Burned alive: a victim of the law of men

by Souad; Marie-Thérèse Cuny

  Some time ago, however, a brutal image arose in my mind, an atrocious vision came into my head. Someone, in a gathering of women, showed me a photo of a dead girl lying on the ground who had been strangled with a black telephone cord. I had the feeling of having already seen something similar. This photo made me very uneasy, not only because of this unfortunate murdered girl, but because I was groping in a fog to “see” something that concerned me. And, strangely, the next day my memory returned with a start. I was there and I had witnessed this scene! I now knew when and how this sister, Hanan, had disappeared!

  Since that moment of recognition I live with this new nightmare in my head, which sickens me. Every precise memory, every scene of my past existence that brutally returns makes me sick. I would like to forget all these horrible things completely, and for more than twenty years I unconsciously succeeded in doing just that. But to bear witness to my life as a child and a woman in my country, I am forced to plunge into these horrible memories, as if to the bottom of that well that made me so afraid. And all these bits of my past that rise to the surface seem to me now so terrible that I have trouble believing them.

  When I’m alone, I sometimes ask myself if I really lived these things. I am still here, I survived them. Other women have lived through these things and they, too, are still living in the world. I would like to forget, but we survivors who can speak out are so few that it is my duty to bear witness and to do so I must relive these nightmares.

  As for the vision of Hanan, I am in the house and I hear shouting. Then I see my sister sitting on the ground, flailing her arms and legs, and my brother, Assad, leaning over her, his arms on either side of her. He is strangling her with the telephone cord. I remember this scene as if it took place yesterday. I was standing in front of my two little sisters to shield and protect them. We pressed ourselves against the wall to try to make ourselves disappear. I hold them by the hair so they won’t move. Assad must have seen us or heard me enter. He yells: “Rouhi! Rouhi! Get out! Get out!”

  I run to the cement stairs that lead to the bedrooms dragging my two sisters. One of the little ones is so afraid that she stumbles and hurts her leg, but I make her keep going. My whole body is trembling as I lock us in the room and console the little one. I try to care for her knee and we stay there for a long time, all three of us, not making a sound. I can’t do anything, absolutely nothing but keep quiet, with this vision of horror in our heads, of my brother strangling our sister. She must have been using the telephone and he came up behind to strangle her. She is dead; I’m convinced she is dead. That day she was wearing white pants, with a shirt that went to the knees. She was barefoot. I saw her legs kick and I saw her arms strike my brother in the face as he shouted at us, “Get out!”

  The telephone was black, I think. How long had this telephone been in the house? There can’t have been many of them in the village at that time. My father had modernized the house. We now had a bathroom with hot water and a telephone. It was kept on the floor in the main room and it had a very long cord. She must have been trying to use it, but I don’t know whom she was calling or why. I don’t know what I was doing before that, or where I was, or what Hanan might have done for her part, but nothing in her behavior that I know of justifies my brother’s strangling her. I don’t know what is happening.

  I stayed in the bedroom with the little girls until my mother came back. She and my father had gone out, leaving us alone with Assad. For a long time I tried to understand why there was nobody else in the house but him and us. Then the memories become intertwined.

  That day, my parents went to see my brother’s wife at her parents’ house, where she had taken refuge because she was pregnant and he had beaten her. That’s why my brother was alone with us in our house. And he must have been furious, like all men, to be insulted like this. As usual, I had only snatches of information about what was happening. A girl is not present at family meetings when there are conflicts. She’s kept out of the way. I learned later that my sister-in-law had a miscarriage, and I suppose my parents accused my brother of being responsible. But that day there was no link between the two events. What was Hanan doing on the telephone? It was used very little. I myself used it only two or three times to speak with my older sister, my aunt, or my brother’s wife. If Hanan was calling someone, it had to be somebody in the family. When my parents came home, my mother spoke to Assad. I see her crying, but I know she is just pretending. I’ve become a realist and have come to understand how things happen in my land. I know why they kill girls and how that happens. It is decided at a family gathering and on the fatal day, the parents are never present. Only the one who has been picked to do the killing is with the girl who is the intended victim.

  My mother wasn’t really crying. She was just pretending to cry! She certainly knew why my brother had strangled my sister. If not, why go out that very day with my father and my older sister Noura? Why leave us alone in the house with Assad? What I don’t know is the reason for Hanan’s condemnation. She must have committed a sin but I have no idea what it was. Did she go out alone? Or was she seen speaking to a man? Was she denounced by a neighbor? It doesn’t take much at all before a girl is seen by everyone as a charmuta, who has brought shame to the family and who must now die to wash clean the honor not only of her parents and her brother, but of the entire village!

  My sister was more mature than I, even if she was younger in age. She must have committed an imprudence that I wasn’t aware of. Girls don’t exchange confidences. They’re too afraid of speaking, even among sisters. I know something about this, because I also kept silent.

  I loved my brother very much. All the sisters loved him because he was the only man of the family, the only protector after my father. If the father dies, he will run the house, and if he should die, and only women are left, the family is lost. No more sheep, no more land, no more anything. Losing an only son and brother is the worst thing that can happen to a family. How can you live without a man? It is the man who makes the law and protects us; it is the son who takes the place of the father and marries off his sisters.

  As I have said, Assad was violent like my father. He was a murderer, but that word doesn’t have any meaning in my village when it comes to having a woman killed. It is the duty of the brother, the brother-in-law, or the uncle to preserve the family’s honor. They have the right of life and death over their women. If the father or the mother says to the son: “Your sister has sinned, you must kill her,” he does it for the sake of honor and because it is the law.

  Let me tell you a bit about him. Assad was our adored brother. He loved to ride horses. One day, the horse slipped and Assad fell. I remember that so well. We cried and cried. I ripped my dress with grief and I tore my hair. Fortunately, it wasn’t serious and we took care of him. And still today I can’t fully accept that Assad is a murderer. The image of my strangled sister is a recurring nightmare now, but at the time I don’t think I could really hold it against him. What he did was the accepted custom. He must have agreed that he had to do it out of duty, because it was necessary for the whole family. And I loved him anyway.

  I don’t know what they did with Hanan’s body but she disappeared from the house. I forgot about her but I don’t understand very well why that was. Besides fear, there is of course the logic of my life at that time, the customs, the law, everything that makes us live these things as though they are normal. They only become crimes and horrors when you are elsewhere, in the West or in other countries where the laws are different. I myself was also supposed to die. And to have survived the customary punishment of my land by a miracle was very disturbing to me for a long time. Now I can see that the shock of what happened to me made me “forget” about other events in my life. At least, that’s what a psychiatrist told me.

  So this is how Hanan disappeared from my life and from my memories for a long time. Maybe she was buried with the other babies. Maybe they burned her, buried her under a pile of debris or in a field. Perhaps
they gave her to the dogs? I don’t know. When I talk about my life there, I can see in people’s expressions the difficulty they have understanding. They ask me questions that seem logical to them: “Did the police come?” “Wasn’t anyone concerned about a person’s disappearance?” “What did the people in the village say?”

  Rarely did I see the police. It’s nothing if a woman disappears. And the villagers agree with the men’s law. If you don’t kill a girl who has dishonored her family, the people in the village will reject this family, and nobody will speak to the family or do business with them and the family will have to leave!

  Seen from the point of view of my life now, my sister endured a fate worse than mine. But she is also lucky because she is dead. At least, she isn’t suffering. I still hear my sister’s cries in my ears, so loudly did she scream! Kainat and I were afraid for a long time. Every time we saw my father, my brother, or my brother-in-law, we were afraid he would do something to us. And sometimes we couldn’t sleep. I would wake up frequently at night. I felt a permanent threat over me. Assad was always angry and violent. He wasn’t allowed to go to see his wife. She had gone directly to her parents’ house when she left the hospital because he had beaten her too severely. But she later returned to live with him anyway; it’s the law. She gave him other children, fortunately sons. We were proud of him, we loved him so much, even if he frightened us. What I don’t understand is that I adored my brother as much as I hated my father, although in the end they were very alike.

  If I had gotten married in my village, and had given birth to girls, Assad might have been given the order to strangle one of my daughters. I would have acted like all the other women and would have submitted without revolting. It’s unbearable to think and say such a thing here in my other life, but there, that’s the way it is. I now see things very differently because I “died” in my village and I was reborn in Europe. But I still love my brother. It is like the root of an olive tree that can’t be torn out, even if the tree has fallen.

  The Green Tomato

  I would clean out the stable every morning. It was very large and the odor was strong. When I had finished cleaning, I would leave the door open to air it out. It was very damp and with the heat of the sun the inside of the stable was steamy. The buckets would be filled with manure, and I would carry them on my head into the garden to dry. A portion of this manure from the horses was used for fertilizing the garden. My father said it was the best fertilizer. The sheep droppings were used for the bread oven. When they were thoroughly dried I would sit on the ground and work them by hand into little cakes that I would put in a pile for feeding the oven.

  The sheep would be led into the fields early in the morning, and we would return to bring them back to the stable around eleven o’clock when the sun would be too hot. The sheep would eat and sleep. I would also go to the house to eat, some oil in a bowl, warm bread, some tea, olives and fruit. In the evening, there was chicken, lamb, or rabbit. We ate meat almost every day with rice and semolina that we made ourselves. All the vegetables came from the garden.

  As long as the heat lasted in the garden, I would work in the house. I prepared the dough for the bread and also fed the smallest lambs. I would take them by the skin of their necks, the way you hold a cat, and I would bring them up to the mother’s udder for them to nurse. There were always several of them so I would take care of one after the other. When one had nursed enough I would put it back in its place until they had all been fed. Then I would go take care of the goats, which were kept separate in the stable. The two horses had their own corner and the cows, too. This stable was really immense and held a good sixty sheep and at least forty goats. The horses were always outside in the fields and were brought back in only at night. They were for the use of my father and brother to ride, never for us. When the stable work was finished, I could leave the door open for ventilation because there was a heavy wooden gate that kept the animals from going out.

  When the sun was lower in the sky, I had to tend the garden. There were many tomatoes that had to be picked almost every day when they were ripe. Once, by mistake, I picked a green tomato. I haven’t forgotten it, that tomato! I often think about it now in my kitchen. It was half yellow and half red and was beginning to ripen. I had thought about hiding it when I brought it back to the house, but it was already too late, my father had already arrived. I knew that I shouldn’t have picked it but I was working too fast with both hands. Because I was expected to work very fast, my movements were mechanical, my fingers turned around the tomato plant, left right left right down to the bottom. And the last one, the one that had received the least sun, was in my hand before I knew it. And it was there, very visible in the basin. My father shouted: “You fool! You see what you’ve done? You picked a green tomato! Majmouma!” He struck me and then he crushed the tomato over my head and the seeds fell on me. “Now you’re going to eat it!” He crammed it into my mouth and he rubbed my face with the rest of the tomato. I’d thought that an unripe tomato might be eaten, but it was acid, very bitter, and smelled bad. I was forced to swallow it. I couldn’t eat anything after that because my stomach was upset. But he pushed my head into my plate and made me eat my meal, almost like a dog. He had me by the hair. I felt sick but I couldn’t move. My half sister made fun of me and laughed. She received such a slap that she spit out what she had in her mouth and started to cry. The more I said my head hurt the more he persisted in crushing my face into the semolina. He emptied the whole plate and made little balls of semolina that he forced into my mouth, he was that enraged. Then he wiped his hands on a napkin, threw it at my head, and went and calmly settled himself in the shade on the veranda. I wept as I cleaned off the platter. I had food all over my face, my hair, and in my eyes. And I swept up as I did every day to pick up the tiniest grain of semolina that had escaped my father’s hand.

  Even though for years I forgot events as important as the disappearance of one of my sisters, I never forgot this green tomato, and the humiliation of being treated as less than a dog. And to see him there calmly sitting in the shade, napping like a king after my almost daily thrashing, was the worst of all. He was the symbol of an enslavement that was taken for granted, that I accepted, bending my back and lowering my head under the blows, like my sisters and my mother. But today I understand my hatred. I would have wished him to suffocate in his head scarf.

  This was everyday life. Toward four o’clock, we brought out the sheep and the goats until sunset. My sister walked beside the ones at the head of the flock, and I always took the rear position with a cane to move the animals along and especially to scare the goats. They were always agitated, ready to take off anywhere. Once we were in the field there was a little tranquility because it was only us and the flock. I would take a watermelon and tap it on a stone to open it. We were afraid of being caught when we returned because our dresses were spotted with sugar juice. We would wash them on ourselves in the stable before our parents saw us. Since it wasn’t possible to take off the dresses, it was lucky they dried very fast.

  The sun would take on a special yellow and then fade on the horizon, the sky changing from blue to gray. We would have to return before nightfall, and since night came very quickly, we had to move as fast as the sun, scurry close to the walls, and then the iron door would clang shut on us again.

  When it was time to milk the cows and the sheep, a big milk can was put under the cow’s belly, and I sat on a stool almost at ground level. I would take a cow’s hoof and squeeze it between my legs so the animal wouldn’t move and so the milk wouldn’t go anywhere but into the bucket. If there was a puddle of milk on the ground, even a few drops, it would mean trouble for me! My father would slap me and shout at me that he’d lost a cheese! The cow’s tits were very big, very hard because they were swollen with milk, and my hands were small. My arms would hurt since I’d spent a lot of time pulling and I was exhausted. Once, when there were six cows in the stable, I fell asleep hanging on the bucket, the cow’s h
oof between my legs. As luck had it my father arrived and shouted, “Charmuta! Whore!” He dragged me on the ground in the stable by the hair and I caught a whipping with a belt. I cursed this wide leather belt that he always wore around his waist with another smaller one. The small one jangled loudly. He would swing it around with force, holding it by one end like a rope. When he used the big one, he had to fold it in two, it was too heavy. I begged him and I cried in pain, but the more I said it hurt the more he struck me and called me a whore.

  I would still be crying in the evening, when it was time for the meal. My mother could see that he had given me a bad beating that evening but if she tried to question me, he started to hit her, too, telling her it wasn’t any of her business, that she didn’t need to know why I’d been beaten because I knew the reason.

  On an ordinary day in the house, there would be a slap or a kick on the pretext that I wasn’t working fast enough or that the water for the tea had taken too long to heat. Sometimes I succeeded in dodging the bang on the head but not often. I don’t remember if my sister Kainat was beaten as much as I was but I think so because she was every bit as afraid. I’ve kept this reflex of working very fast and walking fast, as if a belt were permanently waiting for me. A donkey is moved along the road by being rapped with a stick. It was the same for us, except that my father would strike us much harder than he would have struck a donkey. I have also been struck the next day, just on principle, so I shouldn’t forget the licking of the previous day. All that so I would continue to move along without falling asleep, like the donkey on the road.