I grew up treating my body as a crime that had to be hidden.
I hated mirrors the way a child hates needles. I would hurry past them as though a ghost were chasing me. I could not bear to stand in front of one, and for years I did not understand why simply seeing my body frightened me. I hid inside loose clothes, pulling them tightly around me as though they could protect me from something I could not name.
I was six or seven years old when I came home one day and immediately wrapped myself in a long, loose piece of cloth. I only wanted to hide, to conceal a scar that had left me with fear and a sense of sin, though I had done nothing wrong.
Many years passed before I understood that this fear had not appeared inside me from nowhere. Something happened on that distant day, a day whose details my mind has mostly erased. Something that left scars on my body and my spirit and never truly left me. My body had been violated, and perhaps the hardest thing to understand, beyond the violation itself, was that the person who did it was a woman.
At the time, I did not know what hijab meant. But I understood that a piece of cloth could cover a body that suddenly felt as though it no longer resembled me.
I saw my mother, and the women and girls around me, begin wearing it when they reached a certain age. But I was only six or seven. I took shelter beneath that piece of cloth as though it were armour, hoping it would protect me and hide the traces of what had happened.
I forgot most of the details of that day, but my body did not. It remembered everything, every feeling, every moment. I do not remember how I got there or how I came home. I was not a naive child, but I was a child, and that alone should have been enough.
Still, I kept questioning myself as though putting myself on trial: How did I go with her?! I knew very well that I was not supposed to go somewhere unfamiliar with a stranger.
Why did my mind erase those details? Was it trying to protect me, or make my suffering worse?
The details disappeared from my mind, but my body kept everything.
I remember the terror and paralysis that took over me when she ordered me to touch her intimate parts. I remember that damned smell coming from her mouth.
The foul smell of her body clung to me, to my nose, until, as I grew older, I became obsessed with perfume and everything scented.
My mother often gets angry with me because of how much perfume I spray on my body and clothes. She shouts at me and says she can no longer breathe. She complains that I buy too much and finish it far too quickly.
I never know how to answer her.
I wish I could say: Mum, her smell is still stuck inside my nose. It has never left me. I smell it on my body, on my clothes, everywhere around me. Whenever I run from the memory, the smell returns.
I do not remember how I came home that day, but I remember my trembling body, the sweat pouring down my forehead, and my fear that my father would hit me if he found out, or that my mother would collapse if she smelled that filthy smell in my mouth.
I did not know then that what had happened was called assault. She was in her twenties, I think, and I was a child…
Just a child.
I spent years hiding because I thought I was a criminal, a criminal who had committed something obscene. I lived believing I was guilty. I did not understand that I was a victim until I was twenty-five.
A turning point in my life came when I watched the series Lam Shamsiyya. In a moment, it took me back almost twenty years.
A young boy is deceived by an adult man who convinces him it is only a game, then rewards him with something so he will keep the secret.
I watched the scenes carrying the weight of a buried memory in my chest. With each scene, I was not simply a viewer standing in front of a screen. My entire body was being forced back into that cursed night.
Cold moved through my limbs. I struggled to breathe, pressure bearing down on my chest as though someone were choking me. My muscles locked into place, exactly as my small body had frozen twenty years earlier. The series was pulling back the curtain on memories that had escaped my mind, tearing painfully into a wound that was still bleeding.
I saw helplessness in the boy’s eyes and heard my own muffled scream inside my throat, the scream I had trapped there as a child out of fear and shame.
I felt the old nausea again, the disgust that had eaten through my insides. My body seemed to replay the horror moment by moment: the child’s fear that she had done something wrong, her confusion, her innocent questions:
“What is happening? Is this something bad? Should I run? Why didn’t I resist?”
Each episode felt like a knife driven into my memory, a different kind of terror that shook every one of my senses.
For years I had avoided thinking about anything connected to that day. I never allowed myself to remember because I was surrounded by a heavy fence of guilt and self-blame.
I finished the series and broke down crying.
It was crying I had postponed, crying that had been trapped inside me for years.
That moment reinterpreted the whole past and turned it upside down.
Twenty years of punishing myself. Twenty years of hiding, believing I had committed a crime.
But for the first time, through tears of terror and remembering, I truly understood that I had been the victim of a sexual assault committed by a woman.
Someone of my own sex had chosen to violate my body.
A woman forced me into a sexual act I was too young to understand.
This was rape.
For years, I hid behind hijab and loose clothing, believing that my body was a sin, a disgrace that had to be concealed.
Loose clothes gave me a sense of comfort, of safety. I believed in anything that could hide me, as though I myself were the sin.
I hid even inside my own home.
When I slept, I either hugged a pillow so I could disappear behind it and my body would not show, or covered myself with a blanket, even in the middle of summer, when the heat was unbearable and there was no air conditioning in our house.
I was always afraid that someone might see my body…
even my mother.
I hated my body so much. I wanted to get rid of it. I wanted to disown it, to run somewhere far away where I would never have to see it again.
I hated its feminine parts, its sexual organs. Their very existence felt threatening to me. I felt they were the reason everything had happened.
But I had been only a child.
I did not even have the body of an adult woman.
And yet, from that day until now, I have continued to hate this body. I cannot bear to look at it closely in a mirror. I cannot accept it. I am always afraid of it.
That, and that alone, was why I ran towards loose clothing and hijab.
I did not wear hijab because it was an obligation, or because I wanted God to love me more. But as I grew older, I kept convincing myself that God would be pleased with me, even if I had not originally worn it for Him.
Day after day, year after year, the distance between my inner self and my outward body grew wider, and my fear grew with it.
I feared marriage and relationships. I feared sex. I feared being naked in front of a man, imagining a stranger’s eyes examining my body.
Even when I was with only my female friends, they would wear comfortable clothes that showed the shape of their bodies, while I sat among them in the loose clothes that frustrated them so much.
But I was somewhere else entirely.
I wondered: How could every one of them be so at peace with her body? How could those tight clothes not terrify them?
Simply imagining myself wearing something that close to my body genuinely made it difficult for me to breathe.
I ran from all those thoughts, then tried to confront myself.
I tried to understand who I was, the identity that incident had shaped, the fears that had lived inside me ever since.
I kept asking myself:
Who am I?
Why did I decide to wear hijab?
Why do I run from men?
Why do I hate physical contact with strangers?
And why didn’t hijab protect me?
I remember clearly that I experienced many incidents of harassment after I began wearing it, despite having believed it would protect me.
I choked on all the questions, and on the loneliness living inside me.
I regretted never telling my family what happened.
But I had not told them because, at the time, I believed I was an immoral person. I was afraid they would hit me and torture me. I was afraid they would ask me, “Why did you agree to go with her?”
I was afraid they would kill me.
A child living in the countryside, going somewhere far away among the fields with a strange woman, obeying her commands, not running, not protesting.
How would my family have reacted?
Would anyone have believed that I was the victim?
Perhaps they would have believed me and turned the world upside down if a man had done it.
But a woman?
A woman who sexually harasses?
A woman who rapes?
A paedophile?
And in 2007?
Nearly twenty years ago?
It would have been chaos.
I had not seen her since that day, and I never wanted to see her again…
But she came back.
Perhaps Lam Shamsiyya had not arrived in my life at that particular moment by accident. Perhaps it was divine timing, giving the shock to me in instalments, preparing me for something I had never expected.
Suddenly, I saw her in my neighbourhood.
Beneath my home.
Directly under my bedroom window.
She had returned to open a vegetable shop right below our house.
I hear her voice every morning and wake to it. Panic attacks come, and my body jolts.
Her voice takes me back to that day, to the tone she used when she ordered me around.
I run from her. I do not look at her, no matter what happens. When I leave for work, or go anywhere at all, I avoid turning my eyes towards her.
I am frightened by the thought that she might remember me.
Does she remember me?
Does she think of me from time to time and feel pleasure at what she did?
Whenever I imagine her, I feel the scars deepen inside my body. Pain rises in my stomach. Disgust settles in my body and in my mouth.
I have often wondered: Would leaving this town and never confronting that woman solve anything?
Would the psychological scars disappear if I left the place where they began?
I had never shared these memories with anyone before.
My memory is inflamed.
The first time I tried to cleanse it was in front of my psychiatrist, whom I decided to see only a year ago. By then, I had become filled with more than I could bear. I was afraid I might surrender and end my life.
But despite everything, I still wanted to live.
For the first time, the words came out of me.
My psychiatrist listened with extraordinary care.
Session after session, we talk about everything. We face each detail. We analyse it.
It is true that I have not healed.
I have not forgotten.
I still run from my body.
I am still afraid of it.
But I am trying.
I am trying not to run from it again. I am trying to accept it, and to accept that I was a victim.
It still hurts to the point of death.
I still blame my body, and I still blame that little girl who lives inside me.
But I am trying again to reach her.
That child is still waiting for me there, in the place where I was assaulted. She is still trapped inside that place, trapped inside that memory.
But I will try to reach her and save her…
because she is a victim.
Perhaps I will never forget any of it.
But I have decided, of my own free will, to place a bandage over my wound, even if only for a while.
This wound has bled enough.
It is time for it to begin closing, even if it leaves scars behind.
I will look at those scars and imagine them as drawings traced across my body and my spirit.
Today, looking back at all the years that have passed since that distant day, I understand that this has not simply been a journey of recovering a memory or digging up the past.
At its heart, it has been a journey back to my body.
The body I came home that day and hid inside a loose piece of cloth.
The body I carried away from mirrors.
Today, for the first time, I am trying to face it.
I am trying to loosen the grip of a guilt it never earned.
I am trying to make it mine again…
mine alone.
Not trauma’s.
Not fear’s.
