I’ll Repent When the Time Is Right

The death of my parents didn’t make me an orphan. I became an orphan when I didn’t die, and when Saqr didn’t die either. He remained in the world to become my jailer, to search my bags on the pretext of looking for gum, to scroll through my phone claiming he wanted to know if I had the number for Hardees, and to review my browser history on the computer to make sure I was not deviating from the course of virtue or talking to men in cyberspace. He guarded my honor like a dog, although a dog would have been more likable.

I found myself running away and returning in failure, without anyone knowing about it. The number of my graves would have just increased by one.

I wasn’t able to be, to just be. To walk on God’s earth without feeling that the world was going to prey on me. That’s why I was always two steps ahead of him, through my symbolic death and my symbolic burial, by standing symbolically at my graveside and symbolically paying my last respects with flowers.

The flower seller knows me. He wraps my daisies with obvious care, and smiles too. When he smiles I think that he is one of the “human wolves” that Saqr talks about, who prey on girls. I never smiled back at him. Thanks to my brother the world was suspect, Saqr having claimed all honor for himself.

I want to be somewhere where there is room for people to be themselves, where what is outside resembles what is inside, where the two are in harmony with their truth—to study French, to draw birds, to write a poem in the daylight, to sit alone, to run in an amusement park, to touch the sea with their feet, to walk to the grocery store alone, to sit with their friends in a café. My own space, a space that belongs only to me, that harms no one, I want all of it. Why did they steal it? Why does the world invade me so?

To live in a place that seizes hold of every last centimeter of you means that you become skilled in the arts of evasion. I had to play tricks. To deceive. To dance my dance in the dark. I had to hide the files on my computer and protect them with a password so the guardian would not breach the secrecy of my poems. I had to download pirated books, save them on a flash drive, and read them without the guardian discovering my offense of reading outside the ideological curriculum and list of permitted readings. I had to reach my hand into the internet and pluck the fruits of the world and touch its vast spaces. I had to write under an assumed name, to put on masks in order to be my truth, to delete the browser history from the computer and erase my tracks on poetry websites and writing forums. To set my imagination free in my mind. To sit on the windowsill pondering the dust and calling it mist, to travel without leaving my place. To write delicate poems with no meter or rhyme because this type alone resembles me. To break the law that confiscated my humanity and taste the world outside. I steal away at night and practice running away.

Most importantly, I had to learn how to research different and conflicting opinions of sharia scholars. I developed a passion for fatwas, searching for gaps, openings, and holes where I might find a way through to points of view that differed from those that prevailed. Every time he said to me such-and-such thing is forbidden, I’d tell him scholar so-and-so has a different point of view. For hours I’d debate with him, test his knowledge, and try to force him to acknowledge that different opinions exist. I failed.

I had to lie. To go to the library and tell him that I was at the university. I sat in that deserted place, hidden in the rows of books. I would read, guarded by the spirits of the poets and philosophers, making friends with the characters in novels and living other lives.

I spent my whole life feeling that by reading I was committing a sin, and I was certain that if I died I’d have to spend some time in hell, as punishment for my disobedience, my undeclared outings, and the things I read in secret. I was doing the forbidden and the thought of hell terrified me, but I always promised myself that I would repent when the time was right—five minutes before I died.