My best friends had been telling me to start writing blogs but I never had been able to find a good reason to. However, after I read the book ‘A promise to Nadia’, I acquired the inspiration for my first one. The story of two sisters, Zana and Nadia, fifteen and fourteen years respectively, were tricked by their father to a holiday to Yemen and sold for marriage. Their life changed, a vast transition from a life in Britain, from modern and independent ideologies to a restricted, primitive and abysmal lifestyle. With countless struggles, Zana managed to escape with the help of her mother and a public outcry, after eight long dismal years and fought with awe-inspiring perseverance for her sister’s release. Considering the fact that I’ve always been sensitive towards the misery of women and the struggle that they have to go through both at a minute and massive level, this story and this perspective was discrete. It affected me in a way no book or story had done before. It made me think; it made me feel the appalling existence of reality to an extent that cannot possibly be expressed with words. I’m unaware of the condition of the current position of this case, nonetheless, I still keep wondering if they’ll ever achieve justice, if ever amongst this make-believe world of truth and righteousness, two women who’ve experienced losing their liberty, dignity and individuality will ever regain their rights to choose, to live and to be happy. Zana escaped those bonds, maybe because she got the choice and also because she had the courage and the desire for freedom. After all, a girl whose never experienced freedom, is born and bred in a conventional environment, has learnt the traditional ways and has never experienced what it’s like to live like a free human being might not understand the significance of this situation. Nevertheless, to lose something as precious as independence leaves nothing but a dejected individual trying to leap at every opportunity available to make it to the outside world. To even imagine to try to place oneself in the position that they encountered is a painful one; to imagine a real father escorting his daughters towards a life that would leave them trapped in a foreign country with a routine that they never sought for themselves; to imagine oneself as a young girl who lost all access to her dreams and ambitions for a life with strangers as nothing but a slave, feels terrible. Furthermore, to see a woman like Zana and her persistence despite constant disappointments makes one realize that life is more than the petty issues that we face, its more than just troubles at school or work, it is more dreadful and atrocious than one could ever imagine. Life sometimes can be very unfair. What was Nadia’s fault? Why does she have to neglect the prospect of a better life? Why does she have to be trapped forever because of her children? Why does she have to suffer physical and mental torment? To seek an answer to all these questions is very difficult because Nadia never accepts the fact that she’s suffering, that she’s in agony. It might be because she’s scared to lose her children, because every time someone tries to raise a voice for her, she is tied to her children and threatened to more distress. Maybe, she’s given up all hope to escape? They’re both different and so is their struggle, yet it inspires me, their pain more than anything else to not just appreciate the normal life that we’ve been blessed with, but try to be one of those voices that empathizes with their grievance and the discrimination that they’ve been through. In my perspective, they’ve won to a large extent, more so because many women endure an affliction, however, very few have the audacity to raise a voice, to fight for their rights, to oppose the wrong; as Elizabeth Blackwell said, "If society will not admit of woman's free development, then society must be remodeled’’ and if they’ve done that, they’ve triumphed.
