Abier Hamidi

Confession

That morning, I woke up before dawn, the air in the cell was thick, heavy with the quiet hum of women still lost in dreams or for some, nightmares. I sat up slowly, letting my palms press against the thin mattress. My chest ached with that familiar pressure, the kind that comes before the tears start flowing. I had made my decision.

I was going to confess.

The thought doesn’t frighten me. Alhamdulillah. A strange kind of peace settles in, not the warmth of happiness, but the calm that comes when you stop resisting what is written for you. Maktub, what is written, is written. I had fought against memory and against shame for so long and now all that remained was to surrender.

When the guards came for morning count, I asked for the warden.

The taller one frowned. “Leh? Why?”

“I have something important to tell her.”

She studied my face, hesitant, then nodded, maybe deciding it was easier to take me than argue. My legs trembled slightly as I rose from the bed, adjusting my scarf, and followed her down the corridor. The keys at her waist clinked with each step.

The walk felt endless. Every door, every barred window, reminded me of the women I had prayed besides, laughed with, fought with and sometimes envied. Allah yisamhom, I thought softly, may Allah forgive them, forgive us all. Who among us hasn’t sinned, even in thought?

The warden’s office was half-lit, blinds drawn against the harsh sun. Dust drifted lazily through the slivers of light. She looked up from her papers, kohl smudged at the corners of her eyes, pen pausing mid-air.

“What is it, Samar?” She said looking back down at her files.

“I need to make a statement. About my husband.”

She leaned back, searching my face, silent for a long moment. Then she exhaled. “I call the investigator. You tell him.”

The interrogation room felt smaller than I remembered. The same faint smell of disinfectant and cigarettes, the same grey walls, the same flickering light. I felt strange, detached as if my body had stepped aside, leaving only a truth to speak, though perhaps a different truth.

He entered with a file tucked under his arm. The same investigator as before, though his hair had thinned and his eyes were shadowed by lack of sleep. I wondered if he had daughters, if he went home and thought of women like me, women who loved too hard, endured too much, who silently broke and were punished for it.

“Mrs. Moosa,” he said cautiously. “You asked for me?”

“I am ready to tell you what really happened,” I said.

And I did.

But it wasn’t really the story of what I did. Every word felt both true and false. I was confessing years of endurance, of silence, of learning to become the woman everyone said would be enough. The obedient daughter, the good sister, the loving wife, the forgiving woman, the upright Muslim, the one who would never complain, never show cracks, never breaks.

Every time I said “I,” I meant We. Every girl whose voice was stifled, whose body became a hidden archive of pain no one could see, every woman told to swallow her shame, to carry the family’s honour, to endure so the world would see her as respectable. In the Arab world a woman holds in her body, behaviour and reputation the honour of the collective community.

I think about how we learn to hide our pain, how we fall into silence, and how we squeeze ourselves into spaces society deems appropriate. There are moments I can still feel the weight of that instruction pressing down on me, the unspoken rule that what happens to a woman, the shame she carries, the pain she feels, are hers to conceal. Because they are not only hers, but they also belong to her family and to the fragile structure of reputation that society gives importance to, while it ignores her suffering.

It is exhausting, this constant guarding of body and mind, to live by their expectations of enduring, forgiving, and smiling. And when you finally crack, when your body betrays the lies you’ve fed it, you realise these expectations were never meant to protect you, they were for the world. For people who will never thank you for the sacrifice, who will never see the fractures or hear the silent screams.

I learned this early. My body remembered what my mind wouldn’t, how certain touches made my skin crawl, how some voices turned my stomach to stone. I learned to hide, to cover, to disappear and to survived. It is strange, the way memory works. How it can bury itself, only to resurface when the mind is ready or perhaps when the body demands it. Truth in my life has always been partial, fragmented and veiled and yet I feel the sting of what was hidden and the sharpness of the secrets every day.

Then life demanded more. Marriage demanded more. The patient wife, the forgiving wife, the one who absorbs everything and says nothing. I learned to smile even when my skin ached, even when my heart raced with fear.

That is what women like us are taught, to stay quiet and endure. But how many times had I forgiven what should never have been forgiven? How many times had I stayed because leaving would have made me less respectable? Astaghfirullah. The words echo in my head, undoing nothing, reminding me that women carry burdens, shame, and secrets silently.

I am confessing now, finally, not for the world, not for anyone to forgive me or condemn me. I am confessing for myself. For the little girl who learned too early that silence was safety, for the woman who had to keep standing even when every part of her wanted to collapse.

And then there is Leila. Bright, untamed, stubborn Leila. She moves through the world as if daring it to restrict her, and I see how hard it tries. How quickly the world attempts to dim her flame, to bend her and to break her spirit.

Maybe I’m telling him a story to punish myself, to protect someone, or simply to make sense of the chaos that has ruled my life. Truth is not always the same as honesty, but justice is being served. Leila is safe. Maybe this is Allah’s way of balancing the scales.

It is strange how many lives exist inside one person. The girl who survived, the woman who endures, the narrator who speaks, the protector who lies. They coexist in silence, but silence does not mean nothing happened. Endurance does not erase cracks and survival has a cost, and some stories, some truths, should never be fully told. And yet here I am telling mine. This is how it began, the days before everything went wrong, before I was able to make sense of it all.