Zawj: one of my favorite words in Arabic. I love the hardness of its beginning and the softness of its end. Translated into Turkish the word is koja and in the Balkans it is suprug. I know these words because for the past three months, as I have travelled through these countries, I have been asked the same question using all of these different words, which mean the very same thing: husband.
As in:
"Where is your husband?"
This question is followed quickly by a second question:
"Where are your children?"
And then the third, asked in a disbelief unheard of since the proposition of the roundness of the world.
"You are alone?"
And even after being asked these questions over and over again I still do not know exactly how to answer.
Do I speak of my divorce? My abortion? My uncertainty, as the years quicken and my cycle slows, if children are to be found in my fate?
Do I say that my former husband is somewhere in South Africa with a new wife and a child of their own?
Do I offer my singularity in a world of duplicity and even multiplicity?
And how do I graciously admit the absence of a husband and, with the same grace, deny the proposal of marriage that inevitably follows?
I am neither uncomfortable with these questions nor do they offend me. More often than not they come from a place of curiosity and not condemnation. But what does concern me is how can it be that in 2017, a woman alone in the world is still regarded as an all too modern phenomenon? How is it that most of these men (and often women) have never heard of the forces which are Freya Stark, Ching Shih, Laskarina Barbailno, or the countless other women who dared to call the world their own?
Perhaps were we taught that history abounds, has always abounded, will always abound with women who have set out into the world alone without husbands, without children, and without any care given as to what society thinks of them, then these simple questions would give way to more important inquiries:
Where did you go?
What did you do?
What did you see?
Who did you speak to? What did you speak of?
How did it change you, transform you, give shape to the woman that you have become?
For I may not have simple answers to simple questions, but man oh man, I sure as heck can tell you of the woman I am forever becoming.