Afghan
women risk their lives to write poetry... and yet I stagnate, my heart
churning with words, mired in apathy of expression.
I read this news article with
shock, with tears. When her books of poetry were taken from her, Zarmina, young
Afghan girl in the article, set herself on fire, a horrible way to die. She was
shamed into stopping to write, and I suddenly remember, too clearly, what it is
watch fire consume life. As a young girl stuck in traffic on a bridge in Cairo,
I remember watching a man on distant roof pour clear liquid all over his body.
I wondered briefly what he was doing, then he raised his hands to the sky, lit
a match and set himself on fire. It happened so quickly, and I was horrified, a
helpless observer, trapped by traffic and separated by rooftops, by age, by
skin color. He was too far away for this to be possible, but I swear I smelled
his flesh burning, melting, his heart pumping blood to fuel the fire. The last
I saw of him were little flames licking the rooftop, looking for more substance.
“A poem is a
sword,” Saheera Sharif said for this article. I couldn’t agree more. But what
good are swords when their adolescent wielders have their bodies and spirits
crushed before they are even fully formed, simply because of their gender?
At age eleven I
had many Cairo girlfriends being sent away for arranged marriages. Some were only
one or two years older than me. I remember one friend, smaller than me due to a
lifetime of malnourishment, a sparkle in her dark eyes, sent to be second wife
to an older man who took turns raping and beating her. I never saw the sparkle
again, and I rarely saw her. I moved on, moved to the States. I grew up and got
married to a kind man who cooks and does laundry. I sit in my suburban home,
and I think about t-ball, about Disneyland, about redecorating, and about anything except for
those friends I shared my early adolescence with. Girls who had all of the same
hopes and dreams that I did, who taught me to bellydance and henna my too-light
skin. My life has been filled with all the goodness this world has to offer,
and theirs was cut short before they had a chance to bloom.
I feel
overwhelmingly guilty. I feel terrible that long, happy days can go by without
me even remembering them, the sisters of my younger heart. I am angry that nothing
can be done, that the childhood home I had such great hopes for is now on the
brink of plunging into Islamic rule. I am angry that girls can be born into the
world with passion, grace, and beauty, only for their innocent lives to be destroyed
at a man’s whim.
I am woman. I
will make a difference for those who have no voice. I will make this world a
better place for my own daughter to grow up in.
No comments:
Post a Comment