Jordan Diaries: Emy
Since I became old enough to be aware of this life, I knew that I lived in complete isolation. I was the eldest girl, and I only had a brother who was two years older than me. My father used to take him everywhere while my mother and I spent our days, year after year, between the walls of our terrifying house. No phone, no television, no books, no neighbors, no visitors, and we were not allowed to go out.
I hated my father coming home. I would immediately hide as soon as I heard the sound of his car engine. My mother, who had gone through many traumas, used to isolate us and was silent most of the time. She had no companions other than the BBC on the radio that her family had brought her. She took us and ran away from my father for months, staying with her family in West Amman. There I could feel a little safe and alive. She used to take us to cabarets, airports, and restaurants. We would wake up early to watch cartoons on the TV. Despite my young age, I remember these things because they were strange to me. When the time came to return home, anxiety began, and I felt it like a pain in my chest. Later, this feeling haunted me until the age of 30, whenever I approached the door of the house.
It wasn't long before my father married a second wife who lived in an apartment next to ours. On the day my father got married, my teacher cried and hugged me. I was in the first grade, but I still remember this scene well. Her name was Basma. She was white, short. She wore a white veil and brown robes. She predicted my future early.
My father’s violence against my mother increased with his new wife’s instigations. One of the childhood traumas I remember, which robbed me of a sense of safety, was his second wife’s constant intrusion into our house and her assault on my mother. He dragged my mother by the hair into his second wife’s apartment to beat her in front of her, and the blood oozed from her nose and head while I wiped it off the floors and the walls. He also beat her stomach until she deliberately miscarried her fetus; his wife had found out about his sexual relationship with my mother, and she became angry. This is just a small insight into the dark nights of the 30 years we lived in that hell.
Later, my mother developed a mental illness. As a result of 30 years of isolation and violence, she started talking to herself all the time, believing that my father was spying on us with listening devices and interpreting my father's behavior towards her as violence at times and tenderness at other times, and strange behaviors that made her carry her bags from house to house, following divine messages, as she thought.
Imprisonment of women in their homes is related to the patriarchal society’s sexual view of women: that is, sexual objectification, where women are viewed as sexual subjects, not as human beings who need freedom, work, knowledge, entertainment, and social lives. Whoever does these actions without the permission of the males in her family will be killed, and the law tolerates the killers. Some women, motivated by jealousy, take revenge on each other by accusing them of such cases, most of which are false, and I had a share of them.
When I was eleven years old, my father's second wife spread a rumor accusing me of having an emotional relationship with our married neighbor. My grandmother scolded her and tried to prevent her from spreading this rumor. My stepmother did not remain silent and started to incite my father. Then he harassed me in a way that shocked and froze me; he took out a knife and started threatening to kill me if I uttered any word. I went back to my room and hid under my bed. I couldn't even cry, and I couldn't tell anyone because no one would help me. Twenty years later, that is, until this night, she is still my father's wife, and her children raise this story in an attempt to harm me, but the difference is that I have become stronger and can defend myself, so they do not talk about it in front of me.
When I was in university, my female relative was accused of the same thing; the difference is that my relative was old enough for her father to believe this rumor about her. So, her uncle and her father killed her under a hail of bullets and then hit her head with stones to death, despite the brutal way she was killed. Her father was acquitted, and her uncle was imprisoned for only four months.
The suffering of women detained in homes does not stop with harassment, rape, violence, isolation, mental and psychological collapse, threats of death, and men being proud that the law gives murderers excuses, but instead goes beyond that to interfere in their lives in every small and large way and to decide their fates. For example, my father did not want me to get higher education. When my grandfather forced him to send me to college, he deprived me of the specialization that I wanted and forced me into another major, which he did with my sister as well. He prevented my other two sisters from education completely.
Economic violence does not stop at depriving us of money and material needs. Instead, it prevented me from working after I graduated from university. On one occasion, my father allowed me to work for three months in return for taking my salary, equivalent to the minimum wage. When I accumulated debts and could not repay him, he constantly hit me and prevented me from continuing to work.
My father also prevented me from marrying whom I desired, and he attempted to force me with violence to accept uneducated people with a reactionary, patriarchal mentality to ensure the survival of his control over me, which I rejected.
The danger lies in the situation of house detainees, denying their right to even physical treatment, as for that psychological and mental treatment, of course, is not recognized. For many years, I complained of constant pain in my body, especially in the abdominal area. My father used to tell me that I was trying to escape from domestic work since we were forced to do all the housework and cleaning, even for his second wife and their many children.
This matter exhausted me to the point of lying in bed. One day, I learned from one of my relatives about a Russian doctor who volunteered to help house detainees and people experiencing poverty, supported by the United Nations. I actually convinced my father to let me see her, and he agreed because the doctor was close to the house, and my situation had become miserable. The doctor said that I needed an operation on my stomach because I suffered from endometriosis, which causes cysts over the ovaries, and their bursting will cause internal bleeding. My father wanted to perform the operation in a hospital known for its high death rates.
I kept crying and refusing to go until he agreed to perform it in another hospital. One day before my operation, his wife told him that my illness would prevent me from getting married, so he beat me the night I was in the operation. This caused pressure disorders, which prompted the nurse to take them out. I slept alone, and when the time for the operation came, I went alone, and as soon as I woke up, I found them. I started crying, and my whole limbs froze; then I fainted.
The simplest daily activities are restricted. My father investigates our phones every time we hold them, deprives us of food, and doesn't allow us to sit in a room alone or turn off the light or close the door to get some privacy, so he rushes to open all closed doors without permission, even the bathroom door, and even to practice sports activities inside our home rooms. He insults us every time we exercise and sometimes hits us, and at night every day, he opens the door forcefully several times to deliberately scare us while sleeping.
I wake up with a racing heart and stay awake for hours afterward.
Someone might think that what happened to us was caused by ignorance or remote environments. The truth is that my father is an educated man. He is a doctor at one of the Jordanian universities. We do not live in remote areas but in the capital, Amman. We are not poor but well-off.
Home detainees do not find an outlet for salvation and are subjected to violence for daring to complain. We, four girls, remained detained in our house, where he threatened my mother to give up her right to custody and alimony. My mother had to submit to his threats.
It is worth noting that the Jordanian law, which does not protect women, also prevents them from protecting themselves. If a girl escapes from the home of her abused parents and her family reports her, the government imprisons her in real prisons or government care homes, which are also prisons in which the girl is prevented from going out and studying. Working or even carrying the phone and spending the flower of their youth in it is a crime condemned by Amnesty International.