A Woman Is No Man

by Etaf Rum

Where I come from, voicelessness is the condition of my gender, as normal as the bosoms on a woman’s chest, as necessary as the next generation growing inside her belly.

Surely she would have more control over her life in the future. Soon she would be in America, the land of the free, where perhaps she could have the love she had always dreamed of, could lead a better life than her mother’s.

more bearable to pretend her life was fiction than to accept her reality for what it was: limited. In fiction, the possibilities of her life were endless. In fiction, she was in control.

But we could live here for the rest of our lives and never be Americans. You think you’re doing the right thing by wearing this hijab, but that’s not what Americans will see when they look at you. They won’t see your modesty or your goodness. All they’ll see is an outcast, someone who doesn’t belong.”

A man is the only way up in this world, even though he’ll climb a woman’s back to get there. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

“Learn this now, dear. If you live your life waiting for a man’s love, you’ll be disappointed.”

“Some days it feels like time is slipping through my fingers like water, as though one day I’ll wake up to find it all gone.”

Why did she have to be so afraid, so sensitive, so affected by the world? She wished she could be stronger, wished she could be one of those people who could listen to a sad song without bursting into tears, who could read something horrible in the news without feeling sick, who didn’t feel so deeply. But that wasn’t her.

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?

pretending nothing’s wrong is not protecting yourself. If anything, it’s much more dangerous to live pretending to be someone you’re not.”

“A real choice doesn’t have conditions. A real choice is free.”

“Too often being happy means being passive or playing it safe. There’s no skill required in happiness, no strength of character, nothing extraordinary. Its discontent that drives creation

For so many years she had believed that if a woman was good enough, obedient enough, she might be worthy of a man’s love. But now, reading her books, she was beginning to find a different kind of love. A love that came from inside her, one she felt when she was all alone, reading by the window. And through this love, she was beginning to believe, for the first time in her life, that maybe she was worthy after all.

She knew she had to teach them how to love themselves, that this was the only way they had a chance at happiness. Only she didn’t see how she could when the world pressed shame into women like pillows into their faces.

But maybe that’s the way of life, Fareeda thought. To understand things only after they had passed, only once it was too late.

“The cruelest thing on this earth is a man’s heart.”

To want what you can’t have in this life is the greatest pain of all.”

You have to know what love is to feel alone.”