I was in a microbus.
I got on in Al-Mandara,
And was getting off in Miami.
A woman with a child sat next to me.
I made room for her,
And looked the other way.
She moved closer to me.
Where I was supposed to go?
gender violence, harassment
Don’t you dare think of pressing charges like those women in the movie did.
A respectable girl would never go into a police station full of men and tell them that a man, for example, grabbed her here or touched her leg.
This country is full of incidents like these, and women never speak up. Don’t you go playing the hero
My father was the first person to touch me.
I used to tell myself that I was imagining it.
When he’d touch me with his leg from behind,
I’d tell myself he was just being playful.
To my big nipples,
Why do you lose all feeling in bed?
Don’t you know you’re supposed to be an erogenous zone?
I feel nothing from you.
It’s as if you’re not connected to my breasts.
Not connected to my heart.
You disconnected yourself from my heart so I wouldn’t feel pain.
But I’m lacking confidence now.
beauty stadards, body image, harassment
You said I was only pretending to be a liberal,
And I turned out to be a conservative woman who had issues,
Just like any other Egyptian woman.
You said that because I refused to do what you wanted.
We were at a conference.
Later at the hotel,
As we were going back to our rooms,
One of my colleagues told me,
“I’m staying in room 13.”
gender violence, harassment, work
The French teacher, Miss Lubnah, was very sweet and petite.
She spoke in broken Arabic,
But her French was perfect.
She was a great French teacher.
I was walking down the street one time when a cargo motorcycle full of middle school boys drove past me.
One of them slapped me on my behind.
I screamed in surprise. They mimicked me and laughed.