Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [49]
So without Sultan, and without her oldest brother, Fahmi, who had found work in the United States, Zuhra’s fate was left to her uncles. When she reached seventeen, she told them she wanted to go to medical school. Impossible, they told her flatly. They convinced her second-oldest brother, Aziz, to forbid Zuhra to attend. Zuhra’s theory is that her uncles were jealous of how clever she was and how well she performed in school, because their sons did not do as well. Even Zuhra’s mother, Sadira, who had supported her daughter’s education, acquiesced.
Not only did the uncles refuse to allow Zuhra to go to medical school, they would not let her attend any kind of university. “They claimed that an educated woman would not find a husband and would become rebellious. This is the fear of most Yemeni men,” she says. “They say college will corrupt girls and they will not get married.”
So she studied on the sly, hiding her schoolbooks in magazines so her family would not see that she was reading medical books. On the day of the exam, she veiled herself and sneaked out. Her heart pounding with the fear of discovery, she finished the exam. “I remember that while taking the exam, looking at my watch, I felt like Cinderella, afraid of being revealed.” A few days later, she found that she was one of twenty-nine people admitted to medical school.
Her family was furious. Immediately, her brothers and paternal uncles forbade her to go. Zuhra was so desperate that she contemplated sneaking out to attend classes. But she knew that she would eventually be caught, and her motives for her clandestine outings could easily have been misconstrued.
Thus began her darkest days. She was so angry with her family she decided to stop speaking. “I was locked up at home for an entire year. I waged a silent battle against them and refused to talk to them. I became ill and was close to death, making many more people support me. These people knew that if my father were alive, he would support me.
“During this period of my life, I have realized lots of things and built lots of things. And lost lots of things. One of the things I built is that I know how to be strong. And that sometimes in your life you will be alone and nobody next to you,” she said. “And then I felt how horrible my father’s death was, because if he were alive this wouldn’t happen. So I learned how to be strong and not emotionally dependent on anybody in this world.”
One of the things Zuhra lost during this time was belief and confidence in herself. To this day, insecurity plagues her.
“I feel I am a second-class human, that I am not important. Because no one cared about my priorities, which really hurts,” she told me. “I know it’s not my fault that I can’t study, but I start to blame myself.”
Soon, Zuhra had stopped doing any of her normal activities. She wasn’t allowed to go to work. She began to believe that she was a horrible person.
“It was almost a prison. When you are an active person and smart and have many things in life waiting for you, but then you are stopped like a machine …
“I still remember one day, I was taking some garbage outside the home. I saw my friends that day, they were going to their college, and then I felt it is the worst feeling ever when you really feel pathetic to yourself. I felt how horrible it was—I knew I was smarter than all of them, and there I was throwing garbage.”
She became embarrassed to appear in society, worried that she would be thought pathetic and helpless. Because of this, she even lied sometimes and said that she didn’t want to go to college, just so no one would think she was controlled by other people.
At her nadir, discouraged and friendless, she became religious, but in a different way than she had been before.
“I established a new relationship