The Republic of the Big Brother

He was my half brother but I was an orphan, alone. For Saqr, me becoming an orphan was a gift sent from heaven. He could now be responsible for me. I could be his project; he would reform me, set me straight.

Even before he knew me he was convinced that I was disturbed, or at best broken and in need of repair. He’d had his differences with my parents and disapproved of many things that they did: listening to music, buying Barbies, displaying photographs on tables for decoration, celebrating birthdays, going to weddings in hotels. With me, Saqr was pursuing a noble mission called “save what is possible to save.”

I was the victim of too much love, of following passion and losing one’s inner compass. Saqr believed he had to save me from my misguided ways, now that it was in his power, now that he alone held the power of being my sole guardian. Now he would have his revenge on me, his thirteen-year-old half sister, for being his half sister.

He came to my room all the time. I was the daughter whose waywardness he had resolved to correct, as if I were a prisoner, as if he were a warden. He put me under a microscope to make sure things were running well on this mythical bridge where he was working to rehabilitate me so I’d be worthy of his paradise: Barbie no longer pollutes my head with debauched thoughts, I took the photos of my parents off the night table so as not to chase the angels away, I don’t draw butterflies on my notebook, I don’t read Bibliothèque verte books that fill my head with harmful stories about laughing swans, people turning into birds, and charming genies that emerge from lemons—stories he called “nonsense.”

I don’t chew gum in public. I only sit in the family sections of restaurants. I don’t wear pants. I don’t listen to music. I don’t watch movies. I don’t buy books that aren’t “beneficial.” I don’t sit alone. I don’t go to the hairdresser. I only visit certain homes. Everything was prohibited, with few exceptions.

He was stuffing me full of reality, the reality of being an orphan, of being alone, and the arid life that he had chosen for me. Every time he plucked another feather from my heart and stole one of my many skies, he would remind me that the world is a prison for the believer and heaven for the disbeliever, and that holding fast to one’s religion is like holding on to a hot coal.

I was a girl on the verge of puberty, about to become a woman. Therefore, he—the older brother ruling my life like a curse—was to prepare me for my heavenly and sacred role in this world: to make of me a sound wife, devoted and fecund, who would have more and more children, girls who would start wearing the hijab at age four and follow me around like dyed chicks, and boys who would go to the “Buds of Light” and “Guiding Light” camps, where they’d dwell on the fall of al-Andalus and head out on imaginary conquests, awaiting that moment—that would be a disaster for the whole world—when they would be the ones in power and could devote themselves to destroying everything.

Everything had already been decided for me. All I had to do was to follow the proper guidelines in order to do things the right way—simple practical steps that didn’t require a lot of thought. Actually, they required one not to think at all, and one’s skill at this was linked to how capable one was of not thinking.

In order to be worthy of this sacred duty of mine, I had a lot to learn. I had to read endless booklets—The Horrors of Judgment Day, Torments of the Grave, 1000 Questions and Answers for Women, and so on. These were the only things suitable for me to read. There was also a long list of tapes full of preaching, hollering, and crying to treat my mental illness.

For the first week after the accident, when the features of my new life as an orphan were revealed and opened up like a wound, I buried myself under the bedspread and wept, wondering if the unbelievable horror of my life was just a dream. I pinched myself and slapped my face. I couldn’t shake the nightmare.

On one of his rounds he found me crying under the pillows. Are you crying, Fatima? Your mother and father don’t need your tears, they need your prayers. He talked for a whole hour about how the believer must submit to fate and how the dead are tortured by the cries of their family, and told me that every tear I shed held dire consequences for my parents in their afterlife. Each word turned the tears in my eyes to stone; each tear was a burning hot coal.

He spoke robotically—all he had to do was open his mouth and the words poured out, neatly ordered and arranged. Each word knew its place, as if they had been waiting inside him the whole time, as if they had grown tired of waiting, as if they could not believe he opened his mouth to summon them, until they appeared there, floating in the air, like a green genie.

That was the first religious lecture that Saqr gave me, for the sake of bringing me up right, when he could have just given me a hug.