Burned alive Read Online Free PDF

really crying. She was just pretending to cry! She certainly knew why my brother had strangled my sister. If not, why go out that very day with my father and my older sister Noura? Why leave us alone in the house with Assad? What I don’t know is the reason for Hanan’s condemnation. She must have committed a sin but I have no idea what it was. Did she go out alone? Or was she seen speaking to a man? Was she denounced by a neighbor? It doesn’t take much at all before a girl is seen by everyone as a charmuta, who has brought shame to the family and who must now die to wash clean the honor not only of her parents and her brother, but of the entire village!
    My sister was more mature than I, even if she was younger in age. She must have committed an imprudence that I wasn’t aware of. Girls don’t exchange confidences. They’re too afraid of speaking, even among sisters. I know something about this, because I also kept silent.
    I loved my brother very much. All the sisters loved him because he was the only man of the family, the only protector after my father. If the father dies, he will run the house, and if he should die, and only women are left, the family is lost. No more sheep, no more land, no more anything. Losing an only son and brother is the worst thing that can happen to a family. How can you live without a man? It is the man who makes the law and protects us; it is the son who takes the place of the father and marries off his sisters.
    As I have said, Assad was violent like my father. He was a murderer, but that word doesn’t have any meaning in my village when it comes to having a woman killed. It is the duty of the brother, the brother-in-law, or the uncle to preserve the family’s honor. They have the right of life and death over their women. If the father or the mother says to the son: “Your sister has sinned, you must kill her,” he does it for the sake of honor and because it is the law.
    Let me tell you a bit about him. Assad was our adored brother. He loved to ride horses. One day, the horse slipped and Assad fell. I remember that so well. We cried and cried. I ripped my dress with grief and I tore my hair. Fortunately, it wasn’t serious and we took care of him. And still today I can’t fully accept that Assad is a murderer. The image of my strangled sister is a recurring nightmare now, but at the time I don’t think I could really hold it against him. What he did was the accepted custom. He must have agreed that he had to do it out of duty, because it was necessary for the whole family. And I loved him anyway.
    I don’t know what they did with Hanan’s body but she disappeared from the house. I forgot about her but I don’t understand very well why that was. Besides fear, there is of course the logic of my life at that time, the customs, the law, everything that makes us live these things as though they are normal. They only become crimes and horrors when you are elsewhere, in the West or in other countries where the laws are different. I myself was also supposed to die. And to have survived the customary punishment of my land by a miracle was very disturbing to me for a long time. Now I can see that the shock of what happened to me made me “forget” about other events in my life. At least, that’s what a psychiatrist told me.
    So this is how Hanan disappeared from my life and from my memories for a long time. Maybe she was buried with the other babies. Maybe they burned her, buried her under a pile of debris or in a field. Perhaps they gave her to the dogs? I don’t know. When I talk about my life there, I can see in people’s expressions the difficulty they have understanding. They ask me questions that seem logical to them: “Did the police come?” “Wasn’t anyone concerned about a person’s disappearance?” “What did the people in the village say?”
    Rarely did I see the police. It’s nothing if a woman disappears. And the villagers agree with the men’s law. If you