Burned Alive Quotes

“Something in me is broken but people don't realize it because I always smile to hide it.”
― Souad, Burned Alive

“Although I am able to walk about freely, I am a prisoner in my skin.”
― Souad, Burned Alive

“Sometimes laying in my bed, I would think that I should have died because I deserved to.”
― Souad, Burned Alive

“The only way to help me stop suffering was to help me die.”
― Souad, Burned Alive

“I was thirsty, as much as for water as for dying.”
― Souad, Burned Alive

“You're just an object locked up in the house.”
― Souad, Burned Alive

“But for a mother who was submissive to the degree my mother was, it was OK to kill girls. For a father like mine, it was normal to chop off his daughters hair with sheep shears, and to beat her with a belt or a cane or tie her up in the stable all night with the cows.”
― Souad, Burned Alive

“In Jordan, and this is only one example, there is a law on the books, as there is in most countries, that a murder must be punished by years in prison. But next to this law, are two small articles, ninety-seven and ninety-eight, specifying that judges will be lenient with those found guilty of honor crimes. The penalty is generally six months to two years in prison. The condemned, sometimes considered heroes, usually do not serve the whole sentence.”
― Souad, Burned Alive

“Imams and religious Christians explain continually that the honor crime is totally foreign to the Koran and the Bible.”
― Souad, Burned Alive

“oki”
― Souad, Burned Alive

“It has been reported that more than six thousand honor crimes are committed in a year, and behind this figure are all the suicides and “accidents” that cannot be counted. In some countries, women are put in prison when they have the courage to complain, supposedly to save their lives. Some have been there for fifteen years because the only people who can get them out of there are the father or the brother, which is to say the very ones who want to kill them. So if a father asks for his daughter to be released, it is quite evident that the warden is not going to comply! I am aware of one or two women who were released, and they were subsequently killed.”
― Souad, Burned Alive

“My brother was the only son in the middle of girls, he dressed the way men do here, like in a big city, he went to the barber, to school, to the movies, he went out as he pleased, why? Because he had a penis between his legs! He was lucky, he had two boys, but in the end he’s not the luckiest, it’s his daughters. They have had the great fortune of not being born!”
― Souad, Burned Alive

“You’re a free woman here, Souad, you can do what you want to do”
― Souad, Burned Alive

“And having people say thank you to me was a new experience. No one had ever said it to me before, not my father, my brother, or anyone, when I worked like a slave. I was used to being struck, not thanked.”
― Souad, Burned Alive

“Most of the humanitarian organizations do not take up the cases of these women, because they are individual social cases, “cultural” cases! And because in some countries, laws protect the murderer. Their cases do not excite the big campaigns that are waged against famine and war, to aid refugees, or battle epidemics.”
― Souad, Burned Alive

“A woman burned for honor is supposed to burn to death. The only way to help me stop suffering was to help me die.”
― Souad, Burned Alive

“And this man who was crying out in his pain, who was ripping his shirt, I will never forget him. He was so beautiful with his cries of love for his wife. He was a man of much dignity.”
― Souad, Burned Alive

“For me love was a mystery. In our culture, you talk of marriage, not of love. Of obedience and total submission, not of a loving relationship between a man and a woman. Only of the obligatory sexual relations with a virgin girl who had been bought for her husband. Where is love?”
― Souad, Burned Alive

“We accept it as natural. No thought of rebelling ever occurs to us. We don’t even know what it would mean to revolt. We know how to cry, hide, lie if needed to avoid the stick, but to rebel, never. Quite simply because there’s no other place for us to live than in the house of our father or husband. Living alone is inconceivable.”
― Souad, Burned Alive

“And Noura went back. Beaten as she was. She returned to her husband who had “corrected” her by beating her with a stick.
There was no choice. Even if he strangled us, there was no choice.”
― Souad, Burned Alive

“We will have to wait for the moment when the husband will display the white linen from the balcony or attach it to the window at daybreak so the people can verify officially the presence of the bride’s blood. This linen must be visible to everyone, and as many people as possible from the village should come to see it. It is not enough if there are only two or three witnesses. The proof could be contested, you never know”
― Souad, Burned Alive

“When hair begins to appear on a girl it is the first sign, with her breasts, that she is becoming a woman. And she will die with her hair, since we will be taken back just as we have been created. And yet all the girls are proud of the idea of having their pubic hair removed. It is the proof that they will belong to a man other than their father.”
― Souad, Burned Alive

“It is terribly shameful for a girl and her family if she has no jewelry on her wedding day. My father forgot to mention this when he told his daughters that they weren’t worth what you get for a sheep. When he sells his daughter, he is owed half the gold! And he can bargain.”
― Souad, Burned Alive

“A donkey is moved along the road by being rapped with a stick. It was the same for us, except that my father would strike us much harder than he would have struck a donkey. I have also been struck the next day, just on principle, so I shouldn’t forget the licking of the previous day. All that so I would continue to move along without falling asleep, like the donkey on the road.”
― Souad, Burned Alive

“Then I see my sister sitting on the ground, flailing her arms and legs, and my brother, Assad, leaning over her, his arms on either side of her. He is strangling her with the telephone cord.”
― Souad, Burned Alive

“In my village, if the men had to choose between a girl and a cow, they would choose the cow. My father repeated endlessly how we girls were not good for anything: A cow gives milk and produces calves. What do you do with milk and calves? You sell them and bring the money home, which means a cow does something for the family. But a girl? What does the family get from her? Nothing. What do sheep bring to us? Wool. You sell the wool and you get money. The lamb grows up, it makes other lambs, still more milk, you make cheese, you sell it and you bring home money. A cow and a sheep are more valuable than a girl. And we girls knew this very well because the cow, the sheep, and the goat were treated much better than we were and they were never beaten!”
― Souad, Burned Alive

“She is giving birth, and my aunt Salima is with her sitting on a cushion. There are cries from my mother and then from the baby, and very quickly my mother takes the sheepskin and she smothers the baby. She is on her knees. I see the baby move under the blanket and then it’s over. I don’t remember what happened after that, I just know that the baby isn’t there anymore.

So it was a girl that my mother suffocated at her birth. I saw her do it this first time, then a second time. I’m not sure I was present for the third one, but I knew about it. And I hear my sister Noura say to my mother: “If I have girls, I’ll do what you have done.” This is how my mother got rid of the seven girls that she had after Hanan, the last survivor. This was accepted as normal. I accepted it, too, but I was also terrified.”
― Souad, Burned Alive

“He always wanted to have sons, but it didn’t work out with Aicha, either. She gave him only two more girls, still more girls! So he dropped her and brought the two new little sisters home. That was considered the normal thing to do. Everything the men wanted to do was considered normal in this village,”
― Souad, Burned Alive

“I often thought when I looked at my brother, who was adored by the whole family including me: What more does he have? What makes him so special? He came out of the same belly as I did. And I had no answer. That was just the way it was. We girls had to serve him as we did my father, groveling and with head lowered.”
― Souad, Burned Alive

“It was not unusual to be beaten, to have your hair shaved off and be tied to a stable gate. There was no other way of living.”
― Souad, Burned Alive