But I was wrong.
The hardest part began after the hospital, when people looked at me with pity and whispered the same question everywhere I went:
—How will he live now?
My husband was arrested. The court punished him. People said that justice had been served.
Calculators and reference tools.
But justice didn’t help me get dressed.
He didn’t help me eat.
It didn’t stop me from waking up at night trying to reach for hands that were no longer there.
Many people thought my life was over. They expected me to sit in a corner, depend on others, and become a sad story the town would whisper about.
But he had already lost too much.
I refused to lose myself too.
So I started again.
Slowly.
Painfully.
I learned to use my arms and elbows. I learned to dress myself, cook, clean, wash, and carry objects in ways that people didn’t think were possible.
At first they looked at me with sadness.
Then, to my surprise.
And finally, with respect.
Linguistic resources
I didn’t want to beg. I didn’t want people to feed me because they felt sorry for me.
So he walked up to the mountains.
I gathered thyme, herbs, and wild figs. The bags were heavy. The paths were difficult. My whole body ached, but I carried everything to the market and sold it with dignity.
Philosophy
Some people bought me because they felt sorry for me.
Later on, they bought because they knew I had earned every penny with my own effort.
Years passed.
People came to hear my story. Mothers brought their daughters to me and said:
—Tell him what you survived.
But I never told my story just to make people cry.
She told the story so that women would understand that cruelty doesn’t begin in a field. It begins much earlier, in the anger that people justify, in the silence that women are forced to swallow, and in the first moment a wife begins to fear the man who should be protecting her.
Mehmet Ali had taken my hands away.
Military history.
But I hadn’t lost my dignity.
It hadn’t taken away my strength.
It hadn’t taken away my desire to live.
And that was the part he never managed to understand.
He wanted to see me defenseless.
Instead, I became proof that a woman can be hurt and still refuse to be defeated.
So tell me honestly… when a woman survives something that was meant to destroy her, should people only remember what was taken from her or the strength she built with what she had left?
