1 - 7 March 2001
Issue No.523
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 1 - 7 March 2001 Issue No.523 |
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'A moment of anger'
For every evil under the sun
Wafaa
There is a remedy or there is none
If there is one, try to find it;
If there is none, never mind it
That proverb may sum it all up for Wafaa, a 33-year-old woman from the poor village of Segin Al-Kom in the governorate of Gharbiya. Initially, she took up Khul' (the right to obtain a divorce by renouncing all her financial rights) as the only "remedy" to the "evil" her husband inflicted on her: beatings, humiliation, taking a second wife, and refusing to divorce her. Wafaa, however, never obtained Khul'; attempts at reconciliation seemed to have worked out, but only for a little while: her husband divorced her four months later to redeem his "shattered pride."
An illiterate villager with no financial means and three children to feed (two sons and a daughter), Wafaa could barely make a living on her own after the divorce. Living with her divorced mother, a destitute cobbler with seven children of her own, was not easy. Four extra mouths could not be fed; Wafaa's mother, though sympathetic, had always advised her daughter to go back to her husband. "It's your destiny," she would tell Wafaa.
"My children used to fight a lot with their uncles, some of whom are the same age as my eldest son," Wafaa relates guardedly, not mentioning the financial side of the story. "Raising children is not easy. They need a father."
Which brings us back to the same old proverb. Wafaa saw Khul' as a way out of her 14-year marriage. The catch: poverty and raising children proved even more insurmountable. With no other remedy, Wafaa decided to just "never mind it." After all, she reasons, "there is no paradise on earth."
A few days ago, Wafaa decided to go back to live in her ex-husband's three-storey house in Damietta, but not as his wife. She will stay in a separate apartment, next door to the one he shares with his other wife. This way, she hopes, he will share the responsibility of the children, morally and financially. Wafaa, however, is willing to go back to her husband "if he ever forgives me."
When the amendments to the Personal Status Law were being discussed, Khul' was the word on everyone's lips. It was opposed on social, religious and legislative grounds. Many feared that Khul' would break up otherwise happy homes and turn children into vagabonds roaming the streets: women, others said, would abuse their right to Khul' in moments of anger, only to regret it later. Supporters of women's rights thought it was unfair to demand that a wife relinquish her financial rights to obtain Khul', while many viewed it as a device allowing rich women to escape unhappy marriages.
On the other side of the spectrum, women's rights activists and legal experts saw Khul' as a victory for women who are otherwise unable to obtain a divorce yet who cannot remain married. Experience, at any rate, is the best judge of all controversies.
Talking to Wafaa makes it possible to understand Khul' in an economic context. "I regret having requested it," is her final verdict. She attempts to veil her sense of defeat behind conventional words of wisdom. "It was a moment of anger," she proceeds, "a selfish decision" that caused her children a great deal of suffering. "It was a brief moment of relief for me, but I could not foresee the negative consequences it would have later."
In addition to the psychological strain divorces place on children in general, Wafaa and El-Sayed's eldest son Mustafa could not put up with his classmates' taunting; he left school and eventually ran away from home.
"In a conservative rural society like ours, Khul' is alien -- a scandal, a disgrace," Wafaa explains. That "disgrace" led her husband to lock himself up to fend off the shame. In a patriarchal society, it is difficult for a man to accept that his wife can divorce him without obtaining his consent. "What I did to my husband was no small thing," Wafaa says now, in light of the media attention she received as the first woman to request Khul'.
Nor however, was what El-Sayed did to her. According to Wafaa's initial statements to the press, at the time she filed for Khul', El-Sayed used to beat her in front of the children for any reason at all: when his trousers were not ironed properly, if the towel was a little damp, if she answered back... She told the Weekly last year that El-Sayed's violence was once life-threatening: "Once he got a knife from the kitchen and my son screamed 'not with the knife, don't hit her with the knife!' So he took off his belt and tried to strangle me."
Her lawyer, Atef Abdel-Wahab, who volunteered to handle her case for free, concurs. "I didn't accept Wafaa's case until I made sure she was being abused by her husband," he explains. But the physical abuse was not grounds to file for divorce, because no witnesses would come forward.
Nor was it possible to base the case on El-Sayed's second marriage, which, as she had told the Weekly, "made me feel like nothing": he forced her to sign a paper approving his second marriage, "and adamantly refused to divorce her until Khul' was approved by the People's Assembly," Abdel-Wahab recounts.
Today, though, Wafaa would shrug off the beatings as "part of every household's life" and her husband's remarriage as "destiny." That stands in sharp contrast to her former "I just want my freedom. You don't understand what it is like to hate life with your husband so much that you would give up the galabiya you are wearing to be free."
What has caused Wafaa to change her views so radically? "Because children are a priority and they need their father around," she answers. "Khul' is definitely not the solution for mothers." She continues: "Bear with your husband's shortcomings because nobody is perfect. My son Mustafa is lost; I'm not ready to sacrifice the other two."
Although she is still young, Wafaa would not consider remarriage, which she describes as "bringing my children to another man." And then, she muses, who can guarantee he will be any better than her ex-husband? She would rather play it safe with the one she knows. "A million men would not replace the father of my children," she flatters El-Sayed. "But will he ever forgive me?"
He cannot, for now. "I was hurt, and the press treated me like a criminal," El-Sayed complains. "I beat my wife when she made a mistake; but no husband would ever hurt the mother of his children. I refused to divorce her for the children's sake and remarried, with her consent, the woman who took care of our kids when Wafaa was in hospital with a lung abscess."
For El-Sayed, Khul' is too dangerous a weapon to be put in a woman's hands. "Women are emotional; when they're angry they cannot think and make wrong decisions which they regret later," he explains. "The tragic death of our 13-year-old son left Wafaa in a bad psychological state a few months before she requested Khul'. Otherwise, why would she have sought divorce after 14 years of marriage?"
Wafaa nods in agreement: "I regret it. I regret it. I regret it."
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