Arabiyah

She wears her mother’s pearls. They bear into her neck. They hurt her. She wears her mother’s gold instead. This gold, passed down to her from her mother’s mother, hangs loosely around her neck. What should she wear? She wonders.

She looks at her reflection in the mirror. Her eyebrows furrow. There are lines under her eyes and around her lips. She is not smiling. She frantically looks for something that fits. She is frustrated.

Then she gets up and she take one of the many black scarves her mother hangs in her closet. She wraps it around her head expertly, with swift hands that perfected this movement over the years. She looks at the girl in the mirror. The girl is still angry. She grimaces. The lines in between her eyebrows grow deeper. The hands go up and fix the scarf, here and there.

This is what she does every night. She places her mother’s pearls, her gold, and scarf back where they belong. Then she leaves her mother’s room.

Sometimes, she weeps. Quietly. So quiet that her secret remains only between her and the quiet night. The night is kind to her. The night holds all the secrets of all the troubled minds deep in its heart; Secrets that the girl could never tell.

And when she finally sleeps, she begins to dream. She dreams of wind that tangles through her hair, and she wears a red dress, and her gold necklace rests lightly on her neck, and then she sees waves crash against the shore beside her, and she is running just because she has the freedom to, and she laughs, and she laughs again, and this time, this time she laughs louder.

The girl smiles in her sleep.

Let me tell you a secret: I’m not afraid of dying. Sometimes, even, I yearn for it. I want it more than anything, more than anyone. No matter how many times religion likes to tell me about snakes that break you bones, and worms that eat through your skin, I will never stop yearning for death, in the same instance that you could yearn for a skinny love. You know you could never have it, you know it could never love you, but you need it. You put your solace in it. That’s what death is to me. A relationship I don’t think I could ever have.

Sometimes I even think of the approach of death. When death comes, does it come knocking? Or does it break through your door? Or does it crawl through your window while you’re sleeping?

I often wonder if there is a frame, a time—an instance, between life and death. That point, when we are not yet dead but not entirely alive either. When we hand something to others, there is an instance when our hands meet, or when our fingers touch, or our eyes linger onto one another, or we smile. There is an instant flashing moment when life meets death, and I wonder how beautiful and frightening that meeting is.Does life repel death? Does death repel life? Or are they indifferent to one another? Mere catalysts for the ‘grand scheme of things’?

We’ll never have the answer, but it’s all still very wonderful, really. When you think about it. Death is not such a sad thing. I mean, I do grieve the people I lose to death. But, death, in itself, is a thing to behold. Life brings us out of the earth, and death simply tucks us back into the earth when it’s our time to sleep.

This is another secret: I don’t think any of us fear death. I think we fear not being immune to death. We fear being unable to conquer death. Death makes us recognize our own human vulnerability and it sickens us.

Our own humanness sickens us.

Half

I am half-Man. I am half-capable. I am half strong. I am half intelligent. I am a half. And the man is whole. In simple terms that is who the unlucky women are think they are: Halves, and not halves of a whole, because Man is whole. Woman is just a half that will never be complete.

If you did not grow up this way, then you are lucky. We are the women buried under ground. The seeds who never flowered because they were never watered. Told that they are seeds, and they will always be seeds, and they cannot be anything beyond a seed. A woman is small; A woman is weak; A woman is unintelligent—and because she is unintelligent, she needs a man. She needs to comply to certain standards, and those standards only: Cook, clean and say false pretty things to false pretty guests. (As if that is all a wife should be; as if that is all a woman can be.) A woman is, like the child and the mentally unstable, unable to form her own decisions. But unlike the child and the mentally unstable, a woman should be covered and invisible. Show your face or say your name, and you are shunned. A woman cannot be anything but a seed and a half.

This is why these women never hold authority, never speak up, and view the participation of their own sex in the workforce as blasphemy! Their mothers were never allowed to grow, and their mothers’ mothers’ were never allowed to grow and all their life they remained a seed and a half. Their life is half-important, their opinions are half-important, their capabilities are half-important. We are halves. We are presented with the right to earn an education, to build ourselves, to contribute to our society, but our voice cannot be heard, and should not be heard, and our independence is impossible because a woman will always be a half.

This hurts the Man too, the logic that he is whole. How many boys were raped in school? How many young men raped in universities? How many of them raped by strangers? How many by relatives? How many by inmates? None. A Man is a strong whole who cannot be hurt, and if he is hurt and traumatized and broken, then he is a half, no longer a whole—he is a Woman. If a man sheds a tear, he is a half. If Man follows the steps of the Prophet Mohammad PBUH, and Man cooks, cleans and values the opinions of his wives, then Man is half.

I’ve always hated myself, because I cannot be that Woman. Someone else has always hated them selves, because they cannot be that Man. We are a society that promotes self-hatred and underdevelopment. I realized my fault was in the way I never questioned my being a seed. It’s when I started to realize that Man was a seed too, and then man developed and blossomed. Why cant Woman do the same? Because Woman was never allowed to look beyond what was there. And Man is stuck in the illusion that he is in the position of power and dominance, when, in reality, Man is a half of a whole, just like Woman.