After a long day at work, Mawj stood before the round mirror. She poured a few drops of lemon and green tea oil into her palms, slipped her slender fingers through her hair, and shook it loose so it fell lightly over her shoulders. The fragrant oil reached her nose as a few drops rolled down her neck. She raised her head and saw that woman staring back at her, as though she were meeting her for the first time in her life, discovering her body for the first time.
She was not searching her reflection for what needed to be covered, corrected, or hidden in shame. She simply looked at herself and, with remarkable precision, managed to silence the voices that had never stopped judging every movement and every stillness of her body. The same reprimands and prohibitions had once filled her ears:
“Lower your eyes. Keep your legs together. Cover yourself. Shame on you. Haram. Lower your voice. Listen to your father. That’s your brother; don’t answer him back. It’s fine, he’s your husband.”
Those voices had taken a greater role in raising her than her own mother.
Their refrain never left her. Its echo kept ringing in her ears until it became a watchman, deciding what was forbidden and what was permitted. Eventually, it settled into her body, becoming an unconscious response stored in her sensory memory. Whenever she spoke and her voice rose, she immediately lowered it again, as though an inner voice were scolding her. If her father or brother was speaking, or any man at all, however close or distant his relation to her, her voice would soften or disappear altogether. Her shoulders would drop, her head settling between them until she could barely raise her eyes.
The same happened whenever she entered a mixed gathering. The moment she sat down, she pressed her legs together and checked that her body was sufficiently “modest”, an unconscious movement that had begun to precede thought itself.
She often felt that women spent their entire lives inhabiting their bodies as though they were rented apartments. They were not allowed to choose the furniture, the colour of the walls, or even the terms and duration of the lease. The deed remained in the hands of custom and the men of the clan.
Our Holes, Their Stitches
Mawj opened her eyes and looked closely at the softness of her body, its curves and contours, until her gaze settled on the stitches that were now barely visible. She passed her fingertips lightly over them. Over the years, their texture had almost blended into the pores of her skin.
A strange feeling came over her, a mixture of sadness and shyness, of longing for the body of the child she had been and tenderness for the woman who had grown up carrying the wound with her.
The moment she saw the stitches, her breathing quickened and grew heavy. Pain rose in her lower abdomen, and the muscles in her legs contracted involuntarily. She pressed them together, as she had done ever since the incident.
Those stitches were a window onto her childhood. Whenever the wind blew, the window opened and forgotten images returned, drawing her body inward again as though it were trying to hide the story of the stitches. She lifted part of her hair and wrapped it in a green shawl inherited from her grandmother, then placed a hand over the muscles of her legs, trying to ease the contraction.
It did not work.
Her body remained folded in on itself, as though it had relived the incident without realising that it was over, that she was no longer that little girl.
She could hardly believe that an accident in childhood could create such a distorted relationship with her own body, leaving her constantly compelled to justify every movement and every breath, as though she were pleading a case in defence of the body of a child who never knew that falling from a bicycle could leave her standing accused, with the sentence suspended.
That morning, her clothes had filled with blood after she began bleeding from below. Everyone gathered around her, wailing as though some terrible calamity had befallen her.
They returned from the doctor’s clinic with a medical report in her grandfather’s possession stating that the “tear” had resulted from a childhood accident, nothing more, and that no one had touched her.
At the time, Mawj did not understand what the report was for, nor why her grandfather placed it inside the safe alongside land deeds and documents belonging to the clan. He locked it away until the day it might need to be produced for another man, to prove that she was still “a virgin girl”, that “no one but her mother had ever kissed her.”
Mawj had always felt that her grandfather and the other men of her family were the judges of her body. Only they seemed to possess the authority to accuse or acquit it.
What she felt then was not simply passing fear. A kind of emptiness overtook her. Her body throbbed, and the smell of blood brought on a nausea that has never entirely left her. She felt that her space had been violated, that everyone was examining her piece by piece, as though her body had become common property of the clan.
Whenever she bathed, she would stop at the stitches. She did not dare touch them. She would only steal glances at her own body as though it belonged to another girl she had once been.
From that moment on, her body became, in her own eyes, accused of a crime she did not understand, dependent on the testimony of others to prove its innocence.
Our Blood, Their Panic
Suddenly, Mawj felt a contraction in her lower abdomen. A sharp pain shot from the place of the stitches into her chest like an electric current.
Once again, she rubbed lemon and green tea oil between her palms, then began massaging her abdomen to ease a pain that reminded her of her first period, which had arrived without warning when she was nine years old.
Mawj had bled from below again.
She was frightened. She thought the stitches had opened.
How would she survive her grandfather’s anger? What if he went looking for another document to prove what had happened to her body?
Even today, she can recall the trembling of her fingers, the dryness of her throat, the contraction that squeezed her uterus whenever she heard women talking about what that blood meant and where it would lead. The contraction returns to her lower abdomen whenever she ventures further into the reel of her memories.
At school, she would press her legs together and wrap her arms around her waist. Then the tears would fall from the intensity of the pain and her inability to bear it.
At the end of those first days of menstruation, Mawj waited for her mother to come into the bathroom with her, as she always had, to wash her hair and scrub her back.
Instead, her mother surprised her.
“You’re a young woman now, my girl. You can take care of yourself now.”
The words struck Mawj deeply. She felt as though she were being weaned from her mother, and from an entire stage of her life.
From then on, cleaning and caring for her body became her responsibility, but she was expected to do so without looking at or becoming familiar with all of its parts. It was as though that part of her body had been sealed with red wax until the time came to hand it over to the awaited man.
From then on, her body no longer moved with the ease it had known in early childhood. Menstruation became a dividing line in her life. It switched on an internal system of surveillance, as though the intimate parts of her body had been placed under an authority that existed beyond her own boundaries.
She began adjusting her dress whenever she sat down. She pressed her knees together in the presence of men. She lowered her voice whenever she felt the urge to laugh.
Even dancing, which had once flowed spontaneously through her body, now demanded enormous effort to escape the weight and constraints of shame.
Our Fear, Their Slaps
Mawj put on a pair of circular brass earrings. She liked the way they looked against her face, and her dimples appeared clearly on her cheeks.
She placed her hand on her right cheek, felt it gently, then lowered her hand to her chest and felt her heartbeat reaching into it.
The pulse carried her back into the past.
She remembered Bahr, the first man whose cold gaze and soft claws had managed to uproot her femininity.
Longing swept through her for Bahr, whom she had loved when she was young, who had grown beside her in memory and then reappeared after years of absence. When Bahr returned, the childhood feelings she had thought time had killed woke again.
After their first meeting, Mawj returned home feeling as though she were trapped inside a bottle of sparkling water that had been shaken violently for a long time, then suddenly dropped to the floor, shattering along with the glass.
Nausea overtook her, followed by relentless vomiting, as though she were emptying out everything her heart held in feeling and everything her mind held in fear. Then she dropped her soft body onto the bed.
The weakness stayed with her for days, until she consulted a doctor who told her that what she was feeling was more than her body could bear.
Years later, when Mawj returned to those feelings, the same nausea came back. She burst into tears until her limbs went numb.
It was as though the memory of her body had archived her childhood love somewhere within its folds.
But Bahr’s return in adulthood did not awaken love alone. It also released the genie of fear that her body’s memory had stored away, until it seeped into her smallest details.
One day, they were sitting facing the sea. Joy was not an ordinary word that day. Her limbs felt as light as a butterfly moving from one flower to another, and her heartbeat ran like horses in a fevered race.
When Bahr leaned towards her and tried to kiss her, her body pulled back. The air locked inside her chest.
Then he slapped her across the right cheek.
All Mawj could think in that moment was that kissing was forbidden, and that if she physically returned a kiss from Bahr, or from any other man, he would eventually leave once she had given herself to him.
She became confused. She did not know what to do. Her limbs went numb, and her voice disappeared from her throat. She wrapped her arms around her waist and pressed her legs together as though they could no longer hold her upright.
After that incident, she tried to escape Bahr’s hands whenever they met. She knew he would find some way to touch her without her consent, so her body would turn itself into a plank, numb and unresponsive, defending itself by refusing sensation.
After every meeting, she stood in front of the mirror and examined her arms, neck, and shoulders.
She was not searching only for bruises. His attempts to touch her by force had left dark marks on her skin, but she was looking for something else too.
She was looking for the boundaries of her body, trying to see whether they had changed after his touch.
A year later, Bahr left without warning, just as he had returned from his long absence without explanation.
Mawj, however, kept the trace of that slap on her right cheek. The colour of the bruises disappeared, but they remained fixed in her memory like an archive.
For a moment, she felt the pulse in her neck and along the right side of her jaw quicken. A confusing fear swept through her, even though Bahr’s hand was no longer there to slap her.
For years, Mawj’s body lived in that wooden posture, folding inward whenever a man looked at her or moved towards her, as though the memory of her body were returning to a position it had memorised somewhere outside her conscious mind.
Our Bodies, Our Homes
The most recent Israeli aggression in 2024 hit Mawj hard.
She could not bear the idea of surrendering to death or accepting loss. The vulnerability she felt appeared as tension, and its effect on her body intensified whenever death or loss seemed to draw closer.
Little by little, she understood that if death was inevitable and beyond her control, then perhaps she could direct her energy towards what remained within her reach. She could change the small details of her life and her days, looking for whatever might bring her moments of joy and stillness.
She began searching for a chance to live the life she had kept postponing before the death that now felt so near arrived.
She stepped away from the mirror and sat on the edge of the bed. Then she began to look at her entire body, taking in all of its terrain.
She looked closely, without fear and without guilt, ignoring every prohibition.
Then she watched her breath moving in and out.
She noticed that her shoulders were still tense, as though they were waiting for another slap.
Her hand closed into a fist, which she pressed into the mattress.
Slowly, she tried to loosen her fingers, as though persuading her body for the first time that the danger had passed, that here, now, she was safe.
For the first time in years, she did not press her legs together.
She did not wrap her arms around her waist.
She did not search for a dress to adjust.
She let her body move however it wanted.
She began to move like a bird newly released from its cage.
Here and now, she entered the depths of her body alone, without fear reaching them before she did.
Mawj danced, and for the first time she felt that this body was hers.
She alone would decide how it moved, how it felt, and how it flew.
The body that had so long been a document kept in the custody of others had become her home, and the deed belonged to her alone.
She understood that despite the weight of memory and the archive she had carried like something held in trust, she was free of her grandfather’s document and of the guardianship of the men of the clan.
She no longer needed walls to hide behind, afraid of guilt, threat, or shame.
A loud sound rang out.
Seconds later, she opened her eyes.
The mirror had shattered, its pieces scattered across the room.
She left her old faces strewn across the floor and walked away in a body no longer held in trust for anyone.
