Bensalem Himmich - My Torturess

She smiled as she wiped her eyes and then gave me a look filled with a profound sadness. Moving over to sit beside me, she took a pair of white gloves out of her pocket and put them on my hands.

“Rub my back for me,” she said. “That’ll give me some relief while I tell you part of my life story. My stage name is Fayruz, and my companions honored me by giving me that name because they thought I was the best imitator of the famous and much beloved Lebanese singer, Fayruz. My dear fellow believer, my situation is exactly the same as yours, except with regard to the particulars of our personal situations. We’re both victims of injustice and dark times, oppressed and totally crushed until we are broken, at the beck and call of tyrants and subject to their Fascist projects and evil intentions. For reasons I don’t understand they transferred me from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to here. Their only question asks me to provide the names and addresses of nationalist, Shi‘i and Communist resistance fighters to whose organizations I belong. My traitorous husband betrayed some of them, so I shot him in the head and left him dead. For two years now the very worst American torture experts have been wearing me out with their cross-examinations and torture, but my Job-like endurance has defeated them. With cross in hand, I have decided to be a martyr and to meet my Lord whenever He wishes and ordains. Is the river supposed to behave differently, I ask myself, simply because its source bursts forth and the distant sea pulls its course toward it?!”

I now understood that this woman was an Iraqi Christian resistance fighter.

“May God grant you long life, my Lady!” I told her with admiration, “and record you as one of those pious saints and freedom fighters who deserve respect in this world and the delights of paradise in the next. You mentioned that you were transferred here from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Where exactly are we here?”

“I don’t know precisely,” she replied, “but I get the impression that we’re in a desert location either in the African continent or somewhere close to it. But God knows. . I’m feeling tired and I need to sleep. God willing and if I’m still alive, I can tell you more about myself tomorrow and hear your story as well.”

Hardly had she completed this sentence before the cell was invaded by four guards who grabbed her off my bed and dragged her forcibly outside, totally oblivious to my shouts and protests. They simply made do with swearing at me, calling me a fornicator, and threatening to come back for me.

“My name’s Hamuda al-Wajdi,” I yelled as they pulled her out. “Hang on and be strong; God is with you!”

“If God is not with people like us,” she yelled back, giving me the victory sign, “then who is He with? Tell me, who is He with?!”

From the entrance to my cell and all along the corridor I could hear her Fayruz-like voice singing to the accompaniment of other prisoners’ voices and applause:

Radiant fury is on its way.

And all of me is a believer.

Radiant fury is on its way,

And I shall forget about sorrows.

From every direction it comes,

It comes with fearsome steeds.

There followed a sudden silence. Stretching out on my side, I started singing Fayruz’s glorious and defiant song; at the words “radiant fury is on its way” I kept punching my pillow and crying. But my chronic cough forced me to stop. I managed to suppress it by squirting spray into my open mouth, something that was especially necessary since some of my neighbor prisoners were vying with each other in urging me to ask for a transfer to the TB wing. With a good deal of effort I managed to get it under control and stop coughing. All I could think about at this point was what kind of awful things might be happening to Fayruz; I also thought about my own situation and the fact that, by dint of sheer endurance, I had managed to exhaust all the vicious and criminal activities of my torturers. It felt as though, according to their rules, I had now become a hopeless case, someone with no potential benefit or utility. Wrapping myself in my flimsy loincloth, I consigned some of these thoughts to my collection of notes, as follows:

I’m no Job, Hercules, or even ‘Antara, the pre-Islamic poet-cavalier. In any case, if even people with their fortitude and endurance were to find themselves at the mercy of the ghouls and sadists in this rendition center where I’ve now spent any number of years, their sense of terror and oppression would be just as bad as my own. My body is broken and my soul feels shattered. Even so, I’m not defeated yet; in fact, I’m convinced that the only way they’ll defeat me is with a single terminal blow — and that is something the higher authorities are hesitating to do in my particular case, because they’re eager to destroy me and make me grovel and beg for mercy. As it is, staying alive in this virtual death situation doesn’t bother me anymore. My only value and significance, I have decided, lies in putting a spanner in their works and a thorn in the soles of their feet. Dear God, thwart all their efforts to enslave me and crush my honor, and protect my mind from all harm and loss of control, even though I may at times have to pretend to be crazy for some particular purpose I have in mind.

This experience of imprisonment has taught me something I did not know. It has revealed certain proclivities and stimuli within me of which I was not previously aware and indeed never even supposed that I possessed. In those earlier days of my clearly mistaken sense of freedom, you could apply to me the words of a writer whose name now escapes me, but this is approximately what he wrote: ‘Many, many are the rains and winds to which my body has been exposed in a quest for the sweet scent of sanctity and a modicum of happiness. But all their raging fury brought me was a severe cold and a bronchial cough!’

Hardly had I written down that last sentence before the four men who had dragged Fayruz away reentered my cell. I quickly shoved my notes under the bedcover and uncovered my face. The guard told me to stand up and accused me of fornication.

“We’ve just given that slut we dragged from under you a hundred lashes,” another man said, “and we’re going to do the same with you very soon.”

I told them that their accusation had no validity because there were no witnesses, to which the third responded that they were the witnesses, four of them. In legal terms, that was quite sufficient. He now ordered me to collect my possessions and get ready, whereupon I showed them my swollen feet with their wounds, all the while cursing them for their false testimony and calling down God’s vengeance on them. I gave them the choice: they could either carry me on their shoulders or else provide me with a crutch. However, I then recommended an intermediate solution that would work for everyone, if only for a while.

“And what’s that?” they asked.

“That you leave my cell and let me be.”

After a bit of argument they silently withdrew — wonder of wonders! — with heads lowered.

Accusations of fornication, threats of a hundred lashes, followed by the incredible way the guards had responded to my last suggestion, all those things were clearly part of the evil intrigues and games being played by Luqman, the investigating judge — May God never show me either his face or his shadow! He might well decide to send me another woman who would swing between promises and enticement at one point and curses and intimidation at another. But, through the strength and power of Almighty God, he would discover that I remained steadfast to the pledge and rock solid in my chaste behavior.

My thoughts now turned to Fayruz and the way in which the old scars on her back would have been inflamed by a hundred new lashes. I now recalled the wonderful words she had used: “Is the river supposed to behave differently, simply because its source bursts forth and the distant sea pulls its course toward it?” That’s a saying that demands contemplation and interpretation; it’s one that, if I ever manage to be rid of my suffering and escape from this diabolical center, I dearly hope to sit and explore in all its various dimensions and significances. And I am still thinking of cracking the code of the little containers that my fellow townsperson Na‘ima had given me and understanding their underlying message.