Flights of Fancy

A Story for the Lady Leaders

I intended to obtain a passport, so I went to the police station in charge of the district where I live and asked the officer to give me the forms to fill out. The unshaven gendarme looked up at me, doubting my ability to fill them in without his help — am I not a woman? — then he asked me:

Do you have permission to travel?

I said: From whom?

He said: From your guardian.

I said: What do you mean?

He said: The wife obtains permission from her husband, and the unmarried woman from her father or her brother or one of her male guardians.

I said: Even if the male guardian is younger than she is, and she has reached the age of majority?

He said, with finality: ...Yes.

I said: Are these your instructions?

He said: No — the orders of the authorities.

And I turned to go and get the permission, calling well to mind the legend of equality and political rights for women...

★

A Salute to Nahida

Three months ago my friend Nahida Fadli stood pressing my hand in farewell, the tears swimming in her eyes, and said: Samira, do you suppose I shall be anything more there than a wife — So-and-so's wife?

And I was moved, sensing what a sacrifice was being offered by a woman accustomed to work, accustomed to proving her existence, intellectually and socially, in more than one field. But I looked at her with composure and said: Nahida, is it a small thing that a woman should be a wife?

And Nahida traveled to join her husband Ghanem al-Dajani, who works at the Saudi radio as director of programs.

Her first letter came to me overflowing with a sense of emptiness, of loneliness, of being a mere thing...

She says: Ghanem goes out in the morning and does not return until the last hours of the night; as for me, I sit with nothing before me but emptiness, desolation, and sweat...

The second letter came, saying: Samira, I am a wife, and a wife, in the Eastern understanding of the word, is a synonym for cook, children's nurse, and...

So I made my first experiment in cooking.

Out came a dish of which one could say: had there been less broth in it, had the rice been better done and the meat more thoroughly cooked, and had there been fewer spices, the dish might have been called "maqlubeh."

And yet Ghanem and I ate our meal with appetite, and afterward we celebrated my having established my footing as a cook.

A few days ago I rejoiced — rejoiced greatly — when I found in Nahida's letter her strong spirit, her green hopes, for she says:

Ghanem is paying the price for the sake of a great dream, the dream of us both. He works 365 days a year, and he knows the road is hard and long, but we shall travel it together... I shall stay with him to the end, and perhaps I shall not come this summer.

I live my own ambition in this man's labor.

Bravo, Nahida. My salute to you, and to every wife who sees for herself a shadow reaching beyond the bounds of femininity.

★

Advice for Fame

I was always the victim of a belief that persuaded me that doctors do not read.

And that if they do read, there is nothing for them but the black medical books with Latin titles.

It was my wish to find a volume of poetry in a doctor's library.

But lately I have been freed from my illusion.

For there fell into my hands the book of a doctor's memoirs, by Axel Munthe.

You will ask me what a book I happened to read has to do with the culture of doctors, and I answer that a passage in Axel Munthe's book inclined me to change my opinion.

The literary doctor — or the doctoring man of letters — says in his book: I did not become a famous physician of wide renown until after I had raised my fees to an almost fantastic level. When I was a humane physician, "polite society" neglected me, when it did not disdain me; in its eyes, as I spent my efforts in the cause of good, I was like a deacon collecting donations for the burial of a tax collector...

Our doctors have read Axel Munthe, no doubt about it, and they have profited greatly from his experience — no doubt about that either...

Yes, may the doctors forgive me... they do read.

In simple words I shall try to set out what I have gathered from a reliable source about Kamala Devi Chattopadhyay, the Indian lady who visited Beirut at the beginning of June.

— 5 years in prison for the sake of the independence movement.

— President of the Indian Handicrafts Board — a board that works to revive the village and folk arts threatened with extinction.

— She fosters theatrical and musical activity in India.

— President of the Arab-Indian Friendship League.

— A prominent and active worker in the Indian Socialist Party.

After this introduction, the farce becomes plain that lies behind the desperate struggle of some of our women to win the title of leader... a women's leader... with apologies to the lady leaders...