The herpes outbreak that covered half of Rania’s face a week before her wedding; red spots of fury as she prepared for the happiest day of her life, as she cried and bit the soft skin around her thumb so raw it wouldn’t stop bleeding, as her belly cramped. The doctor promised her father it wouldn’t leave scars following the treatment, but she scratched it raw, and it drew a white spot next to her left eye and another on her forehead she still scratches when anxious.
The panic she felt during the scan that revealed she was expecting a girl, as her husband swore and she cried because he wanted a son and she didn’t want to raise a girl in a society that treated women like objects, a society that refused to protect them or give them rights, a man-made society that strangled them. Her heart never beat to the same rhythm again.
Her sobs when her daughter became a woman at ten, and she couldn’t protect her anymore. How angry she got watching her little girl’s life turn to silence; her smile, curiosity, laughter, hidden under layers of cloth along with her soul and her voice. How Rania’s eyesight deteriorated, as if the tears had forever blurred her vision, but not her sorrow.
When she dared to report her husband and he spent fifteen days in jail. Fifteen days when she had to beg a male relative to allow her out and accompany her to the shop so she could fill her fridge. Fifteen days that punished her more than they did him. Fifteen days filled with so much fear, her hair turned grey.
How her bruises took longer and longer to fade because he was allowed, by law, and they both knew it now. ‘Preventing vice,’ he called it and laughed as his hands turned into fists. As her bones cracked in terror.
The scar Rania carved into her own skin when she tried to cut off her right breast to channel the courage and strength of the ancient Amazons because she couldn’t take it anymore. Because she refused to let her daughter, anyone’s daughter, struggle through a life so painful and devoid of joy. Refused to be governed by fear, to obey a brute she had no respect for and never chose to marry. Because her body belonged to her, not to them.
