Page 103 - A Woman Is No Man

through?”
He looked away, red-faced.
“Now you have nothing to say, do you?”

“Bikafi.” Khaled fixed her with a glare. “Enough.”
Fareeda shook her head. How could he be so insensitive after all these
years, after everything he had put her through? After everything she had
done for him? Because of him. She took a breath and pushed the thoughts
away. Fareeda understood her place in the world. The wounds of her
childhood—poverty, hunger, abuse—had taught her that the traumas of the
world were inseparably connected. She was not surprised when her father

came home and beat them mercilessly, the tragedy of the Nakba bulging in
his veins. Nor was she surprised when he married her off to a man who beat
her, too. How could he not, when they were so poor that their lives were
filled with continuous shame? She knew that the suffering of women started
in the suffering of men, that the bondages of one became the bondages of
the other. Would the men in her life have battered her had they not been

battered themselves? Fareeda doubted it, and it was this awareness of the
hurt behind the hurt that had enabled her to see past Khaled’s violence over
the years and not let it destroy her. There was no point in moping around.
She had decided early on in her marriage to focus only on the things she
could control.
She ripped her eyes away from Khaled and returned her gaze to the
rearview mirror. “Don’t listen to him,” she told Isra. “Inshallah, you’ll have

a son this time.”
But Isra still seemed worried.
Fareeda sighed. “And if it is a girl, and it won’t be, but if, God forbid, it
is, then it won’t be the end of the world.”
Isra met her eyes in the glass. “It won’t?”
“No,” Fareeda said. “You’ll get pregnant again, that’s all.” Isra was

lucky. As if anyone had ever been so kind to her.

“Let’s go.” Fareeda stood in the kitchen doorway and peered down at Isra,
who was on her knees, in a faded pink nightgown, reaching for a cobweb
beneath the fridge. They had just finished mopping the floors, kneading the
dough, and putting a pot of okra stew on the stove to simmer.
“Where are we going?” Isra asked.