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Rape in the Memories of Childhood
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Mays Al Krydi-Al Thara
29-5-2010
The neighbors were chatting and the words, “he violated her…” or “she violated him…” appeared; “he did it to her” or “she did it to him…”
When we were young when it happened, playing in the silence of those looking for knowledge. That knowledge became part of our beliefs and distorted our lives that followed. At the time,we didn’t understand the meaning of that word—rape--but we hadcome across the word in our National Education textbooks, used to describe land—“our violated land.” So I understood that rape meant something ugly, dirty to the fullest extent.
Now, after all the years that have passed, it is not surprising that such incidents resurface vaguely to float on the surface of life, only memories of memories.
Fear, the fear we have inherited from the edges of our sidewalks, from which we have learned to fear strangers and relatives, their hugs and their kisses, their sympathy for our childhood, because we can’t expect when their long-stored hungerwill pull back the curtain of their smiling faces to brutalize our bodies.
The twelve year old girl’s lips hang loosely, suggesting herdelayed mental development. I did not notice her, a little girl in the middle of a group of children who laughed at her naivete and harassed her. Their behavior toward her was the result of ignorance. My mother said,“Poor girl, she is mentally handicapped.” She explained to me and as she spoke I began to feel for the girl in my heart, this girl who weighed three times more than me, this blonde girl walking the earth overwhelmed by her own weight, who did not know how to be coquettish with her walk, as women are, nor the adolescent emotions that arise in young hearts. She was a young girl in the body of a woman. She was exhausted from years of repetition, but could not graduate from the sixth grade and complete primary school. Her parents preferred for her to go to school with her younger sister, because the mother was chronically ill and could barely move. The girl was happy being with the younger kids and generally able to interact well with them, but sharing stories and games with the children did not stop her body from maturing and providing happiness. Her childhood did not stop her body from provoking blind lust nearby.
On that day, in a town hungry for gossip, the girl was left alone about three meters from the door of the house, but she didn’t come back until late afternoon. She hesitated over the word “violated,” and then talk gave way to an examination of the bruises and blisters caused by abuse. She screamed while her angry father hit her with a leather belt; this became the story of the neighborhood.
Her sister, who became a friend of mine later, told me we the story when wewere in high school, after I saw hertrembling in the corner of the room, hunched over as if she had been sitting there for years and I imagined that she had become stuck there.
My friend who told me about the incident had been talking and laughing, but now she could hardly eat.
A young man of twenty-eight lured the girl to him. He lived in the neighborhood and had been watching for a moment when her family’s attention was elsewhere. The trick was simple—he convinced her that her uncle wanted her, and had sent him to take her to buy some chocolate. He took her and then let her go while he arranged his things; she left the rented room. Despite the fact that he told her to she say that she was over at a neighbor's house, the red signs everywhere in her soft flesh marked the brutality of what had happened.The courts, complaints, and demands followed, but the law was not able to protect her, or to deter the rise of immoral desires on the dark edges of society. Without the intervention of some wise men who convinced the father to reconsider the girl’s guilt in this case, the girl would have been today merely an occupant of a tomb no one visits. Now, the girl is close to death in spite of her previous health--the shock devastated until her childhood, which was supposed to extend safely until the end of her life.
In the lane full of people living together, these accidents are familiar—they happen from time to time, every year or two. There is a story of a child with Downs Syndrome who was attacked by a number of young people who had just smoked hashish, but Court did not intervene because the child's family did not complain—instead, they accepted a monetary gift to treat the child.
Once upon a time ..
I know that what I say is painful to our humanity, but it is reality. When hunger rages and instincts are left unchecked, this is the result. Children who should be in specialized centers, children who have not chosen their fates, are converted into fuel for fires of hunger and suppressed impulses.
The problem is that we hear these stories and we promise, and we count. We limit the bad, and recall the victims with compassion. Today, this neighborhood has become warm urbanized, full of flats and apartments, and it denies these stories. But we do not know the number of drunks and murderers and drug users, and whether the drug market in our country is like that of the Egyptian underground or if we haven’t reached this point. We do not know our neighbors anymore, though we greet them the same way, we do not know who is working in illegal trades—it could be anyone.
Children are sent to the sidewalks to pick the pockets of passers-by, and scabies eat their hands and eyes in the twenty-first century. Whether they are similar to the above two cases or not, they are initiated early into sexual activity and prostitution;they negotiate with senseless pedestrians on the sidewalks, outside the protection of compassion, out of control, and time passes on their pain.
Thara E- Magazine No. 235 ,29/5/2010
Reproduction permitted with appropriate citation |
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