I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced

by Nujood Ali

  “Get out or I’ll throw stones in your face!” Eyman told him.

  When Eyman’s threat finally drove the boy away, it was such a relief. That was the only time anyone had ever come to my defense, and Eyman became my imaginary hero. I told myself that when I was grown up, maybe I’d be lucky enough to have a husband like him.

  On my wedding day, my female cousins began to ululate and clap their hands when they caught sight of me arriving. I, however, could hardly see their faces, my eyes were so full of tears. I advanced slowly, doing my best to avoid tripping over my outfit, which was too big for me and dragged on the ground. I’d been hastily dressed in a long tunic of a faded chocolate color, which belonged to the wife of my future brother-in-law. A female relative had taken charge of my hair, which she gathered into a chignon that weighed down my head. I didn’t even get to wear any mascara. Catching sight of my face in a small mirror—round cheeks, pink lips, and brown, almond-shaped eyes—I’d noticed how smooth my brow was, and try as I might, I couldn’t find a single wrinkle. I was young, too young.

  Barely two weeks had passed since I had been spoken for. Following local custom, the women celebrated my wedding in my parents’ tiny house; there were forty of us, all told. Meanwhile, the men gathered at the house of one of my uncles to celebrate, and to chew khat yet again. Two days earlier, when the marriage contract had been signed, the event had also been men only, and occurred behind closed doors. Everything had happened without me. Neither my mother, my sisters, nor I had had any right to know how things had gone. We found out the details late that afternoon only through my little brothers, who had gone off to beg a few coins in the street to pay for refreshments for my father, my uncle, and my future husband, along with his father and brother. We learned that the meeting had taken place according to well-established tribal protocol. My father’s brother-in-law, the only one present who could read and write, acted as notary, drawing up the marriage contract. My dowry had been set at 150,000 rials, a sum equivalent to 750 dollars.

  “Don’t worry,” I heard my father whisper to my mother that night. “They made him promise not to touch Nujood before the year after she has her first period.”

  I shuddered.

  My wedding celebration, which began at lunchtime, was quickly over. No white dress. No henna flowers on my hands. No coconut candies, my absolute favorites, the ones that hold the sweet taste of happy days. It was over quickly—but to me it seemed to last forever. Sitting in a corner of the room, I refused to dance with the other women because I was gradually realizing that my life was undergoing a complete upheaval, and not for the better. The youngest women began to improvise a belly dance, baring their navels and undulating their bodies like something out of a tacky video. Holding hands, the older women performed more traditional folk dances, like the ones still seen in villages. During lulls in the music, they came over to greet me, and I embraced them dutifully. But I couldn’t even pretend to smile.

  I just sat impassively in my corner of the main room, my face swollen from crying. I didn’t want to leave my family. I didn’t feel prepared. I already missed school painfully, and Malak even more. Catching sight of my little sister Haïfa’s sad face during the celebration, I realized with a pang that I would miss her as well. I felt a sudden rush of fear: What if she, too, were condemned to suffer my fate?

  At sundown the guests took their leave and I dozed off, fully clothed, Haïfa at my side. My mother joined us a little later, after straightening up the room. When my father returned from his all-male meeting, we were fast asleep. During my last night in my parents’ house, no dreams came to me, nor do I remember sleeping fitfully. I only wondered if I would awaken the next morning as if from a nightmare.

  When sunlight flooded the room at around six o’clock the next morning, Omma woke me up and asked me to follow her out into the narrow hallway. As we did each morning, we bowed down before God, reciting the first prayer of the day. Then she served me a bowl of ful (fava beans cooked with onions and tomato sauce, which we eat at breakfast) and a cup of milky chaï, our tea. My little bundle was waiting for me in front of our door, but I pretended not to see it. It was only when a car horn sounded outside the house that I was forced to resign myself to this new life full of uncertainty. After hugging me tightly, my mother helped me cover myself in a black coat and scarf. For the past few years I had worn simply a small colored veil when I went outside, and sometimes I even forgot it, but no one ever paid any attention. Now I saw Omma reach into my bundle and pull out a black niqab, which she handed to me. Never, until that moment, had I been forced to veil myself completely.

  “From this day on, you must cover yourself when going out into the street. You are now a married woman. Your face must be seen by no one but your husband. Because it is his sharaf, his honor, that is at stake. And you must not disgrace it.”

  I nodded sadly and said good-bye to her. I was angry at Omma for abandoning me, but could find no words to tell her of my pain.

  In the back of the SUV waiting in front of our door, a short man was staring at me. He wore a long white zanna, like Aba, and had a mustache. His short wavy hair was somewhat mussed, his eyes brown, and his face poorly shaved. His hands were stained with black grease. He was not handsome. So this was Faez Ali Thamer! The man who had asked for and been granted my hand, that stranger whom I had perhaps walked past one day in Khardji—where we had returned for visits several times over the last few years—but whom I did not remember.

  They had me sit in the middle row of seats, right behind the driver, with four other female passengers, including the wife of my husband’s brother. Their smiles were strained, and they didn’t seem very talkative. The stranger sat all the way in the back, next to his brother. I felt a little better not having to look at his face during our long ride, but I could feel his eyes on me, and it gave me the shivers. Who was he, actually? Why had he wanted to marry me? What was he expecting of me? And marriage—what exactly did that mean? I had no answers to those questions.

  When the motor rumbled to life and the driver pulled away, my heart was pounding, and I couldn’t help myself—I started crying, silently, with my face glued to the window as I watched Omma grow smaller and smaller until she was only a tiny little dot of nothing at all.

  I never said a word that whole trip. Lost in my thoughts, I wanted only one thing: to find a way to go back home, to escape. The farther away from Sana’a the car drove on its way north, however, the more I understood how trapped I was. How many times did I wish I could tear off that stifling black niqab? I felt so small, too small for this whole business—for the niqab, for this long ride far away from my parents, for this new life beside a man who disgusted me, a man I didn’t know. The vehicle stopped suddenly.

  “Open the back door!”

  The soldier’s voice startled me. Exhausted from too much crying, I had finally fallen asleep. Then I remembered that the road north is full of checkpoints, and that we were only at the first one. People say it’s because of the war raging in the north between the army and the Houthi rebels; my father says that the Houthis are Shiites, while most Yemenis are Sunnis. The difference? I have no idea. All I know is that I am Muslim and recite my five daily prayers.

  After a glance inside the vehicle, the soldier sent us on our way. If only I could have taken that moment to appeal for his help, to ask him to save me! With his green uniform, his weapon on his shoulder, wasn’t he supposed to ensure order and public safety? Then I could have told him that I didn’t want to leave Sana’a, that I was afraid of being bored and alone out in that village, where I didn’t know anyone anymore.

  Over the years I’d grown used to Sana’a. I loved all the buildings under construction in the capital, the wide avenues, the billboard advertisements for cell phones and orange sodas that tickled the roof of my mouth. Pollution and traffic jams had become part of my daily life. But it was the old city, Bab al-Yemen—Yemen’s Gate—that I would miss the most. Bab al-Yemen is truly a city within t
he city, a magical place where I loved to stroll around, holding Mona’s or Jamila’s hand, feeling as if I were an explorer off on a mission. It’s a whole different universe, with its adobe houses and windows outlined in white tracery so delicate that Indian architects must clearly have passed through there long ago, well before my time. Bab al-Yemen is so elegantly civilized that I’d invented my own story of a king and queen from the olden days who must have lived out happy lives there. Perhaps the old city had even belonged entirely to them?

  Anyone who enters Bab al-Yemen is immediately surrounded by all sorts of sounds: merchants’ cries mingle with the popping and hissing of old cassette tapes and the laments of barefoot beggars, while a shoeshine boy at an intersection might grab your foot to offer you his services. The call to prayer often rises above this entire concert of jumbled noises. I used to have fun trying to sniff out the different smells of cumin, cinnamon, cloves, nuts, raisins—all the scents wafting from the street booths. Sometimes I would stand on tiptoe to better appreciate the goods laid out in stalls that were a little too high for me, but whose bounty lay heaped up as far as the eye could see: silver jambias, embroidered shawls, rugs, sugared doughnuts, henna, and dresses for little girls my age.

  In Bab al-Yemen, we’d sometimes see women draped in sitaras (“curtains” in Arabic), large, colorful pieces of beautifully patterned cloth worn over their clothes. I used to call them “the ladies of the old city” because their brightly colored outfits were just so different from the black veils usually worn in the street that these women seemed to belong to another age.

  One afternoon, when I was accompanying my aunt on some errands, I allowed myself to be distracted by this fantastic and almost unreal world, and I wandered off into the middle of the dense crowd. When I tried to retrace my steps to rejoin my aunt, I found that all the lanes and alleys looked alike. Should I take the next one on the right, or on the left? Disoriented, I crouched down in tears: I was well and truly lost. And it was only two hours later that I was spotted by a vendor who knew my aunt.

  “Nujood, when will you stop being so scatterbrained?” Auntie had scolded me, grabbing my hand.

  And here I was, lost again, on this sad day after my wedding, sitting in the uncomfortable SUV, only now the people around me were grim and unfriendly. Gone were the magic of spices and the kindly looks of vendors who let children taste their still-warm doughnuts. My life was taking a new turn in this world of grown-ups, where dreams no longer had a place, faces became masks, and no one seemed to care about me.

  Once the capital was behind us, the highway became a black ribbon snaking along among mountains and valleys. At every turn I clutched the armrest of my seat. My stomach was heaving, and several times I had to pinch myself, hard, to control my nausea. Better to die than to ask him to stop by the roadside so that I could breathe some fresh air, I thought. I kept gently swallowing my saliva as quietly as possible, trying not to be sick.

  To block out everyone around me, I decided to observe the smallest details of the landscape. There were old fortresses in ruins perched on promontories; little brown houses with white trim that vaguely reminded me of Bab al-Yemen; cacti by the side of the road; arid mountain passes alternating with pockets of agriculture; goats cropping the grass; and cows. There were women, too, their faces partly hidden by the scarves they pulled over their mouths. I thought I also saw two run-over cats, but I closed my eyes quickly to avoid memorizing the image. When I opened them again, the car was driving through an ocean of khat. On the right, on the left, green as far as I could see. It was magnificent, so fresh and cool.

  “Khat, our national tragedy!” exclaimed the driver. “It sucks up so much water that we’ll all wind up dying of thirst in this country.”

  Life is really weird, I thought. It’s not just bad people who spread misery—even pretty things can be hurtful. So hard to understand …

  A little farther along, to my right, I recognized Cocabane, a small village cut into the living rock, way up atop a hill. I remembered going by the place with my parents when I was younger, on our way to another village to celebrate Eid. People say the women of Cocabane are thin and beautiful because they go every morning to labor in the fields. An hour to walk down, another to climb back up—a real workout. What courage! An hour to walk down … another to climb back up. An hour to walk down …

  It was the throbbing of the car’s engine that woke me with a start. How long had I been asleep? How many miles had we driven? I had no idea.

  “One, two, three!”

  Behind the vehicle, a half-dozen men were pushing on the bumper with all their strength, trying to free us from a sandy hole. Amid the dust cloud raised by the wheels, I tried to read the sign bearing the name of the dried-up village where we had run aground. Arjom. Apparently we had left the highway for a rocky, rutted road edging a ravine that led to a deep gorge. The car was definitely at a standstill.

  “You’d do better to turn around,” one of the villagers suggested. He had a red and white headcloth wrapped around his face. “You’ll never get any farther; this track just keeps getting worse.”

  “But we must get to Khardji,” insisted the driver.

  “Pfft—with your car? You’re joking.”

  “Well, then, how?”

  “The best way is to go by donkey.”

  “Riding donkeys! But there are women with us. It might be difficult.”

  “Listen, why not hire one of our fellows? He’s used to making round-trips carrying visitors. And the tires on his car are up to it—he gets new ones at least every two months, the road’s so bad.”

  So we changed cars, and while the grown-ups were busy moving our bundles into the other one, I used those few minutes to stretch my legs. I took a deep breath, drawing as much pure mountain air into my lungs as possible. Below my black veil, the brown dress was sticking to my skin with perspiration, and I picked up the folds of material to go carefully over to the edge of the ravine. Right at the bottom, so far away, I recognized Wadi La’a, the valley of my village—it hadn’t changed. I’d been so little, though, when we’d left. Were my childhood memories coming back, kept alive thanks to a few recent trips to the area with my parents? Or was I recalling things from the faded photographs languishing in an old album that Aba looked at from time to time with tears in his eyes? I saw my grandfather again in my mind’s eye, my Jad, whom I had loved so much. It had been a year since his death, when I had cried and cried. He always wore a white turban, and although his beard was thin and grizzled, he had bushy, dark brown eyebrows. Sometimes he would sit me on his knees and playfully tip me over backward, then catch me at the last minute. I’d grown used to the idea that if the world collapsed around me, my Jad would always be there to save me. He had gone too soon.

  “Nujood! Nujood!”

  I turned around, wondering who could be calling me in that unfamiliar voice, so strange to my ears. Not like Jad’s, a voice I could always recognize with my eyes closed. Looking up, I realized that it was him, my unknown husband, speaking to me for the first time since we’d left Sana’a. With barely a glance at me, he announced that it was time to leave again. Nodding, I headed toward our new “carriage”: a rusted-out red and white Toyota pickup. I was put in the front seat with the veiled sister-in-law, sitting on the new driver’s right. The men clambered into the open truck bed in the back, with other passengers who were catching a ride.

  “Hang on tight,” warned the driver. “The pickup will rock back and forth.”

  Before setting out, he turned on his tape deck at top volume, and folk music began crackling out of loudspeakers as rusty as the pickup. The vibrations of the oud, a kind of Oriental lute, accompanied the voice of a very well-known local singer, Hussein Moheb, and soon they were joined by the jolting of the pickup doing battle with the big stones in the road. We weren’t rocking back and forth, though; we were flying in all directions! Several times, stones crashed into our windshield, and I hung on for dear life, praying to arrive at the v
illage in one piece.

  “Listen to the music, it will make you forget your fear!” shouted the driver.

  If he had only known what other fears tormented me.

  Hour after hour we drove, to the sound of Hussein Moheb’s wailing; I should have counted the number of times the driver rewound the cassette. He seemed intoxicated by the music, which surely gave him the courage to forge ahead. Hanging on to his steering wheel like a rider clinging to his horse, he tackled even the slightest turn with his eyes riveted on the winding road, as if he knew all its pitfalls by heart.

  “God made nature tough, but luckily he made men even tougher!”

  Well, I thought, if the driver is right, then God must have forgotten to include me.

  The deeper into the valley we went, the worse I felt. I was tired. I felt sick to my stomach. I was hungry and thirsty. But most of all, I was afraid. The closer we came to Wadi La’a, the more uncertain my fate seemed. And my hopes for escape? Dashed.

  Khardji hadn’t changed; it still felt like the end of the earth. As soon as we arrived, aching from the bone-jarring ride, I recognized the five stone houses, the modest river flowing through the village, the bees humming from flower to flower, the endless trees, and the village children going to the well to fill their little yellow jerry cans. A woman was waiting for us on the threshold of one of the houses. I felt immediately that she didn’t like me. She didn’t embrace me—not even a tiny kiss, not even a gentle pat. His mother. My new mother-in-law. She was old and ugly, with skin as wrinkled as a lizard’s. She was missing two of her front teeth, while the others were rotten from cavities and blackened by tobacco. She wore a black and gray head scarf. She gestured for me to enter. The inside of the house was spare, with hardly any furnishings: four bedrooms, a living room, a tiny kitchen. The toilet was out under the stars, behind some bushes.