Burned alive: a victim of the law of men

by Souad; Marie-Thérèse Cuny

  Sometimes when I look outside at the swimming pool, I hate it. It was built for the tenants’ pleasure, of course, but for me it is anything but that. It was the pool that set off one dreadful depression. I was forty years old and it was the very beginning of the summer, a June that started off unusually warm. I had just come in from shopping, and I was looking out my window at some women who looked practically nude in their skimpy bathing suits. One of my neighbors, a very pretty girl, was just coming back from the pool in a bikini, a sarong over her shoulders, her bare-chested boyfriend at her side. I was alone in the apartment, obsessed by the idea that I couldn’t do what they were doing. It seemed so unfair because it was so hot. So I went to my closet and spread out I don’t know how many clothes on the bed before finding something reasonable, but I still didn’t feel right. Short sleeves underneath, another shirt on top of that. It’s too hot. Put on a lighter shirt that’s too see-through but closed at the throat, I can’t do it. A miniskirt, I can’t do that because my legs were used for the skin grafts. Open neck, short sleeves, I can’t do it because of the scars. Everything I laid out on the bed was can’t do it. By then I was perspiring heavily and everything stuck to my skin.

  I lay down on the bed and began to sob. I couldn’t stand being closed up in this heat anymore while everyone else was outside with their skin exposed to the air. I could cry as much as I wanted because I was alone. The girls were still in school, which was across from the house. Eventually I looked at myself in the bedroom mirror and thought: Look at yourself! Why are you alive? You can’t go to the beach with your family. Even if you go, you’ll keep them from staying in the water, they’ll have to come home because of you. The girls are in school but when they come home they’ll want to go to the pool. Happily for them they can, but not you! You can’t even go to the swimming pool restaurant to have a coffee or drink a lemonade because you’re afraid of being looked at. You’re covered up from head to foot as though it were winter. People would think you’re crazy! You’re good for nothing! You’re alive, but unable to live. You’re just an object locked up in the house.

  Too many thoughts were colliding in my head. I went into the bathroom and took the bottle of sleeping pills that I had bought at the pharmacy, without a prescription, because I had trouble sleeping. I emptied the bottle and counted the pills. There were nineteen left and I swallowed them all. After a few minutes I felt very strange and everything was spinning. I opened the window, and I was crying as I looked out at Nadia and Laetitia’s school, directly across from our building. I opened the apartment door, and I heard myself talking as if I were at the bottom of a well. My intention was to go up to the sixth floor to jump from the terrace. I was moving as if walking and talking in my sleep.

  What will they become if I die? They love me. I put them into the world. Why? So they could suffer? It isn’t enough to have suffered so much myself? I don’t want them to suffer. We leave this life the three of us together or nothing. No, I can’t do this because they need me. Antonio works. He says he’s at work but maybe he’s at the beach, I don’t actually know where he is. But he knows very well where I am. I am at home because it is too hot and I can’t go out. I can’t dress the way I want. Why did this happen to me? What did I do to God? What did I do here on earth to deserve this?

  I was in the hallway, crying and feeling very disoriented, but I went back into the apartment to close the window. Then I went into the hall, to the mailboxes, to wait for the girls. After that, I don’t remember anything until the hospital. I had passed out because of the sleeping pills. They emptied my stomach and the doctor kept me under observation. The next day, I found myself in the psychiatric hospital. I saw a very nice woman psychiatrist. I wanted to smile politely when she came into the room, but I immediately burst into tears. She made me take a tranquilizer. Then she sat down beside me and asked me to tell her how it happened and why I took the pills and why I wanted to end my life. I explained about the sun, and the fire, the scars, the desire for death, and I began to cry again. I wasn’t able to sort out what had gone on in my mind. The swimming pool, that stupid swimming pool had set it all in motion. Could it be that I had wanted to die because of a swimming pool?

  “You know that this is the second time you’ve escaped death? First at the hands of your brother-in-law, and now you. I think that’s a lot, and if you’re not treated it could happen again. But I’m here to help you. Do you want that?”

  The answer was yes, and I was in therapy with her for a month, and then she sent me to see another psychiatrist once a week on Wednesdays. It was the first time in my life since the fire that I had the chance to talk with someone who was there only to listen to me talk—about my parents, about my unhappiness, about Marouan . . . It wasn’t easy for me. Sometimes I wanted to stop everything but I forced myself to continue because I knew that when I left the session I always felt good.

  After a time, I found the psychiatrist too directive, as if she were telling me to take a right turn to get home when I knew I could only get there by going left. She was acting like a parent with a child. I was required to see her every Wednesday even though I wanted to go only when I felt like it or needed to. I would have preferred, too, that she ask me questions, talk to me, and look me in the eye instead of looking at the wall while she wrote her notes. For a year I resisted the temptation to run away, but I knew I wasn’t being realistic. In wanting to die, I was denying the existence of my two daughters. I was thinking only of myself, wanting to get away without thinking of Antonio and our daughters.

  Although I am better now, it is sometimes very painful. It can come over me at any time, but especially in summer. We are going to move far away from this swimming pool. However, even though our house will be at the edge of a road, summer will still come. Even in the mountains, or in the desert, it will be summer all the same.

  Sometimes I feel that I would like not to get up in the morning, I would like to die and not suffer anymore. I have my family, friends around me, I make a real effort. But I’m ashamed of myself. If I had been burned or paralyzed in an accident, I would regard my scars differently. It would be fate; no one would be responsible, not even me. But my brother-in-law set fire to me, and it was the will of my father and my mother. It isn’t destiny or fate that has made me as I am. What is the worst is that it deprived me of my skin, of my very self, not for a month or a year, but for my whole life.

  And the terror comes back from time to time. Recently, we were watching a movie on television, a Western, two men were fighting in a stable. One of them, out of viciousness, lit a match and threw it into the hay, between the legs of his adversary, who caught fire and began to run in flames. I started to yell, I spit out what I was eating. I was like a crazy woman. Antonio said to me: “No, sweetheart, it’s a movie, it’s just a movie.” And he turned off the television. He took me in his arms to calm me and repeated: “Honey, it’s only the television. It’s not real, it’s a movie.” I was all the way back there, I was running with flames over me. I didn’t sleep that night. I have such a terror of fire that I freeze at the sight of the smallest flame. I watch Antonio when he lights a cigarette, I wait for the match to go out or the flame of the cigarette lighter to disappear. I don’t watch television much because of this. I’m afraid of seeing again someone or something burning. My daughters are sensitive to my fears. As soon as they notice something that could shock me, they turn it off. I don’t want them to light a match. Everything is electric in the house. I don’t want to see fire in the kitchen or anywhere else. But one day, someone was playing with matches in front of me. He put some alcohol on a finger and he lit it. The skin didn’t burn, it was a trick.

  I stood up, overcome with both fright and anger: “You go do that somewhere else! Me, I’ve been burned. You don’t know what it’s like!”

  A fire in a fireplace doesn’t frighten me, provided I don’t go near it. Water doesn’t bother me if it’s lukewarm. But I’m afraid of everything that’s hot. Fire, hot water, th
e oven, the burners on the stove, saucepans, electric coffeemakers that are always turned on, the television, which could catch fire, faulty electrical outlets, the vacuum cleaner, forgotten cigarettes . . . everything that can start a fire. My daughters are terrorized because of me. A fifteen-year-old girl who can’t turn on an electric burner because of me, that’s not normal. If I’m not there I don’t want them to use the stove or boil water for pasta or tea. I have to be there, attentive, on edge, to be certain of turning everything off myself. There isn’t a day that I go to bed without first checking the electric burners.

  I live with this fear night and day. I know that I make life difficult for others, that my husband is patient but that he gets tired sometimes of a reasonless terror, that my daughters ought to be able to hold a saucepan without me trembling. They will have to do it one day.

  Another fear came to me when I turned forty: the idea that Marouan had become a man, that I hadn’t seen him in twenty years, that he knew that I was married and that he had sisters somewhere. But Laetitia and Nadia didn’t know they had a brother. This lie weighed on me and I didn’t speak of it to anyone. Antonio had known of Marouan’s existence from the beginning, but we never spoke about it. Jacqueline continued her work; she would leave on missions and come back, sometimes successful, sometimes empty-handed. She knew but she respected my silence. She had asked me to participate in conferences to talk about the honor crime in front of other women. I owed it to myself to speak about my life as a burned woman, to bear witness as a survivor. I was practically the only one to do it after all these years.

  And I continued to lie, not revealing Marouan’s existence, persuading myself that I was still protecting my child from this horror. But he was almost a man. The big question was to know whether I was protecting Marouan, or if I was really just safeguarding my personal shame, my guilt in putting him up for adoption. It took me time to realize that it was all intertwined. In my village, there aren’t any psychiatrists, the women don’t ask themselves such questions. We are only guilty of being women.

  My daughters have grown up, and the questions have become more hurtful.

  “But why did they burn you, Mama?”

  “Because I wanted to marry a boy I had chosen and because I was expecting a baby.”

  “What happened to the baby? Where is he?”

  He stayed there in an orphanage. I couldn’t tell them otherwise.

  Surviving Witness

  Jacqueline asked me to bear witness in the name of the SURGIR association. She waited until I was emotionally capable, after the depression that suddenly devastated me, even though I had succeeded in building a normal life. I was integrated into my new country, I was safe, with a husband and children. I was better, but I still felt fragile in front of these European women. I was going to speak to them about a world so different from their own, about cruelty so inexplicable for them.

  I told my story in front of these women, sitting on a platform, before a small table with a microphone. Jacqueline was next to me. I threw myself into it from the start. And they asked me questions: “Why did he burn you? . . . What bad thing did you do? . . . He set fire to you just because you spoke to a man?” I never said I was expecting a child. I said that if they even gossip about you in the village, you can end up with the same punishment as someone who actually is pregnant. Jacqueline knows something about this. And especially, I said nothing about it to spare my son, who knew nothing of my past and his. I didn’t give my real name; anonymity is a measure of safety. Jacqueline knows about cases where the family was able to find a daughter thousands of kilometers away and murder her.

  A woman in the audience got up and asked: “Souad, your face is pretty, where are these scars?”

  “Madame, I understand very well that you would ask me this question, I expected it. So I will show you where my scars are.”

  I got up, in front of everyone, and I undid my shirt. I was wearing a low-cut blouse and short sleeves underneath. I showed my arms, I showed my back. And this woman started to cry. The few men who were there were uncomfortable. They felt sorry for me. When I displayed myself in public I felt like a sort of sideshow freak. But it doesn’t bother me so much doing it in this situation, in bearing witness, because this is important for people. I must make them understand that I am a survivor. I was dying when Jacqueline arrived in that hospital. I owe her my life, and the work she pursues with SURGIR requires a living witness to sensitize people to the honor crime. Most people don’t know about it, quite simply because survivors are few in the world. And because, for their safety, they should not go public. They escaped the honor crime thanks to the shelters provided by this organization in several countries. It is in not only Jordan or the West Bank, but elsewhere in the Middle East, in India, in Pakistan. At this part of the program, Jacqueline takes over and explains that it is imperative to take safety measures for all these women.

  At the time of my first testimony, I had been in Europe for about fifteen years. My life had completely changed. I can take risks that these other victims cannot take. The personal questions have to do with my new life but especially the condition of women in my country. A man asked me this question. I sometimes have difficulty expressing myself when it’s a question of my own unhappy life. When it’s about someone else, somehow I find the right words and take off.

  “Sir, a woman there has no life. Many girls are beaten, mistreated, strangled, burned, killed. It’s normal for us. My mother wanted to poison me to ‘finish’ my brother-in-law’s work, and for her this was normal, it’s part of her world. That’s what a normal life is for us women there. You’re beaten up, it’s normal, you’re burned, it’s normal, you’re mistreated, it’s normal. The cow and the sheep, as my father used to say, are worth more than the women. If you don’t want to die, you’d better keep quiet, obey, grovel, be a virgin when you’re married, and bear sons. If I had not had an encounter with a man, that is the life I would have had. My children would have become like me, my grandchildren like my children. If I had lived there, I would have become ‘normal’ like my mother, who suffocated her own children. Maybe I would have killed my daughter. I could have let her burn to death. Now I think that it is monstrous! But if I had stayed there, I would have done the same! When I was in the hospital there, dying, I still thought all this was normal. But when I came to Europe, I began to understand, at the age of twenty-five, that there are countries where it is not acceptable to set a woman on fire, that girls are valued as much as boys. For me, the world stopped at my village. It was a wonderful place, it was the whole world, and it extended all the way to the market! Beyond the market, there were girls who wore makeup, who wore low-cut short dresses. They were the ones who weren’t normal. My family was! We were pure as the sheep’s wool, but the others, as soon as you got beyond the market, they were the impure ones!

  “Girls couldn’t go to school. Why? So they would know nothing of the rest of the world. We were controlled by our parents. Education, information, the law, what we know and believe comes to us only from our parents. What they say, we do. That’s why there was no school for us. So we wouldn’t take the bus, we wouldn’t dress differently, wouldn’t be holding a notebook in our hands, wouldn’t be taught to read and write, that’s being too intelligent, not good for a girl! My brother was the only son in the middle of girls, he dressed the way men do here, like in a big city, he went to the barber, to school, to the movies, he went out as he pleased, why? Because he had a penis between his legs! He was lucky, he had two boys, but in the end he’s not the luckiest, it’s his daughters. They have had the great fortune of not being born!

  “The SURGIR Foundation, with Jacqueline, tries to save these girls. But it isn’t easy. We’re sitting here comfortably, I’m speaking to you and you’re listening to me. But women in those other countries are suffering! It is for this reason that I bear witness for SURGIR about the honor crimes, because it continues! I am alive and I am on my feet thanks to the good God, thanks to Edmond
Kaiser, and thanks to Jacqueline. SURGIR is a courageous organization and is working hard to help these girls. I admire the people of SURGIR. I don’t know how they do it. I would rather bring food and clothing to refugees than do their work. You have to mistrust the world. You may speak to a woman who seems pleasant enough but who will denounce you because you want to help and she doesn’t agree with you. When Jacqueline arrives in one of these countries, she is obliged to behave as they do, to eat, walk, and speak like them. She has to blend into that world, has to remain anonymous!”

  “Thank you, Madame!”

  In the beginning, I was in anguish, I didn’t know how I was supposed to speak, and now Jacqueline had to tell me to stop talking! After a while, speaking in person before an audience didn’t bother me too much. But I was afraid of the radio, because of the other people in my life, the people I work with, and especially my daughters, who knew some things about my other life but not everything. They were about eight and ten years old at the time, they had friends at school, I wanted to ask them to be discreet if they were asked questions. Laetitia thought it was great that Mama was going to be on the radio and wanted to come along. This was reassuring but at the same time a little disturbing. I realized that they didn’t appreciate the significance of this witnessing and that apart from my scars, they knew almost nothing about my life. One day or another, when they would be bigger, I would have to tell them everything, and just thinking about it made me feel sick.