Note – names and place have been changed for security purposes -
Although Yemeni women have on paper more rights than their Arabian sisters and a much greater social status, as they are often on equal footing with men. Saudi women for example are still prohibited from driving or even leaving their house alone to go about their business, while Yemeni women can work, study and even divorce without anyone even raising a disapproving eyebrow; for the most part anyway and in urban setting.
Rural Yemeni women live in a very different realm. Only a few kilometers away from Sana’a, the capital, women are literally trapped in a time bubble, where tradition reins queen over the land and their lives.
In tribal Yemen, or should we say ancestral Yemen, women are little more than commodities for men, obedient baby-making machine, condemned to wear the weight of traditions upon their shoulders and quiet their own will for that of men always would come first.
From the cradle to the grave tribal women have little sway over their own lives, moving from one house to the next, and from one master [father] to another [husband]. Such women remained shadows, denied the right to live to only exist in a world shape by men for men.
It is in such a world that Nadia al-Wasir was born….and it is in such a world that she would die…. Here is a story, as told by her mother.
Nadia was born March 21st 1996 in a small village north of Sana’a, the eighth child of a poor farmer, Mohammed. Her mother Aneessa was only 24 when she had her, but already her face had been marked by a life of poverty and struggle. Married at 14, Aneessa had already had more than her fair share of hardship, as many women in her village.
“She was a tiny, sickly child,” Aneessa recalled. She thought her daughter would never see her first birthday. “She was so small …and I had so very little milk to give her…. She weighted no more than a whisper in my arms and always her huge eyes were staring in silence at the world. We never had enough to eat in my house….after a while you get used to hunger, but babies…..it is always so heart-wrenching to hear them whimper. Life is hard in the highlands, so very hard. But what can we do? We have no education and certainly no money; besides, nobody really cares what happens to us.
Nadia was my only daughter and I wanted her to have a better life, I had hopes for her. I thought she could do better, maybe marry a good man and move to Sana’a where she could settle and have a family of her own. I wanted her to get an education. I did not want my daughter to be like me!” Said Aneessa anger and regret on her face.
“When she was 6 I tried to have her enrolled at the local school but my husband failed to see the point…. He told me we could not afford to spend any money on school things and that since she was a girl she needed not learn anything…… I didn’t give up though, after much nagging and begging Nadia was allowed at age 8 to go to school with her brothers. She loved school so much and she was so eager to learn new things.
When she was 12 her dad decided she had to stay home with me and help around the house …. He said it wasn’t proper for a young girl to be seen coming and going out of the house like that. He warned the neighbors would talk.
Nadia was heartbroken, but she knew better than to oppose her father. Not that he’s a violent man or anything; it’s just that there’s just no point arguing when men have their mind made up about something.
For another two years, life went by quietly, until a distant cousin came to ask for Nadia. She was just about to turn 14, not even a woman yet, when he came for her. At the time my husband was struggling with debt, so when his cousin offered to pay for everything and promise to send us 20,000 YER per month after the marriage, he just agreed,; not even bothering to ask Nadia if she minded. Not that my dad asked me, but I was older and I had known my husband all my life anyway, so it wasn’t too much of a shock. I was different too… Nadia was more fragile than I was, still a child.
I fought for my little girl…. I did everything I could. I cried and pleaded for days…..but my husband would have none of it. He said bluntly he already accepted the money and that was that.
My baby, my only daughter had been sold and there was nothing I could do or say. I wished now I had been braver….If I could do it all over again I would take my daughter and go…., maybe then she would be alive. Maybe then I would feel I didn’t abandon my baby and put her in harm’s way… I feel so very ashamed now….. this is why I’m telling my story, because I don’t want other mothers to do what I did ... give up. I want all mothers to stop men from disposing of women as if they were their properties. It is not Islam … Islam gives us rights, why do men take them away?
What give them the right to take them away? Our tribal leaders have a duty of protection, yet they do nothing. The blood of my Nadia is on their hands now. “
Nadia died from an hemorrhage on her wedding night. She passed away before she could even be seen by a physician.
No fuss was made over her death; she departed as quietly as she had arrived, un-noticed by a society which had cared little for her welfare.
She was buried two days after her marriage and her husband remarried within a fortnight.
Aneesa alone was left to feel the devastating loss of her precious daughter.
Heartbroken and vengeful, she decided to break the walls of silence which often … too often surround tribal women, saying that if her tale could help change one girl’s life than Nadia’s death would have been for something.
“When will men realize that selling their daughters is against the most basic principle of Islam? Poverty cannot excuse everything.
Widespread hunger and poverty have led hundreds of families across Yemen to marry off their daughters to much older men. As a result, dozens of girls have either died like Nadia from hemorrhaging or suicide to escape unhappiness.
All are asking the same thing “Who will stand for the women of Yemen?”