What the Eyes Don’t See: Prologue Summary & Analysis

“I am Iraqi,” begins Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha. While the rest of her family, including her brother, was born in Iraq, Mona herself was born in Sheffield, England. Mona’s brother Muaked was renamed Mark, while Mona’s grandfather Haji, a Baghdadi businessman, selected Mona’s name because he thought it would be simple for both English and Arabic speakers to pronounce. The name means “hope, wish, or desire.”

When Mona was born, her family was living in England so that her father could complete his doctorate in metallurgy at the University of Sheffield, but they were planning to move back to Iraq as soon as his studies were finished. Soon, however, “the road behind [her] family disappeared”—the Iraq they knew was gone. Yet for Mona and her family, the lessons of their homeland endured.

Mona looks back on a road trip she and her family once took. After spending Christmas with Mama Evelyn (her paternal grandmother) outside of Detroit, Mona, her brother, and her parents were on their way back to their home in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Her “perpetually busy” mother, a trained chemist, was knitting a sweater. Mona’s mother always missed her home in Baghdad immensely, and she told Mona and her brother nightly stories and fables with roots in the Middle East. She also told the children plenty of stories about her father, Haji, and her mother, Mama Latifa, who still lived in Iraq.

Though Mona and her brother longed to visit their grandparents, their parents always told them that it wasn’t safe to go back to Iraq—even for a visit. Hearing about the fraught, dangerous situation in Iraq taught Mona about evil and injustice at an early age. The more she learned about the brutality of Saddam Hussein’s regime, which became more extreme by the year, the more she understood why Iraq had come to be called a “Republic of Fear.” Even from 6,000 miles away, Mona and her family—her justice-minded father especially—felt the pain of what was happening in their home country.

Still, Mona and her brother were able to feel connected to their family and their roots through Mama Evelyn, who taught them to play Iraqi card games and told them vivid stories about their father’s childhood in Iraq. Though there was a “tight-knit international graduate student” community in Michigan, where her father was completing a postdoc at Michigan Tech University, Mona and her brother found themselves increasingly replying in English when their parents spoke to them in Arabic. After just a year in school, the five-year-old Mona was changing.

Fifty miles south of their destination on the way back from Mama Evelyn’s, Mona’s family’s car hit a patch of black ice, spun out of control, and fell into a ravine. The next morning, Mona woke up in the hospital in immense pain. She felt better, though, when a doctor with dark hair and skin like hers told her she’d be all right. In spite of a spinal injury and a broken jaw, Mona was ultimately okay—and now, she says, she is the one in the white coat looking out for kids mixed up in accidents that weren’t their faults.

In this book, Mona writes, she is endeavoring to tell the story of “the most important […] environmental and public health disaster” of the 21st century: the Flint water crisis, which affected the bodies of the city’s most vulnerable children. The U.S., Mona posits, is at a point of threatened democracy, disintegrated infrastructure, and deep environmental injustice. But the crisis in Flint has proven that people and their communities can help one another see their problems more clearly, work together, and fix what’s broken.

Flint was “poisoned [….] with policy.” The unseen effects of racism, capitalist greed, and hunger for power meant that Flint—and its children—suffered disproportionately compared to people living in neighboring cities. But just as there are unseen villains in this story, there are unsung heroes: the people of Flint and their resilient children. It is time for American communities, cities, and the country as a whole to learn from the resilience that Flint’s residents have had to embody. Only through listening to its most vulnerable citizens and addressing their needs can America’s “healing” begin.