She looked at herself in her the mirror of her bathroom’s vanity. She remembered how Virginia Woolf once said that if a woman wanted to write she must have “money and a room of her own.” She had always been fascinated by the foresight of that statement, by its relevance to her, and to so many other women. Indeed, the bathroom, being the only lockable safe-haven in her household, became that room.
Slowly, she began to write. She knew exactly who the addressee was, and what she was going to write…
‘Dear Terrorist’, she began unapologetically.
Dear Terrorist,
I remember the day I graduated high school, I was ecstatic. I think we all know that arrogance, that vanity, and that feeling of invincibility associated with that phase. You feel as though the world was at your fingertips, all you had to do was reach hard enough, grab it, and it could be yours. It’s not that nothing could harm you, it’s that everything that could possibly cause you genuine harm seems so distant from you, and if it happened to happen to other people it was not going to happen to you. It wasn’t going to happen to you because so far, your family, your friends, and your school has sheltered you from everything in the best way they possibly could. And even if you don’t have those things to shelter you, you simply believe you know better than to be harmed, and that you can protect yourself from harm; maybe the protection lies in that initial belief in and of itself.
Suddenly, you meet a guy, you fall in love, you marry and it’s perfect! One day, during your first fight, he calls you a name, or a word. Then, one time, during a second argument he snaps harder. His words are no longer simple accusations of ‘stupidity’’ and ‘selfishness’; the words become ‘whore,’ ‘slut,’ ‘cheater,’ ‘failure,’ and threats of physical harm. You think that’s fine because you never think of a word as violence, and because no one has told you that psychological and verbal abuse are a thing, and there are words for them (so here they are, write them down, remember them).
He will hit you, beat you, and smack you. This is not because you provoked him by calling bluff on his threats of violence, rather it is because that is who he is. You have bruises and it’s funny because everyone sees them but everyone silently and loudly tells you to be quiet; it’s inappropriate to cut the chord of silence, you do not know why but it just is. You start hearing things like “3ala el a2el e3tza,’ “w akid enty mostafeza,” and “mfeesh beit maby5lash mn el mshkl.”
You learn very quickly that you are destructible, and what makes you destructible is not only the man you live with, it is also the society you inhabit. You also learn that Egypt’s legal and political systems will leave you more hopeless and helpless, and you hear on the news that your issue and your daily life-and-death battle is to be postponed for another time because there are higher priorities, like terrorism. They do not know that you live with a terrorist as well, or maybe they do know but they can afford to turn a blind eye, because they share with your terrorist a rape culture and a patriarchal attitude. They share with him a very particular kind of terrorism that exceptionally, highly, and disproportionately targets women.
I hope my daughter does not marry a terrorist like yourself, I hope my daughter grows up in an Egypt where even if she does, she can scream without shame or embarrassment. I hope my daughter knows that violence is violence; psychological, verbal, sexual, and physical, violence is violence! I hope she lives in an Egypt that understands that the kinds of violence that uniquely endanger almost half of a country’s population can no longer be dismissed for another time.
Yours Sincerely,
Too many names.
She gets up, wipes her tears, and turns her head as he is calling her name out loud again.
I hope someday we possess more than simple tears, emotions of empathy, and feelings of sympathy towards women who experience violence. I hope that one day this letter won’t make any sense. I hope that one day we understand that democracy is impossible if we continue to treat women like a minority group, with irrelative voices, interests, and struggles!
WE SAID THIS: You should also read You Have to See This Domestic Abuse Billboard Stopping Traffic in Cairo.