Burned alive: a victim of the law of men

by Souad; Marie-Thérèse Cuny

  “Faiez, the neighbor?”

  She starts crying again and jabbing at her eyes with the handkerchief, which is rolled up in a ball, as if she wants to force it into her head.

  “Where did you do it? Where?”

  “In the field.”

  She makes a face, she bites her lip and cries even more.

  “Listen to me, my child, I hope for you to die, it’s better if you die. Your brother is young, if you don’t die, he’ll have problems.”

  My brother is going to have problems? What sort of problems? I don’t understand.

  “The police came to see the family at the house. The whole family, your father and your brother, and me, and your brother-in-law, the whole family. If you don’t die, your brother will have trouble with the police.”

  Perhaps she took the glass out of her purse, because there is no table near the bed. No, I didn’t see her look in her bag, she took it from the windowsill, it’s a glass from the hospital. But I didn’t see what she filled it with.

  “If you don’t drink this, your brother is going to have problems. The police came to the house.”

  Did she fill it while I was weeping with shame, with pain, with fear? I was crying about a lot of things, my head down and my eyes closed.

  “Drink this . . . It’s me who gives it to you.”

  Never will I forget this big glass, full to the top, with a transparent liquid, like water.

  “You’ll drink this, your brother won’t have any problems. It’s better, it’s better for you, it’s better for me, it’s better for your brother.”

  And she was crying, and so was I. I remember that the tears ran down over the burns on my chin, along my neck, and they stung my skin. I couldn’t raise my arms. She put a hand under my head and she raised me to the glass she was holding in her other hand. No one had given me anything to drink until then. She was bringing this big glass to my mouth. I would have liked at least to dip my lips into it, I was so thirsty. I tried to raise my chin, but I couldn’t. Suddenly the doctor came into the room, and my mother jumped. He grabbed the glass from her hand and banged it down on the windowsill and he shouted: “No!” I saw the liquid run down the glass and spill over the windowsill, transparent, as clear as water. The doctor took my mother by the arm and made her leave the room. I was still looking at that glass, and I would have drunk it, I would have lapped it up like a dog. I was thirsty, as much as for water as for dying.

  The doctor came back and said to me: “You’re lucky I came in when I did. Your father, and now your mother! No one from your family will be allowed in here!”

  “My brother, Assad, I’d like to see him, he is good.”

  I don’t know what he answered. I felt so strange, my head was spinning. My mother had talked about the police, about my brother who supposedly had enemies? Why him, since it was Hussein who had set fire to me? That glass, it was to make me die. There was still a wet spot on the windowsill. My mother wanted me to drink it and die, and so did I. But I was lucky, according to the doctor, because I had been about to drink this invisible poison. I felt I had been delivered, as if death had tried to charm me and the doctor had made it disappear in a second. My mother was an excellent mother, the best of mothers, she was doing her duty in giving me death. It was better for me. I shouldn’t have been saved from the fire, brought here to suffer, and now take such a long time to die to deliver me from my shame and my family’s.

  My brother came, three or four days later. I will never forget that transparent plastic sack he brought. I could see oranges and a banana. I hadn’t eaten or drunk anything since I’d arrived there. I wasn’t able to, and anyway no one tried to help me. Even the doctor didn’t dare. I knew they were letting me die, because it was forbidden to intervene in a case like mine. I was guilty in everyone’s eyes. I endured the fate of all women who sully the honor of men. They had only washed me because I stank, not to provide me care. They kept me there because it was a hospital where I was supposed to die without creating other problems for my parents and the whole village. Hussein had botched the job, he had let me run away in flames.

  Assad didn’t ask any questions. He was afraid and he was in a hurry to get back to the village.

  “I’m going to go through the fields so no one sees me. If the parents know I’ve come here to see you I’m going to have problems.”

  I had wanted him to come but I was uneasy having him lean over me. I saw in his eyes that I disgusted him with my burns. No one, not even he, was interested in how much I was suffering in this cracking, decaying, oozing skin, slowly devouring me like a serpent’s venom over my whole upper body, my hairless head, my shoulders, my back, my arms, my breasts. I cried a lot. Was it because I knew it was the last time I would see him? Did I cry because I so much wanted to see his children? They were waiting for his wife to give birth, and I learned later that she had two boys. The whole family must have admired and congratulated her.

  I couldn’t eat the fruit. It was impossible alone and then the sack disappeared. I never saw any of my family again. My last vision of my parents is of my mother with the glass of poison, my father furiously striking the floor with his cane. And my brother with his sack of fruit.

  In the depths of my suffering, I was still trying to understand why I hadn’t seen anything when the fire reached my head. There had been a gasoline can next to me, but there was a cork in it. I didn’t see Hussein pick it up. My head was down when he said he was going to “take care of me” and for a few seconds I thought I was saved because of his smile and the blade of grass he was calmly chewing. In reality, he wanted to gain my confidence to keep me from running away. He had planned everything the day before with my parents. But where did the fire come from? The coals? I didn’t see anything. Did he use a match to do it so quickly? I always had a box next to me, but I didn’t see that, either. So it must have been a lighter in his pocket. Just enough time to feel the cold liquid on my hair, and I was already in flames. I would so much like to know why I didn’t see anything.

  It’s a nightmare without end at night, lying flat on my back on this bed in the hospital. I am in total darkness, I see curtains around me; the window has disappeared. I feel a strange pain like a knife stuck into my stomach, my legs tremble. I am dying. I try to sit up but can’t. My arms are still stiff, two filthy wounds that are of no use. There is no one, I am alone. Then who stuck this knife into my stomach?

  I feel something strange between my legs. I bend one leg, then the other, I try to disengage this thing that frightens me. I don’t realize, at first, that I’m giving birth. I feel around in the darkness with my two feet. Without really knowing what it is, I push the child’s body slowly back under the sheet. I stay still for a moment, exhausted by the effort.

  When I bring my legs together, I feel the baby against the skin on both my legs. It moves a little. I hold my breath. How did it get out so quickly? A knife stab in the belly and it’s there? I’m going back to sleep, it’s impossible, this child didn’t come out all alone without warning. I must be having a nightmare.

  But I’m not dreaming, because it’s there, between my knees, against the skin of my legs. They weren’t burned so I have sensation in my legs and my feet. I don’t move, then I raise a leg, the way you would with an arm, to brush a tiny head, arms that move feebly. I must have cried out. I don’t remember. The doctor comes into the room, parts the curtains, but I’m still in darkness. It must be night outside. I see only a light in the hall through the open door. The doctor leans over and he takes the baby away, without even showing it to me. There’s nothing between my legs now. Someone pulls the curtains closed. I don’t remember anything more. I must have fainted, I slept a long time, I don’t know. The next day and the following days, I am certain of only one thing: The child is no longer in my belly.

  I didn’t know if he was dead or alive, no one spoke to me about it, and I didn’t dare ask the unkind nurse what they had done with this child. May he forgive me, I was incapable of giving
him a reality. I knew that I had given birth but I hadn’t seen him, he wasn’t put into my arms, I didn’t know if it was a girl or a boy. I was not a mother at this moment, but human debris condemned to death. My strongest emotion was shame.

  The doctor told me later that I had given birth at seven months to a tiny baby, but that he was alive and being cared for. I vaguely heard what he was saying to me, my ears had been burned and hurt so terribly! I was in pain all over the upper part of my body, and I kept passing from a coma to a half-awake state, with no awareness of day or night. They were all hoping for me to die and they expected it to happen. But I found that God would not have me die so quickly. The nights and days were confused in the same nightmare and in my rare moments of lucidity I had only one obsession, to rip with my nails this infected stinking skin. Unfortunately, my arms wouldn’t obey me.

  Someone came into the room once, in the middle of this nightmare. I sensed a presence rather than actually seeing someone. A hand passed like a shadow over my face without touching it. A woman’s voice with a peculiar accent said to me in Arabic: “I’m going to help you, do you understand?” I said yes, without believing it. I was so uncomfortable in that bed, the object of everyone’s scorn, I didn’t understand how anyone could help me, especially how anyone could have the power to help. Bring me back to my family? They didn’t want any part of me. A woman burned for honor is supposed to burn to death. The only way to help me stop suffering was to help me die.

  But I say yes to this woman. I don’t know who she is.

  Jacqueline

  My name is Jacqueline. At the time of these events, I was in the Middle East working with a humanitarian organization, Terre des Hommes, which was directed by an extraordinary person whose name was Edmond Kaiser. I would tour the hospitals looking for children who had been abandoned, handicapped children, or children suffering from malnutrition. This work is done in collaboration with the International Red Cross and other organizations involved with Israelis and people from the West Bank. I have a great deal of contact with both populations, because I live and work within their communities.

  However, it was only after I had been in the Middle East for seven years that I heard about girls being murdered by their own families because they had had contact with a boy. This could have been nothing more than just talking to a boy. The family suspects a girl on anybody’s word, sometimes with no proof at all. It does sometimes happen that a girl really has had an “adventure” with a boy, which is absolutely unthinkable in this culture, given that it is the father who makes all decisions about marriage. But until I heard about Souad, I had never actually been involved in such a case.

  To a Western mind, the idea that parents or brothers can murder their own daughter or sister simply because she has fallen in love seems unbelievable, especially in these times. In our society, women are free, they vote, they may have children out of wedlock, they choose their husbands.

  But having lived here for seven years, the first time someone spoke to me about it, I knew immediately that it was true, even though I had had no personal involvement in such a case. There must be an atmosphere of trust before anyone will even speak of a subject as taboo as this one, which especially does not concern foreigners. It was a woman who decided to bring it up with me, a Christian friend with whom I am frequently in contact because she works with children. She sees many mothers from villages all over the country. She is a little like the neighborhood moukhtar, that is, she invites the women to have a coffee or tea and talks with them about what is going on in their village. It is an important form of communication here. You have conversation every day over coffee or tea. The custom gave her the opportunity to make a mental note of the cases of children in serious difficulty that she would hear about. And one day she heard a group of women say that in one of the villages there was a girl who had behaved very badly and whose parents tried to burn her to death. They thought she was in a hospital somewhere.

  This friend has a certain charisma, and she is well respected. She displays an enormous courage, which I was about to witness. Normally she is involved only with children, but the mother is never far from the child. So around the fifteenth of September of that year, my friend said to me: “Listen, Jacqueline, there is a girl in the hospital who is dying. The social service worker confirmed to me that she was burned by someone in her family. Do you think you can do something?”

  When I asked her what more she knew about the case, she said only that it was a young girl who was pregnant; the villagers said she was rightly punished, and now she was expected to die in the hospital. When I expressed my horror, she said that’s the way things are here. The girl was pregnant and so she has to die. That’s all there is to it, it’s quite normal. Everyone feels so sorry for the poor parents, but not for the girl. Besides, she would die anyway according to what she had heard.

  A story like this sounded an alarm in my head. Children were my first mission. I had never become involved in this type of case, and for good reason, but I said to myself: Jacqueline, old girl, you have to see for yourself what this is about!

  I left for the hospital. It was not a hospital that I was particularly familiar with. However, I know the country and the customs, and I can get along in the language, because I have spent so much time here. I simply asked to be taken to a girl who had been burned. They led the way without any problem, and I entered a large room where I saw two beds, each occupied by a girl. I immediately sensed that it was an isolation unit, a place where they put the cases they don’t want seen. It was a rather dark room, with bars on the windows, two beds, and nothing else. As there were two girls, I told the nurse I was looking for the one who had just had a baby. She pointed to one of the girls and then left the room. She didn’t stop in the hallway, she didn’t ask me who I was, nothing! Just motioned vaguely toward one of the beds: “It’s that one!”

  One of the girls has short frizzy hair, it looks almost shaved. The other one has medium-length straight hair. But the faces of both girls are blackened, sooty. Their bodies are covered by a sheet. I know they have been here a while, about two weeks according to what I have been told. It is obvious that they are unable to speak. They both look close to death. The one with the straight hair is in a coma. The other one, the one who had the child, opens her eyes from time to time, but just barely.

  No one comes into the room, neither nurse nor doctor. I don’t dare speak, much less touch them, and the odor that hangs in the air is foul. I have come to see one girl, and I discover two of them, both hideously burned from all evidence, and both without care. I go out to look for a nurse in another ward, and when I find one, I ask to see the medical director of the hospital.

  I am familiar with the hospital setting. The medical director receives me well and seems somewhat sympathetic. I mention that there are two girls who have been burned and tell him that I work with a humanitarian organization that could possibly help them.

  “Listen. One of them fell into a fire and the other one, it’s the family’s business. I advise you not to get involved.”

  I tell him that my work is giving aid, and especially to people who have no other source of help, and ask if he can tell me a little more about it.

  “No, no, no. Be careful. Don’t get involved in this kind of business!”

  When it’s like that, you can’t force people too much. I leave it at that but I go back down to the isolation room where the girls are being kept and sit down for a moment. I wait, hoping that the girl who opened her eyes a little is able to communicate. The condition of the other one is more disturbing. When a nurse walks by in the hallway, I ask about what happened to the girl, the one who has hair and doesn’t move.

  “Oh, she fell into a fire and is in very bad shape. She’s going to die.”

  There is no pity in this diagnosis, simply a statement of fact. But I do not accept this standard explanation about falling into a fire.

  The other one stirs a little. I move closer to her and stay there a f
ew minutes without speaking. I watch and try to understand the situation; I listen to the sounds in the corridor, thinking someone else will come in, someone with whom I can speak. But the nurses pass by very quickly and they have absolutely nothing to do with these two girls. From all appearances, there is no organized care for them. Actually, there must be a little something, but it isn’t apparent. No one approaches me, no one asks me anything. I am, after all, a foreigner dressed in Western-style clothes, yet I am always well covered, out of respect for their traditions; and this respect is indispensable to getting along and getting things accomplished. I think someone might at least ask me what I’m doing there, but instead they ignore me.

  After a little while, I lean over this girl who seems able to hear me. But I don’t know where to touch her. The sheet prevents me from seeing where she has been burned. I see that her chin is completely stuck to her chest, it’s all of a piece. Her ears are burned and not much is left of them. When I pass a hand in front of her eyes, she doesn’t react. I can’t see her arms or her hands, and I don’t dare lift this sheet. But I have to touch her somewhere to make her aware of my presence. As with a dying person, it is important to make her understand that someone is there, so that she may feel a presence, a human contact. Under the sheet, her knees are bent. I place my hand gently on her knee, and she opens her eyes.

  “What is your name?” She doesn’t answer.

  “Listen to me, I’m going to help you. I will come back and I will help you.”

  “Aioua,” which means yes in Arabic, and that’s all. She closes her eyes. I don’t even know if she’s seen me.

  That was my first visit with Souad. I left feeling overwhelmed. I was going to do something, that much was apparent to me!

  In everything I have done up to now, I have always had the feeling of receiving a call. I hear about someone in distress, I go there knowing that I’m going to do something to answer that call. I don’t know what, but I’ll find a way. So I go back to see that friend, who is able to give me some new information, if you can call it that, about this girl’s case. She tells me that the child she gave birth to has already been taken away by the social services by order of the police. The girl is young, no one is going to help me in the hospital. “Jacqueline, believe me, you are not going to be able to do anything.” My response is that we’ll see.