A bright child whose favorite subjects were Dari language and poetry, Farzana dreamed of becoming a teacher. But she had been promised in marriage to the son of the family that was providing a wife for her brother, and when she turned 12, her in-laws insisted it was time to marry. Her future husband had just turned 14. Zahra, 21, tried to commit suicide by self-immolation six years ago because she objected to her arranged marriage.
Why Did You Burn Yourself?
“On the marriage day, he beat me when I woke up and shouted at me,” she said. “He was always favoring his mother and using bad words about me.”
The beatings went on for four years. Then Farzana’s brother took a second wife, an insult to Farzana’s in-laws. Her mistreatment worsened. They refused to allow her to see her mother, and her husband beat her more often.
“I thought of running away from that house, but then I thought: what will happen to the name of my family?” she said. “No one in our family has asked for divorce. So how can I be the first?”
Doctors and nurses say that especially in cases involving younger women, fury at their situation, a sense of being trapped and a desire to shame their husbands into caring for them all come together.
This was true of Farzana.
“The thing that forced me to set myself on fire was when my father-in-law said: ‘You are not able to set yourself on fire,’ ” she recalled.
But she did, and when the flames were out, 58 percent of her body was burnt. As a relative bundled her raw body into a car for the hospital, her husband whispered: “If anybody asks you, don’t tell them my name; don’t say I had anything to do with it.’ ”
After 57 days in the hospital and multiple skin grafts, she is home with her mother and torn between family traditions and an inchoate sense that a new way of thinking is needed.
Farzana’s daughter is being brought up by her husband’s family, and mother and daughter are not allowed to see each other. Despite that, she says that she cannot go back to her husband’s house.
“Five years I spent in his house with those people,” she said. “My marriage was for other people. They should never have given me in a child marriage.”
Why do women burn themselves rather than choose another form of suicide?
Poverty is one reason, said Dr. Jalali. Many women mistakenly think death will be instant. Halima, 20, a patient in the hospital in August, said she considered jumping from a roof but worried she would only break her leg. If she set herself on fire, she said, “It would all be over.”
Self-immolation is more common in Herat and western Afghanistan than other parts of the country. The area’s closeness to Iran may partly explain why; Iran shares in the culture of suicide by burning.
Unlike many women admitted to the burn hospital, Ms. Zada showed no outward signs of distress before she set herself on fire. Her life, though, was hard. Her husband is a sharecropper. She cleaned houses and at night stayed up to clean her own home — a nearly impossible task in the family’s squalid earthen and brick two-room house buffeted by the Herati winds that sweep in a layer of dust each time the door opens.
To her family, she was a constant provider. “Before I thought of wanting something, she provided me with it,” said Juma Gul, 32, her eldest son, a laborer who earns about $140 a month. “She would embroider our clothes so that we wouldn’t feel we had less than other people.”
As he spoke, his 10-year-old twin sisters sat near him holding hands and a picture of their mother.
In the hospital, Ms. Zada rallied at first, and Juma Gul was encouraged, unaware of how hard it is to survive such extensive burns. That is especially true in the developing world, said Dr. Robert Sheridan, chief of surgery at the Shriners Burn Hospital in Boston and a trauma surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital.
The greatest risk is sepsis, a deadly infection that generally starts in the second week after a burn and is hard to stop, Dr. Sheridan said. Even badly burned and infected patients can speak almost up to the hour of their death, often giving families false hopes.
“She was getting better,” her son insisted.
But infection had, in fact, set in, and the family did not have the money for powerful antibiotics that could give her whatever small chance there was to survive. Juma Gul eventually managed to beg and borrow the money, but not before the infection spread.
Two weeks after his mother set herself on fire, he stood by her bed as she stopped breathing.
Published by Newsweek magazine
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