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 exis-tence, 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