A Lone Sheep

Saqr is the older brother and guardian. The guardian must be obeyed.

The guardian’s decisions are always correct because the guardian is the one most capable of discerning and securing my interests. Any disagreement with the guardian is the devil’s work. The guardian loves me, wants what is best for me, and does not guide me except in the way of right conduct. The guardian leads me only onto the wise path. The guardian makes all of my decisions on my behalf, from my clothing to my choice of friends, because he—given his experience and superiority—knows what is best for me better than I do. There is no need to ever think about the guardian’s existence because he—with his superior intellect—has spared me the trouble of thinking and making my own decisions. Everything has been settled, life is a recipe that has been written out step by step, and all I have to do is follow the right procedure to obtain the desired result—the meal that is me.

Saqr treated his status as my guardian as pure fate. If God Almighty was the one who decided, when he planned the accident and foreordained my parents’ death, to place me in Saqr’s care, then Saqr was performing a divine role in raising me. He became an expert in my affairs, as if I were his latest hobby.

He took the accident well, and spoke about it as if it didn’t concern him. He could repeat the gruesome details and explain how the car rolled over four times, landing “like a beetle flipped on its back”—that was the expression he used—and that the coroner said the deaths had occurred quickly. Then Saqr would say that the property they had gone to buy in Amman was a good decision and still generating profit. After that, he’d ask for God’s mercy and forgiveness for them.

The way he dealt with their death was unbearably superficial. I would have preferred to be silent a thousand years than talk about their death this way. I ended up withdrawing from their gatherings and hiding in my basement, which had started to resemble me and the fissures in my spirit, from the yellow blotches on the ceiling to the cracks in the wall.

Solitude wasn’t an easy choice. It was considered the work of the devil in my older brother’s house. The family gatherings occurred through pressure and asserting the necessity of obedience and involvement in the group, because the absence of my desire to sit with my older brother, my guardian and benefactor, was something that made it easier for the devil to influence those of us who are far off by themselves, the “lone sheep” as he called us.

Once I asked him how to understand the Prophet’s desire for seclusion in the Cave of Hira. He laughed and his stomach jiggled to the left and right as if he’d swallowed a sea. “You think you can compare yourself to the Prophet Muhammad?”

Any relation I had to the sacred, to God, to the Prophet, and to the Quran had to go through him, because I was branded with ignorance and inferiority. I, with my questions and my solitude, emboldened myself against that invisible priesthood that was choking my world. I was dizzy with questions, pained by them. They were all forbidden and sealed with red wax: boxes of taboos that were not to be touched and that no one had the right to discuss. For the world, as Saqr believed, was merely a series of interconnected channels. All we had to do was pass the truth that we already possessed to those below us, and to receive it from those above us. We don’t need to search for it, because we were born lucky, we who know and don’t need to figure things out for ourselves. All such efforts lead nowhere; there is no excuse for my wasted effort. It is heresy, a lack of faith. Every question is abhorrent. Every question is an atheist scheme.

So much did religiosity dominate my world that religion seemed to be something unattainable. In the end, I wasn’t allowed to be me. The bulk of Saqr’s lectures served his efforts to break me. To wipe out those things that so annoyed him, the things that made me different. I was a lone sheep, a ripe banana, and inferior no matter what.

Solitude wasn’t a given. I had to fight for it, to draw out its features in a dotted red line, asserting, yes, it’s ugly, but it’s my tomb, it’s my place, it’s where I can be. The alarm inside me would wail in panic whenever I heard Saqr’s sandals slapping the steps, coming down to me. I was always forced to make excuses for the things I did, whether I was doing nothing or paging through Cinderella.

I was tired of being me—not allowed to be me and not allowed to be anyone but me. I was tired and worn out and wasted but I didn’t have the luxury of feeling tired, as I had to fight to hold on to the few choices that remained mine. To fight for myself, me. Who am I? This thing that they were trying to break and destroy and bury alive, this dangerous thing that, it seemed, threatened to take down the whole system by merely reading a novel? Yes, that.

I am trying to capture seven years of prison life in as few words as possible, and thus with as little emotion as possible. I repeat to myself that I have to write everything in that cold, lofty language of the newspapers. I want to forget that I was the child whose name was in the news, who was raped of her childhood.

There is something not understood about the shame victims feel for being victims. There is always that mean voice deep inside that says: I shouldn’t have made a mistake, I shouldn’t have been a victim.

Why are victims ashamed of the chains around their wrists?