Sunflower

Chapter 13

PART TWO
Summer 2009.

Once he was old enough to understand certain things in life, his mother told him the story of how she ran away to marry his father, and it was the worse decision she ever made in her life. "I thought you loved dad, Umm?" "Things are not the same as they used to be before son, I was madly in love with your dad, been only a naive nineteen-year-old girl who eloped with her lover, and got married in the 'in love' experience, everything about your dad triggered my love alert system for him, I believed the love would last forever."  "So what happened Umm?" "I fell out of love, the bells went off, all those traits of him I overlooked when I was madly in love with him now became a huge mountain in our marriage, I always remember my mother's words and ask myself how could I have been so blind and foolish."

The word love, as he always heard growing up and up till now, was that it was the most important thing in life, it was what made the world go round, thousands of books, magazines, songs, and movies, were gingered with the word. But he wondered if the feeling of Love was real, he couldn't say if the love between his family members was biologically programmed or culturally indoctrinated, and if love was important, and also elusive, why had his mother and sister suffered so much pain from his father, perhaps he never loved them.
Growing up he had seen his mother go through different ordeals in life, whilst she was living with his father and his family. He saw how badly she was maltreated by his father's family as well as his father. To them she was nothing but a kept woman, a woman kept to worship her husband, a woman kept to bear him male children, and be a slave to the family, and to make things worse she was an outsider, she was not from their tribe or race, she was a Nigerian, both her parents were from the north in Nigeria. What he remembered about his father was by far his eyes, where each time he came home, the mere look in his eyes, he knew his mother was surely going to receive a merciless beating from him that night. The memories of his mother screaming  always hunted him the most because he could do nothing to save her, After all, he was a weak man as his father always said. I don't know if you are my son or even a man at all.

He never believed in love, cause if love was real, his father wouldn't kill his daughter, and his wife wouldn't have died because in agony.

In the summer of 2009 was when it all began, the day when he followed a brown pickup truck, that drove through the Kurdish highlands in northern Iraq with four men and a young girl of about seventeen years of age. He had just left the grave of his sister who died a year ago.

His sister Ayah was only fifteen years old when she was forcefully taken by four morally retarded men, She didn't know what was going to come next, despite battling with the traumatizing event, reliving every moment when her pride, her honour, her dignity, her sanity, was illegally taken, stripping away her self worth layer by layer, until it was shattered. No one would marry a shameless girl like her she thought. Yes, she was shameless, as people would say, what was she wearing, they would ask when they know full well that she was clad from head to toe, where was she, what had she done to make them angry, and so because of that, no one marries her, and better for her cause she wouldn't be subjected to the torture of a miserable life, in a hopeless and loveless marriage at least, with those thoughts her hopes were high, maybe all her dreams would finally come true. But her hope and dreams were soon smashed to smithereens when she overheard her father and his brothers plotting to kill her since she had brought dishonour to the family by getting raped, and so for the shame, she had brought upon the family the only way to perceive the shame was through honour killing.

And honour killing was the murder of a family member due to the perpetrators' belief that a victim had brought shame to the family, or has violated the principles of a community or religion, with an honour culture. In her culture, Honor killings were considered less serious than murder, simply because they arose from long-standing traditional cultures and were deemed appropriate or justifiable. Roman law gave complete control to men of the family over both their children and wives who were at the discretion of the men in their families.