The Hot Pepper

IN THE SLAVE YARDS, nothing ever stayed a secret. Anything and everything that was done or said—even a sneeze, or the movement of cats and dogs, or my seeing my face in the mirror after a day of sifting—was bound to get out.

I don’t know how Aunt Sabriya found out that I’d gone with Durma to see the Sudanese girl. But she punished me by throwing me on the floor and sitting on top of me. At least it was more bearable than it would have been to have a hot pepper stuffed into my mouth or my private parts.

It wasn’t long before I’d confessed, hoping to God that Aunt Sabriya would get off my back. I was scared of being tortured with one of the hot peppers that hung in a bundle from a post in our shack.

I told her it was Durma, not me, who’d brought the pack of cigarettes. She asked me how Durma had done it. Had she grabbed or begged it off a police officer? Had she filched it from one of the boys? I swore I didn’t know. I thought she believed me, since she got up off of me, and my spirit started gradually coming back into my body. But when my spirit was halfway home, she grabbed me by the hand and pulled me over in front of the stove, which consisted of three rocks. After sticking the iron poker in the fire, she told me to listen up. She’d turned downright evil. The bouri had gotten into her, and her eyes were gleaming red. Crying and shaking in fear of that hot poker, I promised to do everything she told me.

“By the soil on my mother’s grave, that’s the last time!” I told her, cringing. “I swear by God and the Prophet, I won’t do it again, Auntie!”

An ominous look in her eyes, she said, “So you’re back to hanging around with that rotten girl, are you?”

“By the holiness of the Prophet David, I promise I’ll never hang around with her again!”

It came as a shock to be told that Durma was “rotten,” as my aunt put it. But before I could take it in completely, she started yelling.

“Don’t swear!” she scolded me angrily. “The Prophet David was a holy man, but we won’t have his blessing as long as that monster’s around!”

Still shaking, I hurried to correct myself. “Right, right. Forgive me, Master David! Forgive me, all you prophets, by the holiness of Master Mu’min!”

Threatening me with the hot poker again, she said, “And don’t swear by Master Mu’min, either!”

“Okay, okay. I won’t swear by anybody! There—I’ve stopped!”

I clapped both hands over my mouth, tears streaming down my face.

“Durma isn’t a good girl. That’s all there is to it. Don’t get together with her ever again.”

Then she brought the poker up close to me till I could feel its heat. I started to scream, thinking she was going to roast me with it.

“That’s enough, by my aunt’s life!” I pleaded. “I won’t do it again!”

My face was drenched with tears as if the sea off the Slave Yards had poured itself into my eyes till they overflowed. I begged Aunt Sabriya’s forgiveness by the soil of my mother’s grave. Then I saw the instrument of torture retreat. She put the poker back in the fire and got up, leaving me a wreck. I didn’t really think the soil on dead people’s graves could save me from anything. If I had, I would have prayed for it to bury me quick, before the hot peppers went into me and their infernal blaze tortured me to death. I knew some girls were punished by having hot peppers shoved into their vaginas, since we would see them running like mad toward the sea, screaming hysterically. Even so, everybody was determined to have the “locking ceremony”¹ performed on their daughters before a man had touched them, even if the hot peppers had had their desired effect.

Afraid to cry too close to the poker that had been trembling in my aunt’s hands not long before, I went out behind the shack to be by myself. I cried off and on as the hours dragged by. I would sob for a while, then stop when children chasing cats and dogs ran past. Then I’d start to hurt again and go back to crying. I stayed behind the shack until evening, at which point the heat that had roasted our bodies during the daytime gave way to a deadly, damp chill. I was afraid my aunt might leave me there until morning, the way she’d done one other time when she was mad at me. I was honestly afraid I might freeze to death. So I buried my legs in the warm sand to take the edge off the chill. However, the cold had me completely surrounded. It was above me, underneath me, and on either side. I curled up and cried some more until I started to fall asleep. Only then, when she noticed that I’d stopped crying, did my aunt come out. Nudging me with the poker, which had shrunk from the cold the way I had, she said, “Come on in now, you little shit, before you freeze to death.”

It had been a tough price to pay for getting to see my face in the mirror. Even so, I slept well that night, since now I knew what it was that always caught people’s attention, what it was that made me different from other dark-skinned people. I knew now that it was in my eyes. I also knew it would never change, and that for as long as I lived it would make people do a double take the first time they saw me.

It was an identity that couldn’t be falsified by anything I said or did, a select gift from a free man from Misrata, whose people “are as white and red as the Germans,” as the saying goes. It was the color I’d seen in the mirror, the color of eyes the likes of which you wouldn’t find in the Slave Yards, and it was inextricably tied to my fate. Thanks to this color, my eyes were legendary stars in the sky that stretched out between uptown Benghazi and the ghetto where the slaves made their home.

1. Also known as armoring (al-tasfīh), the locking ceremony (qafl al-banāt) was an ancient ritual whose purpose was to protect girls from being raped. Unlike female circumcision (khitān al-banāt), it involved no physical mutilation.