Written by Sahar Khamoosh
Dear Sahar,
I am the woman from your future, writing about the things she managed to change in what you are going through. A woman? You don’t like this word, do you? No, I am not married but I still call myself a woman because I now know that a sexual relationship with a man can’t define my identity. I know that in our culture, even if you are forty and you’ve accomplished everything you wished to, you are still a “girl” until you’re married. I refuse to believe this. I understand that you dislike this word because of the many things it made you go through- things that you didn’t know about and were afraid to question because they bothered people. I learned to bother people in order to learn. That’s how I’ve changed.
Let me remind you of a story, Sahar. It was an early evening that a little girl with a giggling heart and excited face was taking turns with her sister in exchanging stories of school while returning from grocery shopping. There was a man coming out of the mosque nearby with traditional Perahan Tunban and a Taqiyah. The little girl was so deeply drowned in the funny story that she did not realize that he was passing her. She was almost finishing up the story that her excitement was shot by the man pinching her bottom hard and moving on. How do you feel to read this story? How do you feel when you know who the protagonist is? I know you pretend this never happened but for nights you were up crying this melancholy off, when you remembered him smirking as you turned around to look him into his eyes. You never told this story to anyone but I am telling it to everyone I see now because I don’t have to be ashamed.
The first time you convinced yourself to watch the news with dad you had learned a word that you almost never pronounced out loud: Tajawoz , rape. An unwritten law told you not to even look for its meaning and that it would bother people if you said it. But it keeps reminding you of your story, doesn’t it? This was the reason why you decided to name that look in that man’s eyes and that smile “rape” and you buried both in the depths of intentional disregard. You still don’t have a valid response to why you say “no” when your siblings ask you to go out and bring bread; you sleep this tragedy off.
You just recently “stopped running around.” That’s a creative way to name the new phase of your life but believe me what it actually is, sounds way better: your period. It wasn’t easy to run around while you were bleeding from your vagina. I haven’t forgotten the morning you got your first period. Mom had hurried to make you clean up your bloody bed and then pushed you in the toilet. She explained that you don’t have to worry but you ought not to speak about this to anyone either. Perhaps your puberty bothered other people. You were relieved that it was something normal, but then she slid sanitary pads under the door and hesitantly told you how they worked. There was no time for details. Good news: I finally learned how to use them and it is way more comfortable now that I don’t have to worry about whether I’m leaking or not. I learned to run around again and even how to ride a bicycle.
All this isn’t enough to explain why you hate being a woman. I wish I could promise you that it would get easier. But it simply doesn’t. It gets harder and harder. You will have to deal with periods every month and you will lose count of the men that are similar to that “rapist.” It will become so frequent that you will stop turning around and you will be afraid to look them into their eyes.
You will know how womanhood gets hard when the women around you show that they don’t like to hear about things all of us go through. It gets way harder when they try to pretend that you don’t have to deal with a bleeding vagina every month and you don’t mind the transition of “a man harassing you” to “you being harassed”. They will be the first people telling you to bow down when the flowers of your breasts blossom in your chest and how to be a “proper” lady. And much more is yet to come.
But all these hardships will be things to deal with individually. If you speak up about them or acknowledge them, you may be alone, but don’t pretend they don’t exist because it doesn’t help anyone.
Young Sahar, you are unlearning the lessons of our society, learning new words, replacing old ones. Here are a few more for you.
Woman: You, I, and beyond
Choice: Something to always make
Sisterhood: A culture that should be learned
Patriarchy: Something to smash
You decided to avoid the problems and remain quiet, but here are alternatives. Talk to younger people about your experience and what you would like to know about being a woman. Talk about your periods to men around you and tell them how different it feels to have one. Tell them what they are missing. Read about periods and present it to the biology class in spite of the religious studies professor monitoring the lecture. Your physical growth, however a thorn in everyone’s eye, should never make you ashamed and forced to bow down. Learn about being a woman, before you decide to hate or love it.
Me being able to write you this letter already means that you have succeeded but it doesn’t mean you haven’t broken my heart. You have taken away so much that I don’t know which one to ask you for, first. I ask you to return every second of womanhood that you took away from me. This letter is already too long to ask you for the many other things you let people steal from me but one last thing: please, woman up.
With Love and Respect,
Your Woman Self