Inheritance

I grew up being taught to see my inheritance in the fleshy bits of me. You have your father’s feet, your mother’s cheekbones, your grandmother’s nose. But someone somewhere stuck mice in a lab and found that torturing them with things like stress and cold changed their babies’ DNA; so, in convoluted fashion, there might be a mouse that has inherited the feeling of a blizzard from its grandpa. It makes sense; in the same vague way as half-remembered biology lessons about all matter being recycled. There might be a particle of some ancient arrow-wound in your lip, molecules of Roman sweat in your hair — how truly arrogant to think that you were born into the world a pure, unadulterated blank, not a patchwork of hand-me-downs from the infinite things that came before.

No one told me about inheriting my grandmother’s fear. Nor that the sudden realization of it would come in a casual story folded by my mother in the telling of another one: “...Because she used to warn me not to wander around in my underwear if my father’s friends were in the house, and I was only, what, six? Isn’t that mad?” 

I look at her. “I mean, you used to tell me to stay away from my friends’ older brothers.”

“Did I?” 

She had. In fact, I grew up thinking it was my mother’s fault that I wasn’t allowed to forget I was a girl. She curated my childhood with asphyxiating reminders of it. As a toddler I was literally on a leash, too friendly to be trusted not to run off with a strange man of my own accord; the years rolled by; no overnight school trips, no sleepovers. She yelled “Adam” or “Youssef” when I disappeared down supermarket aisles, hiding my little girl's name as if it were a spell for assailants to lure me away with. I resented her, wrote her into an unreasonable harridan imposing arbitrary restrictions on my life. I was an ill-fated prisoner in a tower, I played “Overprotected” by Britney Spears, languished, plotted revolution at the age of eleven, how dare she give me a curfew? And when the first assault did come, before I was twelve years old — before I should have been able to name what an assault could be — it was her I initially became more afraid of, as if it were me who had committed a crime. I had made mistakes she told me repeatedly not to make. Telling her would have meant giving up what liberties I already had, because how would she possibly ever let me out of the house after I went to a party I didn’t ask her about, with those older brothers of whom she didn’t approve?

_____

I am twenty-seven in a producer’s office, a friend who’s trying to piece together a crew for an independent film. He kisses his teeth thoughtfully and says, “do you know any good editors? I’ve found one who’s just incredible, but her fucking parents won’t let her out of the house after eight, and we work through the night loads. So. I need a guy, obviously. Do you know a good guy?”

At eighteen I had left home for university, certain that the world, once I was unleashed upon it, would release me from those silly bonds my parents imposed. I could walk down dark streets whenever I wanted and eat kebab from a van without being dogged by siren-like wails about food poisoning and I could swim in lakes. For a while, I was so adamant this was true that I ignored any evidence to the contrary. But only for so long. At some point, I went from happily jogging the streets of my university town alone at 3 am, insistent that nothing could happen (take that, Ma) to taxi rides home at 11:30, my keys jutting out from between my knuckles. The girl I used to be is not a girl I can get back.

At twenty-seven, I’m angry. I’m angry that the instinct is not to accommodate this woman, this "incredible" editor, but to go for the choice that is more convenient, the one that is male. I tell my friend that if the project were mine, I would figure out a way to make it work. “Well, sure, but no one else will hire her. She’s not going to have a career as long as she has a curfew.”

_____

Maybe you are hand-me-downs because a person, really, is a collection of memories; their own but also ones they are given. I remember, vividly, taking off and flying around the living room at some point when I was child, but I also know that my mother told me bedtime stories in which I was, you know. Flying. 

There are certain tragedies in the moment you understand your parents and, of those tragedies, two still have the ability to floor me: firstly the realization that they, too, are fallible human beings who have been (or remain) every bit as lost as you are; secondly that the things they wished to protect you from were what they, too, were raised to fear. 

My grandmother’s fear.

“He never touched any of us, of course. But he would fly into rages. Broke a couple of televisions. There was one time we were having an argument and he flipped the whole dining table onto the floor.”

My grandfather was a handsome polymath, lover of animals, smoker of cigars. I never met him, but relatives would tell me about pride-inducing little quirks they thought he must have passed onto me (“his kindness”, “his curiosity”), and I kept photocopies of his love letters to my grandmother in my wallet, gobbling up stories about them both like they were denizens of Disney. He fell in love with her when he was nine; years later, he defied a disapproving family to marry her; they fled occupation together, his photograph crumpled in her brassiere. I wear a ring he bought her one Mother’s Day. Her letters back to him haven’t survived, but his are full of swelling, ardent entreaty, hearkening to a full-skirted, sepia time. In one, sent while they are betrothed and before he ships off to the army, he says, “Will you still not give me a kiss before I go?” and it’s hilarious, thinking about my proper little grandmother refusing him — and gratifying, too, because I know that he returned.

“Of course, she was engaged to someone else when he proposed to her.” 

My mother is driving, a time when she is at her most loquacious. I am twenty-three. I have heard the story of how they met and how he fell and how they wed a million times, but she has always left this detail out. It winds me. “She was what?” 

“It doesn’t matter, he talked her out of it. She grew to love him. He was the love of her life.” That request for a kiss seems different, suddenly. ‘Talked her out of it’. What did that mean? What did ‘talked her out of it’ mean? 

Flipped a whole dining table onto the floor.

“No, he never touched us, love. Just punched walls. And he didn’t drink at all, so it wouldn’t get too bad. He used to box to let off the steam.”

At twenty-six, I tell my mother that a man has put his hands around my neck, and her face falls. 

_____ 

I am twenty-nine. We are watching a movie in a packed theatre, a film at the height of the Egyptian box office, and there’s a male protagonist and a female protagonist and I just can’t get into it, I can’t, because the part of their relationship that’s there for the relief — there for the audience’s laugh — is the part where, every time she talks back at him, he raises a hand as if to slap her.

 I thank God for the intermission and drown myself in popcorn, but my friend is bemused. “Come on, you’re not surprised, are you? Have you seen his father’s movies?”

_____

My great-grandfather beat my great-grandmother in front of my grandfather and my grandfather boxed to let off steam and once during an argument with my mother he flipped over a dining table and now, almost every time my mother has a little spat with my own father she says, genuinely, “Sweetheart, I’m lucky to have married a man like him. There isn’t a violent bone in his body.”

I am twenty-nine. An Egyptian comedian releases a song in which he, in “parody”, gathers a pack of men to threaten a girl who told him ‘no’. He doesn’t like criticism of the song, lashes out against the people who "misunderstood" it, says he’s making fun of men like that; they’re funny, aren’t they, those pathetic, harmless little men. He doesn’t say much about the explosion of TikTok videos released in its wake, of boys with thick-gelled hair miming beating up their sisters and girlfriends. 

I am twenty-seven. I tell a man ‘no’. He tries to shove me on to a couch.  

I am twenty-eight. A relative tries to leave her husband. He shatters her face on the floor.

_____

My mother wasn’t allowed to go to friends’ houses. She certainly wasn’t allowed male friends. She describes my grandfather reacting to every boy he thought might be looking at her as a would-be assailant — even into her twenties, when a young doctor in her graduating class crossed a courtyard hoping to meet him and, instead, her father grabbed her by the hand and pulled her pell-mell off the premises. I wonder where our fear originated; when the first time was that an ancestor told a girl, “don’t wear that, you know how men are.” I wonder what made them so afraid. 

In retrospect, actually — through the glasses of a no-longer-teenager — my parents were, as far as cautious Egyptian parents go, incredibly lenient. As I grew up, my mother’s restrictions eased. We found soft, reasonable compromises. But the fear never left her. Once, as I stepped into the house after a school trip, she shuffled to her bedroom for an afternoon nap that lasted thirteen hours. “She can’t sleep when you’re not here,” my father said matter-of-factly. But I’ve been gone for a week. He shrugged.

It must be the most terrifying thing in the world, having a child then watching them waddle, walk, run into the chaos of a world over which you’ve realized you have minimal control. 

We haven’t lived together since 2009. She still calls to ask how I’m going home.

At twenty-six, I tell my mother about the man who squeezed my neck until I could no longer see, and I brace myself for the inevitable Were you alone with him?, or a red-faced Where?, but I am not prepared for the way she does look: A horrible, sort of defeat, as if she has failed me. She is, for a moment, very still. Then she heaves a small sigh, places a hand on mine and says, “I had hoped you could live your whole life without going through something like that.”

_____

There is one, single time in my life that I truly regret having said something to my mum. I am fourteen, and I stamp about her bedroom, furious that she won’t let me choose the length of my own hair, and she tells me how her own mother used to force her to cut her hair above the shoulders though she begged to have it longer, and how when I’m older I’ll thank her for how long my hair has grown; and I tell her, “But you’re being exactly like your mother was.” I will never forget the speed at which the blood drains from her face, the regretful, self-punishing silence with which she allows me to pick up the scissors.

I was a miracle. Six miscarriages in; a c-section baby with an irregular heartbeat; out of the womb for a blissful little period into her arms and then, too quickly, shipped out every morning to daycares she blindly had to trust. My grandmother wouldn’t let her children lick ice-cream that hadn’t been churned in her own kitchen, but my mother was obliged to allow me meals cooked on nursery school counters she had never seen (for a couple of years, she convinced me I had deathly allergies to prevent me from sampling other children’s lunchboxes — the ruse disintegrated when I couldn’t resist a french fry). She didn’t understand why this shield made me more frightened of her force than what lay outside it. I remember her bursting into tears after a heated argument about a sixteen-year-old boy, telling me, with real, gut-ripping helplessness, “I’m just trying to protect you, I’m trying to be a parent.”

I am twenty-seven and now we tell each other everything and she can’t remember the sixteen-year-old but she does recall that moment with the scissors; the pithy, cutting thing I said about her being like my grandmother. I redden with embarrassment. “It was kind of true, though,” I venture, and she throws up her hands. “Of course it was true, but you were 14 years old. You had no business knowing that. I didn’t know that.”

I don’t think I will have children. 

I am twenty-nine, so people ask why — and deserve the flippant responses they get; Stop Asking Women That — but, in quiet moments, I am honest with myself. I am afraid of developing that lung-vacuuming terror I have seen in my mother’s face, the terror I know is lying dormant in my bones, the tiniest, inaccessible cells of me. Because, among other things, what if I have a daughter; how on earth will I protect her; I don’t want to raise that little girl to be afraid of what I am afraid of, don’t want to fetch her home from a friend’s birthday at nine o’clock, watching her feel punished for a would-be crime she would not even commit. Watching helplessly as she resents me. I don’t even want to be comforted by the platitude that “she’ll understand why when she’s older”, the way I did, the way my mother did; I don’t want her to understand what I and my mother and my grandmother were forced to understand. I want to throw out our hand-me-downs and give her entirely new clothes, clothes in which she sees the world, and yes, the men in it, as extensions of her dizzying potential, and I am so, endlessly frightened. And even while my mother gives a teasing, performative sigh and says she wishes she could have a little grandchild to fuss over, I know that she is frightened for her, too; that shared anxiety, unspoken, that the world just isn’t ready.