by ZARBIBI (trans. by ROGER SEDARAT)
Melancholy 1 by Mohsan Hosaini IMAGE/Kabul Art Project
At times I wonder whether they considered me a human being or a lamb to sacrifice for their own good.
Zarbibi was sixteen years old, and four months pregnant, when she murdered her husband by trying to decapitate him with a kitchen knife. On the day of the murder, she offered to give her husband a massage, binding his hands and feet to the bed before taking his life. “The next morning, even though I was at the police station, I felt happy that he didn’t live in the world anymore,” Zarbibi writes in the account that follows. “Free from him now for the first time, I felt as light as a balloon that could just fly away.”
Though her crime was sensational, Zarbibi’s life was otherwise in keeping with the norms of her Afghan community in Iran, says her lawyer, human rights attorney Hossein Raeesi. In Iran, increasing access to education has made child marriage less common. However, many Afghan migrants, excluded from Iranian citizenship and economic opportunity, continue the practice of marrying off their young daughters for the financial reward it brings—typically, the equivalent of four to five thousand dollars. As Zarbibi describes, her family supported her educational pursuits until both her father and brother—the family’s sole breadwinners—became unable to work. “Because we no longer had men to make money I had to get engaged to a guy I had never met before.” At the age of thirteen she was legally committed to a man of twenty-five, and at fifteen she was formally married, and forced to quit her family home and her studies. “With my first steps into my new house I felt like I had walked into my own grave,” she writes.
…
My little sister Havva was the first one of us girls to become a mother, though she still didn’t look like one. A child herself, only eleven years old, she had been married off to a man fifteen years older than her and from a much different world. Though very young, I knew about the pain my little sister endured, both physically and mentally. When she used to cry to come home, my father would bribe her with popcorn and cookies to stay with her husband. How could he do that? I swear to God I wouldn’t even give away a single strand of my own precious daughter’s hair against her will.
After poor Havva it was my sister Negar’s turn to marry. Negar was the third child in my family, the youngest. Since she married the brother of Havva’s husband, they both became sisters-in-law as well as actual sisters. Why is my family cursed in this way? My mother thought that she could “save” her daughters from loneliness by marrying them off at such a young age. She had no idea how bad this other life could be.
It killed me to see both of my sisters suffering. The thought that I might have to endure the same fate became my worst nightmare, something that terrified me since I was a very small girl. For me, the word “husband” meant “monster.” My heart broke when Negar moved out of our childhood home, and her heart broke too. She had been so attached to our family that she became severely depressed when living with her new husband. Her depression got even worse when she became pregnant with twins. One day we were playing together and all of a sudden she started screaming and shrieking and pulling out her hair. It scared me so much I almost peed myself. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately?) her babies died in labor. At least she was lucky enough to endure the pain of childbirth at the age of fourteen or fifteen, a few years later than Havva.
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