Far From Free. (A Story of a Young Middle Eastern Girl)

I am a young woman of Middle Eastern descent, and I live behind the facade of my hijab or scarf that covers my head, neck and throat. Daily, I walk for miles in the soaring temperatures of Iran, carrying water, angered that my brother Abdul never has to do menial tasks like this. I am disgusted by the cultural bondage that women of my ethnicity are born into, and the harsh inequality of power between men and women. I often daydream about the freedom I long to enjoy, which my sister Ameena embraces throurgh her new found home in the United States of America. I shuffle along aimlessly, disoriented by the cultural differences that separate the men and women of my country in Iran, from the citizens of Ameena's land of the free.

As a child I realized that I was not worth much to my parents. I was not allowed the opportunity to attend school. Oh yes, I can write my name, and I can count to twenty, but that is the extent of my education. My brother Abdul goes to school everyday and my parents promise to send him away, one day soon, to become a lawyer. My sister Ameena has written many letters, which Abdul has read to me, about her exciting years in middle school, the challenges of high school and her liberated life at college. She has said that she wants to graduate with something called a degree, get a job, and then, when much older, think about marriage. The girls in my family are prepared for marriage from childhood, and so an education is really not an option for me. In my country, every little girl's dream is to be a wife and mother. Boys like Abdul, can prepare for fatherhood by learning a trade, or getting an education to be able to take care of their families.

Last week I received family photographs from my Uncle Khalil, with whom Ameena lives in Connecticut. His wife wore no veil and stood at his side as an equal. I remember the complete look of horror on my dad's face when he learned that she worked outside the home as an educator. She is a university graduate and lecturer at a community college. Women in my village, as my mother, have the inescapable prospect of becoming housewives. They care for the livestock and tend to the vegetable gardens. Our culture mandates that women be in silent subservience. Sadly, the female gender in our country seems cursed with second-class citizenship. My mother still eats with us girls after serving father his meal. She wears her veil on the street and in the presence of any male family member or friend. Any physical contact with a male, not a husband is an offence and punishable.

Ameena called me with utter delight and sheer excitement to tell me of her new boyfriend. She shares unabashedly about her first kiss and the tender moments spents together. Steve Stedman is his name. He is an American employed by the Stock Exchange and shockingly not Muslim. He treats her as a queen, buys her roses, takes her out to dinner and is very attentive to her needs. His support of her career is bizarre to me. He adores my sister. How totally opposite this Steve to the men I know in my country! Women are treated as property, as old wives are replaced, as it is, by younger, newer models. I reflect with dismay on my older brother's treatment of his first wife, Vidya. She waits on him "hand and foot" and even in her advanced stages of pregnancy, hauls jars of water from a nearby well for the family's use. He never speaks to her with affection or offers to do anything around the house. Housekeeping and child rearing are the responsibility of his four wives.

Last Sunday, my mother called me into her little room, at the back of the kitchen where she sleeps on a feather covered cot on the bare earthen floor. My father was concerned and upset that he had not received any marriage proposals for me, at my age of 14 and one half. I was an expense and burden to him. He needed money to send my brother Abdul to school in America. My father will pay my suitor a fee to take me off his hands. This is the plight of all of my teenage girlfriends. My husband would perhaps be thirty years my senior, and I would have my first child within the first year of marriage, hopefully a son, or perhaps two. Yet my sister Ameena is constantly speaking of her value in terms of academic achievement, her ability to set goals, fulfill dreams and make a contribution to the community. She is a woman with a voice. I am a woman silenced. She no longer hides behind a cotton veil, while I am coerced to cover my beauty and my identity.

The freedom that Ameena takes for granted is a taste I long to savor. The life that she enjoys in North America is as opposite to mine, as day and night. Women and men of Iran have different value systems and live dissimilar roles from the men and women of America. What is accepted as a cultural norm at home here in my village is foreign to someone from the West. I have never questioned the woman's role as mother, laborer and nurturer before, but I have been able to gain a new perspective through Ameena's experiences. I wonder now if I would see with more clarity as an unveiled woman. I dream of life as an educated and career oriented person, as opposed to a subservient existence as homemaker and slave to my husband's pleasures. I sadly return to reality; an earthenware jug, skillfully balanced on my head, carrying water in the soaring temperatures. I ponder on my life and the freedoms I long to enjoy.