My Contradictions

Yemeni mp

Ahmed Saif Hashed

During the period between engagement and marriage, I witnessed a fierce struggle within me. There was a clash between the young man who is liberated, understanding, and open to life with all its brightness and vast horizons, and the creature of extreme backwardness and deep-seated regression that I was shocked to discover had been dwelling inside me, dormant within the dark corners and depths of my consciousness.

I found myself transformed into an arena, a battlefield awakened by the intensity of this conflict. On one side was a culture that exercised its terror, brutality, and tyranny, reinforced by my oppressive complexes, my excessive selfishness, and my insane jealousy. On the other side was a liberated culture I had acquired through reading, study, and my humanity, a humanity that elevates women and their rights as equals to men.

Two storms raged within me until, in my imagination, they took the form of a mythical being. It was like a whirlpool of the sea, spinning fiercely and moving with difficulty. I became engulfed in it, searching desperately for a shore. I lived the violence of its rotation. One half dragged me into a dark, oppressive abyss, while the other lifted me above the clouds, and I chose the ascent to the heavens, to nobility and elevation.

I lived between a heritage of culture, heavy and outdated, clashing with contemporary aspirations, and another culture that confronted tyrannical ignorance, reached for freedom, sought justice, and embraced the future with sensitive humanistic awareness. I experienced an intense struggle between submission and defiance, a will striving to turn the impossible into the possible.

I felt I was living amidst overwhelming contradictions that warred within me. A dark, oppressive past battled a future that looked forward in reconciliation with the self and optimism brimming with hope. I oscillated between extremism and regression, between the return of a ruthless beast indifferent to humanity and the human who seeks humanity, elevates its entitlements, and devotes himself to a youthful future that we love and pursue with sincerity.

My inner self clashed with itself. I lived in two contradictory states, a pathological split apparent to the eye, a flaw in thought, and mental afflictions I had been unaware of and untreated. Yet, on the other hand, I found a highly sensitive, refined, life-embracing human being, a dreamer, passionate for justice, and boundless in imagination.

I lived a struggle between my patience, caution, and endurance, and my folly, which could destroy in a moment what I had built over years. It was a struggle between the innocence of a child dwelling within me, a spontaneous and dreaming human, and the criminal driven by trivial or selfish motives to commit crimes against others, depriving them of life and targeting their right to exist.

I found myself transformed into a field of violent struggle, a battleground of ferocious war. My head felt weighed down with more than it could possibly bear, so heavy it seemed on the verge of exploding and shattering me into fragments like a bomb.

Unjustified jealousy would sweep over me like a flood for the most trivial passing reason, without intent. I wanted to know every detail of her past from the very day she first became aware of herself. I wanted to know her daily life in its dullest minutiae. I rummaged through her near memories and the far ones folded away in forgetfulness, turning myself into a self-appointed guardian of morals and virtue, burdened with my own rigidity and extremism.

I seemed a man emerging from the jungles of ignorance, from the swamps of backwardness, digging into her living and fractured memory. I searched for every fragment, past or present. I wanted to know everything about her, even the most insignificant. Before my own eyes I appeared as more than just a sick, ailing man, but someone deeply flawed.

* * *

I became insanely jealous. I wanted to possess her with suffocating domination. I wanted to own her completely, from her very first breath to her last, from head to toe, from beginning to end. I wanted her as a total possession, undiminished, every letter of her being from A to Z, every inch from the soles of her feet to the hair on her head. I wanted to erase her memory so that nothing would remain but me. I wanted no mother, no father, no brother left in her mind. I saw myself as selfish, savage, and excessively cruel.

I remember one day she wore a shirt that revealed part of her upper back meant for my eyes alone, yet still I was seized by a madness of jealousy over an impossible possibility. I fell into a frenzy whose reins I could not hold. I had never known I could be this foolish and this rigid.

Once, in a fit of fury, I even issued a fiery threat of a deadly crime against someone. My love was growing each day into something wilder than the day before, a runaway madness with no bridle and no tether. I discovered a primitive, feral man living inside me against my will, with a raging vitality I had never seen before. It was a sudden, blind strike of insanity.

In high school I had not been like this. In my early adolescence I was extreme in openness. I longed for a boundless freedom, a crossing of continents. My openness was so radical that when I once confided it to a dear friend, he was stunned. Perhaps deprivation had a hand in shaping it. I had ideas yearning to surpass the possible and the reasonable, an openness reaching far beyond the present and the modern.

After I graduated from university and after I was married, I discovered a monstrous, terrifying ogre lying dormant within me. It erupted against everyone, ferocious, savage, and immense. The girl’s mother, in a decisive moment, felt she had married her daughter to a demon. She offered that each of us should go our separate way, but what had bound us was too tightly woven to be undone easily. Madness had grown huge and unrestrained.

Yet alongside this, some part of my wager remained. I was also inhabited by an innocent child, one who soared and rejoiced at the simplest cause for joy. A simple human being whose tears flowed at a fleeting moment or a painful scene. A person brimming with tender emotion, saddened, pained, and moved to sobbing by a novel’s imagined world, by a writer’s fancy, or even by a cartoon made for children. They found in me a delicate soul, a deep sensitivity, a sincerity that overflowed, and a purity like tears.

Sometimes, as a dreamer, I would feel constricted, sorrowful, and pained, my need to weep growing heavy. I would retreat alone, far from people, to break down and cry in solitude, to release some of the pain and grief crowded within me.

I have long been at odds with myself, my being charged with countless contradictions. I feel as though I am on a battlefield, indeed, as though a thousand battles rage within me. Yet I find solace and comfort in my conscience. It is the arbiter to whom I surrender my flag, the guide I follow with trust. My conscience has been, and remains, my compass toward survival.

It was my conscience that I relied upon to resolve the many contradictions I have lived, those that crossed my path or threatened my mind, my thinking, and my very senses. My conscience has always been present in my life, a guarantor, even if at times delayed, entangled, caught in a hunter’s net, or lulled into a moment of folly. Such moments never last.

* * *