Yemeni Girl Tells and Now Reads her Story of Escape and Divorce
At nine years old, Nujood Ali was force to marry a man in his late twenties. She was raped and beaten. Then she made history: she got a divorce.
Her ordeal as a child bride was reported in Yemeni media outlets before slowly getting picked up and reported internationally. She was ultimately named Glamour magazine’s woman of the year, and she traveled to New York as a new spokesperson for the rights of women.
Ali shared her story, in spoken form, with a French journalist, Delphine Minoui, and now the story has been published in print form in English, titled “I am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced.” When the Arabic language edition is published shortly, Ali, who is now twelve years old, will finally be able to read her own story for the first time.
Ali told the story to Minoui in person, rather than writing it down.
“I do not know what is in it, except what I have been told about. I am still waiting to read it in my own language,” she told Reuters, which is reporting the story. “But I guess it is important to have my story come out to the rest of the world.”
According to the article, publishers have plans to publish the book in a total of 19 different languages, all the better to spread her inspiring story. It first appeared in France last year.
The book tells Ali’s story, how she was married off by her poor father to an older man. She was the one of more than a dozen children.
Her new husband removed her from school and took her off to his home village. He also raped her on the first night of their arranged marriage.
“No matter how I screamed,” said Ali in the memoir, “no one came to help me. It hurt awfully, and I was all alone to face the pain.”
When her husband let her visit her family in Sanaa, a Yemeni city, Ali was able to escape, hailing a cab that took her to the city courthouse. The human rights lawyer Shada Nasser helped her to seek and ultimately get a divorce from the husband. She was the first child bride to successfully get a divorce in Yemen.
Ali’s translator, filmmaker Khadija Al-Salami, reported that the part of Ali’s life captured in the book is not the end of the story. The girl was so busy doing media interviews last year that her school kicked her out. Al-Salami now monitors her education, and the book’s French publisher has lent Ali’s family a hand, buying a home for her family.
Ali has used royalties from the book to pay for her education.
“My life now in Yemen is calm and I live like a happy middle-class kid,” she said, “where last year I was having a miserable poor life.”
Ali’s story, which she can now herself read, has led Yemeni citizens to push for legislation that would ban marriage before the age of 18. A quarter of girls there are still, however, married by age 15.
