I've been reading the novel "The sacred night" (La nuit sacree) of Tahar Ben Jelloun. A woman speaks about her life that, until her father was alive, was a man's life. Her father wanted a male heir, so she was grown as a man.
These lines are about her first feelings of freedom in her feminine nature, some time after her father death:
I was in a wood. Nature was peaceful. I was taking my first steps as a free woman. Freedom, it was as simple as walking one morning and getting rid of bandages without asking questions to myself. Freedom was this happy solitude where my body gave itself to the wind, and then to the light, then to the sun. I took off my slippers. My fragile feet rested on sharp pebbles. I did not feel the pain. Arrived at a clearing, I sat on a clod of wet earth. Freshness went up in me like a pleasure. I rolled in the foliage. A slight dizziness crossed my head. I got up and ran to the lake. I did not know that behind the wood there was a lake and a spring of water. But my body welcomed new instincts, reflexes that nature breathed into it. My body needed water. I rushed off my gandoura and plunged into the lake. I never learned to swim. I almost drowned. I clung to a branch and joined the spring. There I sat down, giving my back to the powerful jet of cold, pure water. I dreamed. I was happy, crazy, all new, available, I was life, pleasure, desire, I was the wind in the water, I was the water in the earth, purified water, the land ennobled by the spring. My body was shaking with joy. My heart was beating very hard.
I was breathing irregularly. I had never had so many feelings. My body that was a flat image, deserted, devastated, monopolized by appearance and falsehood, joined life. I was
alive. I shouted with all my strength and without realizing it, I shouted, "I'm alive... alive! My soul has returned. She screams inside my ribcage. I am alive… alive! ... "
Don't we feel the same? I do, somehow.
Mafalda
