Shaimaa Khalil - Runaways

I dont know exactly when my urge to run away became a lifes goal. It couldve been sometime during my childhood when I found out that my parents were not invincible and that, sooner or later, I would have to make my own way in life. Or maybe it was during puberty when my body and the world turned on me.

Around eight or nine, I started running away in my daydreams, building the places I wanted to be and the person Id be in them imagining myself into lightness and liberty, not weighed down by the limitations of gender, culture and society. I began embracing the idea that somewhere in those daydreams I could make my own decisions, and have real agency to determine what to do, what to wear, how to go about my day.

I was jolted by a mix of fear and defeat whenever I heard this from aunties and family elders: A good woman leaves her familys house only to live in her husbands house. God, how shackled I was by this notion that I had no hope of ever having a whole day on my own, of ever making a decision that was totally mine, of ever having a place that was for me.

He (for it is a he, even if his ideas are sometimes embodied and carried out by the women in our lives), wants to control everything: our bodies ideas space. I am never just I.

Mine is an ancillary existence to a family and a husband whose honour has been placed on me and a child (preferably more than one) that I have been required to bear.

Its always something else that sanctions my legitimacy in the world.

If the systematic will to kill a spirit and strip a human being of their value and individuality was ever declared a crime as deplorable and punishable as murder, then many women in my region, and arguably the world over, would be survivors of a genocide.

Imagination was the safest place I had and, with it, the power to disappear in broad daylight.

Ive become really good at disappearing. At making myself small and invisible. You learn to perfect that if youre a woman growing up in the Middle East. Shelley, you put it so well one time: Its like you suddenly turn off your magnetic field.

For years, I retreated within myself. But that came at a cost I thought I was happy to pay. It came with the repression of thoughts, feelings and self. It came with convincing those fundamental elements of your being that they are not to be shared. Until they stop listening. Until they start a riot and demand to be heard. And how lucky am I that Ive had you to share them with.

The heaviness that came with that stifling of self was amplified with the Covid-19 lockdown. We had all these plans to see each other. Shaimaa and Shell, finally in the same country. We pictured weekends in both directions between Sydney and the Sunshine Coast and further trips across Australia. But then it all vanished.

So, we decided to write ourselves back together. What I didnt realise was that I was also writing myself back to myself. Our memories together, our friendship that has endured unforgiving time, geography and major world events. And then something magical happened for me. In the very nightmare of being trapped with looming anxiety attacks, I had something to run away to.

Tonight, I run away

I am weightless

Ive shed my mass

I am bigger, better

Enough

Tonight, I run away

I am alone

But not lonely

I create paths

Rise up to challenges

Occupy space

In hearts

In minds

In the world

I let love fill me

I let my being quiver at a first touch

I thread my own story

I become the heroine

I know I could never be

I stand tall

Bask in lightness and flair

Tonight, I run away

I leave the void behind

I wish for nothing to fill it

I dont dream of my childs face

I dare to tell her we wont meet

Tonight, I run away

I look in the mirror

and wonder where I was hiding

I forgo it all

Fear, mediocrity, propriety

that voice that reminds me of all that Im not

I am not afraid

Tonight, I run away and

I am not afraid

The would get lost. So, classroom 224 might be next door to 136, and 441 might be next to 39. The most stressful part of the day was finding the room I was to teach in. It was in one of these rooms that we met, you and I.

1996. I was twenty-seven years old. Paul and I had married and run from Africa to Europe to England looking for work, for a way out of South Africa where jobs were scarce, inflation was rampant and violence was indiscriminately everywhere. After Paul put out more than 300 job applications while we lived in a friends room in London, the University of Qatar in Doha offered him a position.

Before we left for the Middle East, I dreamt this:

Before the Desert

Before the windswept shifting sands and plains

Before the silence of the womenfolk,

There was a river music over rocks

Which fed a fertile valley, rich and green.

When womens voices lifted into song

Their soft vibrating tones loosed water from

High elevations, sent it rushing down

To nourish those who worked the fruitful land.

But then a dry and thankless violent hand

Brought silence down, and water ceased to flow.

Men shouted, fought, trailed murder in their wake

And womens silence as the desert grew

A hundred thousand acres in a year.

Every morning I awoke, and I thought, I am in Doha, Qatar, on the Arabian Gulf. I looked out into the humid, purple-blue air, over dust and rubble towards the Corniche, and beyond that, towards the shallow turquoise waters of the Gulf where once in 1991, according to a rumour, an errant missile sent by Saddam Hussein and meant for Saudi Arabia, had landed. It had exploded, killing fish and making a hole in the soft seabed.

The desert was as foreign to me as it probably was to you when you moved to Qatar. Even though I identify as Middle Eastern, North African and Arab Ive never considered the desert as part of my heritage even though my own country has vast swathes of it. When I was in school in Miami, Florida (where my mum had a scholarship to study for a couple of years) and the kids would tease me with the walk like an Egyptian dance and ask if I lived in a tent, I just didnt understand. My notion of home was different. I grew up on the coast Alexandria is a small, ancient, vibrant city. A city with centuries worth of stories way before me.

Whats funny and slightly disgraceful on my part was that those kids notion of me back in the US was the one I had of the Gulf when I found out I was moving there. The Gulf was one place to me dominated by three countries that Egyptians went to: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE. Qatar was never really mentioned anywhere.

When I landed in Doha in 1996 it was a jolt. I think the most shocking was that this was supposed to be familiar (Arab) territory, but it felt like Id landed on a different planet. Emptiness it dominated. Arid streets, expensive cars, houses with high walls and glass faade buildings paled by dust. People spoke Arabic in a dialect I didnt understand. Not that I saw many Qataris when I landed.

It was 6 pm, and nothing was open. In those days all the shops were closed around that time. A couple of South Asian men were about, and it was the first time Id ever been looked at like that.