I Don’t Know How To Fight Back

2017

In first or second grade, there was this boy.
He used to wait for me outside of school,
Just so he’d grab my bag, throw it to the ground, and then run away.
masculinity, social pressure, parents, school, adolescence

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Sixty Slaps

2017

My father used to beat me up pretty badly over trivial things.
I used to get beaten if I used the bathroom too many times at school,
Or for telling my teacher that my father was being hard on me.

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Never a Kind Word

2017

When I got engaged,
He would routinely humiliate me in front of my fiancé.
When you do so in front of him,
He’ll do the same to me when we’re married,
And that’s eventually what happened.
domestic violence, gender violence, physical violence, parents, divorce, marriage

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Thursday at 9 PM

2016

It was 9 pm on a Thursday.
My mother gave money and sent me to buy a box of tissues.
Three guys appeared.
One of them was holding a knife.
He pressed it to my cheek and told me to walk without saying a word.
They took me to a strange area and called out to another guy to join them.
Then they took me to a warehouse and raped me,
One after the other.
gender violence; sexual violence; rape; parents; social pressure

gender violence; sexual violence; rape; parents; social pressure
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Wasted Love

2017

At the beginning, my husband treated me like a friend and wife.
He was like he was a friend, a brother, a husband, and a son to me. He was good to me.
Then, he changed.
He treated me like I was a man and only occasionally like a woman.
I thought he was cheating on me.
domestic violence, parents, work, marriage, divorce, romantic relationships

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Enough

2010

Being a woman is hard. Really hard.
Everything is exhausting.
It requires tremendous effort just to live a normal life.

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Sheikh

2006

When I was ten years old,
The sheikh called me to him and took me inside a closet,
Where he touched my private parts.

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Prenup

2017

His cousin tried to convince me to go back to him.
I told him I won’t.
He said, “Do it for the girls.”
I told him, “Growing up with a mother and father, who are divorced, but respect one another, is so much better than living with two people who hate each other.”

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For the First Time

2015

The first time I ever talked to a girl,
Was during my second year of college.
After that,
My allowance was cut off for a while.

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I Aged With Marriage

2017

I feel like I aged considerably the moment I got my first suitor.
I was still young, in eighth grade.
After I got married, I started bearing responsibilities, and I grew up.
My father had us thinking that marriage was the end-all-be-all
We weren’t supposed to fight with our husbands.
gender violence, physical violence, parents, marriage, divorce, work

FULL STORY
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