Stories

"Two Incidents in Someone’s Childhood as a Marginalized Person

This is not meant to accuse anyone personally, but to describe a lived experience of marginalization and how it affects a child’s understanding of dignity and humanity.

Two racist incidents tore through my childhood. They had a decisive impact on shaping my personality. Two incidents that remain stuck in my memory with all their precise, exhausting, and painful details, even though years have passed since they happened.

I was only five years old at the time when I began to experience and swallow the bitterness of racist humiliation in all its moral disgrace — in a direct, real, and immediate way. I accompanied my mother, as a child, to a wedding party in the city of Al-Turbah. The wedding was held in the house of an elderly tribesman named ***, who was highly respected and appreciated by everyone — both Black and White alike — because of his kind heart, gentle nature, and humility toward everyone around him.

My mother was one of three or four marginalized female singers immersed in enlivening the women’s section of the party with traditional folk singing called “Al-Sharh,” usually accompanied by the rhythm of the “Marfa’” and the “Daf” drum.

In the midst of the chaos and commotion in the women’s area, I had to stand at the edge of the room — specifically at the main door of the dancing and singing room — which opened onto the courtyard of the house. This courtyard also contained the passage leading to the upper floor, where the male tribal guests were gathered in their usual “Maqeel” (afternoon sitting) session for such occasions.

At one moment, while I was standing near the door of the women’s quarters, I noticed one of the tribal male guests descending the stairs and leaving. Instinctively, I closed the door to protect the modesty and honor of the tribal women (the “Sayyidat” of the tribes), so that his gaze would not fall upon them while they were in revealing clothes and wearing heavy makeup, as was customary in such events. But the door latch closed unintentionally on the hand of a tribal child who was with his mother. Despite the fact that the child was not physically harmed at all, he started screaming and wailing. His mother rushed over like a madwoman and began brutally beating me without even bothering to ask what had happened. She kept hitting me with both hands on my back and face with unusual cruelty, while screaming in a supremacist and hysterical voice, repeating: “The servant hit his master! The servant hit الخادم ضرب سيده his master!”

This happened right in front of my mother and my marginalized female relatives, who did not try to protect me from her and did not utter a single word — until that woman stopped beating me on her own, after she had satisfied her thirst for revenge. All of this, even though my act of closing the door was driven purely by my concern that the passing tribesman would not see her nakedness or that of the other female guests of her kind (the tribal women).

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The second incident occurred just a few days later, at the hands of an elderly woman named ***, in the same village — specifically in Hasbara. She had asked me to bring her water from her private pond (the water basin) located in the courtyard of the house up to the bathrooms on the upper floor. Since I was a five-year-old child, carrying a five-liter jerrycan of water was a heavy physical burden on me, which slowed me down and prevented me from completing the task as quickly as she wanted.

While I was carrying the water, I was suddenly confronted by the brother of the house owner, ***. He sent for my father in a fit of rage based on accusations made by his sister *** — that I had insulted her and belittled her while speaking to her. None of that had happened at all. I swear to that with the tears of children of the tin houses and the cries of dark-skinned bereaved mothers.

So my father stripped me naked in front of them in the middle of the courtyard, in full view of the entire village, and rained down blows on me with a thick stick (a “Samil,” if you will) in a savage manner until they — the woman and her brother — were satisfied, after my body had swollen from the beating. My cries, my tears, my denials, and my pleas meant nothing and had no value whatsoever. The tribesman is always right.

Just as my father had no choice, of course. His excessive beating of me with that cruelty and savagery — which left me unable to move for several days — was, from his personal point of view, the logical and correct action, whether I was guilty or innocent. It was done to preserve his slave-like relationship with his tribal masters, whom he considered one of the permanent and scarce sources of livelihood for himself and his children. At that time, I had not even enrolled in the first grade of primary school yet.

Today, many years after those two incidents, the same hateful and inherited racist social system remains the cornerstone upon which the minds of all Yemenis, of every category, are built — a system stumbling outside the realm of civilization and human progress in a way that leaves no hope of healing."