It was a boiling hot summer night in 1993. The tiny alley in the Lebanese city of Tripoli was narrow, and the night sky was pitch black. I was ten years old, and my father told me to wait by the gate. Why I had to sit there, I didn’t know. All I was told was that my clothes weren’t nice enough for the party that was going on upstairs on the terrace above the alley. There was light and music up there. Guests were barbecuing and dancing on a podium. I could barely make out my father sitting at a table.
At the time, I had no idea what it was all about. I was on vacation with my father and Sarah in Lebanon. We had come to visit our family after my dad had bought a small house as an investment for the future. He had taken out all the money he, my mother, and even my siblings had saved up, which amounted to about $9,000 USD in kroner..
There wasn’t a single light in the alley I was sitting in. All the neighbors had been invited to the party. At some point during the night, a man came down and told me that he was supposed to sleep at our house.
The next day, my father came to the house to pick him up, along with a woman I didn’t know. They were going to have a barbecue by a waterfall in the mountains.
“Sleiman,” my father said. “I want you to meet my new wife. We got married last night.”
“But how is that possible? What about Mom? Where is she going to live?” I asked him.
“Well, this is my wife now. I’m not going to be with your mother anymore. Your mother doesn’t do as I say.”
I was devastated. I couldn’t comprehend what was happening. I still loved him, but this scenario wasn’t real to me. I didn’t want to hear it. I wanted my mom and dad to be together forever. Sarah didn’t know what had happened yet because she was staying at our maternal grandma’s.
A couple of days later, Sarah was running down a dusty, dirt road in the Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp. She was hoping to reach the safety of our aunt’s house. A forty-year-old man from my father’s family was chasing after her and yelling.
This wasn’t a vacation after all. My sister and I had been taken back to the refugee camp because our father wished to realize his own dream of returning home. First, he had married another woman behind our mother’s back. Now it was time to execute the second step of the plan. Sarah was being married off to a twenty-three-year-old cousin of ours. The man running behind her was furious because she had just refused the proposal when our father’s family had come specifically to introduce her to our cousin, who was the son of our father’s sister.
The cousin liked the arrangement, and the whole family was pressuring Sarah to comply. In their eyes, it was time for her to get married. She had become too European. They thought her behavior was promiscuous, and that’s why she needed a husband. Promiscuous? She was only thirteen!
Sarah went crazy. She just stood there, all alone in the family’s house, yelling at everyone in defiance. If this was how they wanted things to be, then they were right: she was European! She didn’t want to marry a twenty-three-year-old cousin whom she had never met before that day!
They commanded her to shut up. She was just a girl, and she had no right to say those things. That only infuriated her more and made her yell even louder, “You shut up!”
That was when the forty-year-old man, who was also our cousin, started chasing her. He said, “You have no say in this.”
“Who are you? Why are you talking to me? Shut up!”
The punches started raining down on her, and she ran out of the house with the older man at her heels until she reached safety at our aunt’s. She stayed there the next couple of days. We called our mother from one of the camp’s payphones and told her everything that had transpired. She was blindsided.
Maybe we would never go home again. There was nothing our mother could do, and while Sarah stayed with our aunt, our father frequently came by to threaten her. Every so often, she was also in contact with the cousin who wanted to marry her, and she did everything she possibly could to scare him away.
“Do you really want to marry someone who doesn’t like you? Who hates you?” Sarah asked. He told Sarah that it was his sincere hope that she had a bad life, and she told him she hoped the same for him when he would try to force her to marry him at her young age. She told him she hated him, and he should tell his mother that she refused. When that didn’t seem to be enough of a deterrent, Sarah told him she’d kill herself and him if they forced her to marry him.
She was a brave and clever girl who had to endure a lot. Sometimes, she felt the pressure lifting. They decided to play reverse psychology and not pressure her or beat her in hopes she’d come around. Sarah stood her ground. In her mind, nothing was worse than the fear of being condemned to a life with him.
We didn’t understand why our father wanted to hurt our mother by taking us away from her. What had we done to deserve this?. This harrowing ordeal at a young age forever changed Sarah’s personality. Who are you supposed to trust in life when the ones closest to you would do something like that?
Later on, Sarah and I went to visit our father’s family again. Present were a bunch of uncles, aunts, cousins, and our father. Once again, they tried to pressure Sarah. One well-educated uncle was on Sarah’s side, but he had no real say in the matter. At the time, I didn’t know what a forced marriage was, but I had seen my big sister’s despair, and I was on her side as they gathered in the living room for the final showdown. I was young, but this was pretty much what transpired, per my recollection.
“I don’t want to. He’s old. I don’t want to. He’s old. I don’t want to!” Sarah said.
“You’ll do as I say,” our father said.
“I don’t care. Kill me, then. I’d rather die.”
“You’d rather die?”
Our father ran to a cupboard and took out an AK-47. I didn’t think he would shoot, but he did. I don’t remember if it was because his own sister suddenly stepped in front of Sarah as soon as she saw him pull out a gun, but by mistake, he shot his sister in the arm. When that happened, my father panicked.
There was a mildly development-challenged cousin in the house who was abnormally strong. He immediately lunged at my father from behind, held him in a stranglehold with one hand, and used the other to pivot the gun barrel toward the ceiling. In the meantime, Sarah and I ran out into the refugee camp. Our cousin ran out after us.
“I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” he yelled euphorically as he ran around with the AK-47.
We ignored him and continued running. We felt nothing but the fear and anger fueling our young bodies and the gravel pounding against our feet as we ran through the camp.
Later, we again called our mother, and together, we came up with a plan. We were going home. The problem was, our father had our passports and refused to hand them over. Sarah feared that we would never return home and decided to embrace our father with false sweetness in hopes of tricking him to let us return to Denmark. My sister is one of the bravest and most industrious people I know.
She said to our father, “‘It’s true what you say. Mom is evil. She’s not right, and she’s constantly on your back. When we get home, I’m moving in with you.’ Sarah said whatever our father needed to hear at the time to get out of Lebanon, and get us back home. In the end, he was convinced that we were going to live with him and his new wife. Then our two youngest sisters could stay with our mom. That was his plan, and he was so easy to manipulate because of his tunnel vision.
Eventually, we succeeded. Later that summer, Sarah, our father, and I flew to Copenhagen, and when we arrived at the airport, our mother was waiting with our two younger sisters. On the surface, she seemed happy to see us all, but in reality she lied to our father and told him that she was taking the children to Sweden to visit the family. The truth, though, was that she had given notice to vacate our apartment in Vejle, sold all the furniture, and found a room at a women’s shelter in Helsingør, north of Copenhagen. She refused to live in Vejle, close to where her now ex-husband would start a life with his new wife, have new children, and maybe also force Sarah and I to come live with them.
So while our father went to Vejle, my mother, my siblings, and I went to Helsingør. Like the refugee center in Juelsminde, Røntofte Women’s Shelter is seated high atop a hill and has a magnificent view across the Sound to Sweden. However, at the women’s shelter, there was no dancing and singing in the morning. Everything was ripped away from me at once. Only two months ago, my silent friend Camilla from Jehovah’s Witnesses; the beautiful Arab girl Louisa with the blonde hair, the olive-green eyes, and the light-brown skin; and my friend Aiman with whom I won hip-hop contests were all a part of my life. Now Vejle was suddenly in my past, and I had never even gotten a chance to say goodbye to my class, my neighbors, or my friends.
When my family first arrived in Denmark, we were given a helping hand, and the world collectively rumpled our hair. Six years later, they were fresh out of helping hands. Perhaps the spirit of the times had changed. Maybe it was just the circumstances. It feels like a fog has settled on my memories of that time because it felt like the world and my own family members had all conspired to do me harm at a young age.
A stronger mother would have cried for help until the world around her listened, but our mother was an Arab woman in a strange country, without a husband and without a firm grasp of the language. Our family’s strongest member was now Sarah, who at thirteen sat in a women’s shelter browsing the classifieds, looking for an apartment.
“I’m afraid of Copenhagen. Isn’t it dangerous to live in Copenhagen?” she asked the social worker.
“No, of course not,” the social worker said.
“Should I give that landlord in Ishøj a call? Is that a dangerous place?”
“Sarah, you need to do this yourself. You need to find an apartment. We can’t help you.”
“But it’s not me you’re helping. You’re helping my mom.”
“No. I can sit down with you, and I can show you how to do it. But you have to do it on your own,” the social worker said.
To this day, I can’t wrap my mind around what Sarah had been told that day. They left a thirteen-year-old girl in charge of her entire family!
We ended up in Lyngby, ten miles north of Copenhagen. Sarah found us an apartment in Lundtofteparken, which was a pretty decent place as far as subsidized housing goes. I was enrolled at a local school, but I didn’t like it. That was where I started getting into fights, started smoking, and became friends with the twin troublemakers, Michael and Martin. They accepted me as I was. Only in the beginning did they refer to me as a perker, which is a common ethnic slur directed at people from the Middle East, and they respected me for fighting back whenever they tested me. I don’t know why, but they weren’t happy, so we agreed to be unhappy together. I was a lost kid who didn’t know where else to turn to. None of us—not my mom, not my dad, and certainly not us kids—ever got over leaving Vejle. We were like the living dead.
One day, our father called. He started ingratiating himself with my mother, saying he regretted what he had done, that his new wife wasn’t right for him either. He wanted to come back. Alaa and Ayat, who were only five and seven years old, at the time, missed our father because they hadn’t been to Lebanon and he had never beaten either of them. At the time, even I held out hope that everything would go back to the way it once had been. I just wanted my father to be nice again and for us to be a family.
Sarah didn’t feel the same way. I said, “‘Don’t, Mom. Don’t.’ I knew it was dangerous. But the little ones missed him. ‘We want to talk to Dad. We want to talk to Dad. Why can’t we talk to our dad?’
It was hard for our mom. She was a young mother with very small children, and she was alone. She had no family and no friends in Denmark. She had no money of her own and no support system of any kind. At the time, our mother didn’t know how to do anything but pay the bills and buy groceries. Our father exercised control over her that way.
Our father returned with flowers. A giant bouquet. Sarah thought they were phony and an empty gesture. He had never bought our mother flowers before. “Be careful,” she said to Mom.
“Let’s give him a chance,” our mother said.
She was weak, and he moved right back in. For a while, the living room was quiet. Our father had grown apathetic. He just sat there day after day, drinking coffee. He didn’t fight, didn’t yell. He never even left the apartment. He just seemed sad, lost, and silent on the surface—or so we all thought. It turns out he was merely biding his time.