I wonder if he adored you, once
if he hid scolding smiles replete
with stern indulgence, warned you
against your mother’s promised wrath,
held out scraps of baklawah in
soiled and honeyed fingers.
“Yacol. A’hot. Yacol.” Eat, sister. He sat before you
and you held his knee to steady yourself,
took in his sweet finger as a nipple. He laughed.
The kettle was hot. You came too close,
the hungry musk of lamb and za’atar
more than your stomach could endure
and then the floor fell away.
His face before you,
exasperated onyx eyes, narrowing.
La! La Zahra! With his “no,” your face screwed up
into a cry. His softened, he pointed at the stove.
Sochen, Zahra. Sochen. You knew the word,
had burned yourself one memorable day.
You glanced at fingers once turned angry red,
but red no longer. All was well;
you said the word with him. “Sochen!”
And pointing at the stove, you laughed.
“Sochen! Sochen!” The heat less frightening
now that you had named it.
I wonder, was he safety for you, Zahra?
Fayyez, a mountain twelve years old,
a thin and ebon file of hair
upon his lip, hands longer than your arms,
could you gaze long on him before
your heart would fill with adoration?
Were you a pest? A nuisance? Did he resent
time spent not playing soccer, trying not
to let his sloe-eyed charge provoke a smile
so wide that his complaints would ring hollow?
Your little hand wrapped around his first
two fingers, his hand that in a dozen years
would wield the knife, his fingers that would, shaking,
pull his phone out of his pocket, punch-dial, call
your uncles, let them know
you had been cleansed for good,
your little hand wrapped around
those first two fingers, Zahra,
and I wonder if his hand then
folded itself around your hand in turn.
The story - yet another reason to want nothing to do with my species.
Your response to the story - yet another reason to not give up. Not yet anyway.
thank you, Chris. Your response was perfect.
These things happen when men consider women as property and less than human.
Oh, the horror.
Excellent caveats, spyder. In fact, Syria’s senior mullah (I am forgetting the precise title) has been coming under some fire from traditionalists for speaking out against so-called “honor” killings. Fortunately, that fire is metaphorical at the moment.
This is a beautiful, important, wrenching humanizing of both Zahra and her brother, Chris.
Zahra deserves this, requires it: we must understand her as a human child, individual and profoundly alive in these details of living and family and loving.
Not a symbol, not an abstraction of a young girl kidnapped, raped, and finally stabbed in the head by her brother for the ‘stain’ on family honor.
A child. A person.
In another conversation, we once talked about how it makes people deeply uncomfortable to admit the humanity of the killer, the rapist, the misogynist.
I believe, though, that we must also recognize the details of humanity in him, or we fail utterly to understand honor killing, rape, misogyny - and we fail utterly to grasp what must be addressed to stop it.
He also is not a symbol, an abstraction of ‘monster.’
He is us, just as she is.
And we make this possible.
The poem is beautiful.
It does exactly what it must.
Thank you for writing it.