Awful Anthropology
by Maryam Fouad
One of my interlocutors stood in front of me. In her hand, she held an empty syringe. She said she wants to kill herself. We were in a shelter for girls—survivors of abuse, rape, and societal condemnation—but also imprisoned behind three big, locked doors, high walls, and barbed wires, in the city of Cairo. These girls were confined due to their lack of virginity, promiscuity, early marriage, rape, and abuse by their kin or by strangers. The girl who told me she wants to kill herself is not the first one to attempt suicide inside the shelter. She wouldn’t be the last. I asked her calmly to give me the syringe and begged her not to end her life. This was my third week in the shelter. I had no idea what to do or how to feel. How could I ask the girl to give up her only way out of this confinement? How could I not?
The girl jammed her arm with the empty syringe. I ran to the head of the social workers, panicking. She replied coldly, “Do not worry, if she dies, the medical report will declare it as suicide. We are not going to be held responsible.” I froze. She continued, “If her life is so worthless to her, and she accepts going to hell for killing herself, why are we to care?”
By the tenth time I saw girls harming themselves and wishing for death, I just held them close. My eyes did not water, my heart no longer raced. I felt absolutely nothing. I went home every day with blood stains on my clothes and with blood writings imprinted on the shelters’ walls as images forever inscribed onto my heart. But as I lay in bed at night, I often recalled the conversation with the head social worker asking me, Why do I care?
How does one care, really? And more importantly, how does one stop?