Lily Razuki, ‘Jidou,’ digital collage and embroidery, 30 x 42cm, 1/20, 2025
I never knew my Jidou. He died when I was 2, Allah yerhamo. Despite a life time of absence, I think about him every day. When you don’t truly know a person, especially someone who you admire, your mind starts to romanticise them. It fogs the reality of their essence and replaces it with a filter of gold and sparkles, reimagining them to be exactly how you want or need them to be.
My Jidou, Haaj Ibrahim, helped found the opposition party against Saddam and was a real estate legend in Baghdad and then again in London after he was exiled from Iraq. Full powerhouse, beast mode. But within our family, he sounded difficult like any other Arabic man and Father can be!
Yanni, as Haaj, as Iraqi, as Man and as patriarch, how would he have seen me? As a non-Muslim Australian woman? Would he actually love me, in the same way that I have grown to completely idolise him?
Lily Razuki, ‘Jidou,’ digital collage and embroidery, 30 x 42cm, 1/20, 2025
I never knew my Jidou. He died when I was 2, Allah yerhamo. Despite a life time of absence, I think about him every day. When you don’t truly know a person, especially someone who you admire, your mind starts to romanticise them. It fogs the reality of their essence and replaces it with a filter of gold and sparkles, reimagining them to be exactly how you want or need them to be.
My Jidou, Haaj Ibrahim, helped found the opposition party against Saddam and was a real estate legend in Baghdad and then again in London after he was exiled from Iraq. Full powerhouse, beast mode. But within our family, he sounded difficult like any other Arabic man and Father can be!
Yanni, as Haaj, as Iraqi, as Man and as patriarch, how would he have seen me? As a non-Muslim Australian woman? Would he actually love me, in the same way that I have grown to completely idolise him?
