Doaa, though, saw no promise in their new home, just the irretrievable loss of the friends she’d made in the old neighborhood and the people who understood her without having to try. Once again in a new environment, she was overcome with shyness.
She refused to speak in her new school and her grades fell. At first, she resisted any gestures of friendship. No matter how much her older sisters Asma and Alaa urged her to make friends, Doaa retreated, showing them that no one could force her to do anything she didn’t want to do. Both her shyness and her ferocious stubbornness protected her, allowing her to control unfamiliar situations. It took Doaa a long time to trust people or to allow anyone to see who she really was.
But slowly over time, as in the other neighborhoods, Doaa’s walls began to come down, and she eventually came out of her shell. Doaa made new friends and often went on walks with them through the neighborhood, and they visited one another’s homes to study, gossip, and talk about boys. They frequently went up to Doaa’s roof—her favorite place in her new home—to bask in the sun. At dusk, they would move inside to play Arabic pop music and dance in a circle, singing along with the words in unison.
While eventually Doaa became happy with her new neighborhood and friends, it became clear that the life of a traditional Syrian girl was not going to be enough for Doaa. Her childhood stubbornness grew into a resolve to make something of herself. Daraa was a traditional community, but Doaa knew from soap operas and the occasional movie that some women studied and worked, even in her own country. The Syrian state had officially declared itself in favor of women’s equality, and tension was growing between two factions: those who believed that women should be housewives submissive to fathers and arranged husbands, and those who felt that women could pursue higher education, careers, and husbands of their own choosing. Doaa’s favorite teacher was a woman who told her female students, “You must study hard to be the best of your generation. Think of your future, not just marriage.” When Doaa heard this, she felt a stirring inside her to break people’s assumptions about her and to live an independent life.
After the sixth grade, boys and girls no longer shared the same classrooms. Doaa and her friends would talk about boys; however, it was not culturally acceptable to talk to them. At fourteen, she and her friends were approaching the traditional age for marriage. The other girls would make bets about who would marry first. But when Doaa thought about her future and what it might hold, all she could think of was helping her family.
Her favorite place outside of school and her home was her father’s barbershop. She wanted to show him how she could be a useful and efficient worker, even if she wasn’t a boy. From the time she was eight, Doaa would go to Shokri’s shop to help him whenever she could. As Shokri trimmed and cut, Doaa swept the hair that fell on the floor and always appeared right at the moment he finished a shave, holding open a clean, dry towel. When new customers arrived, Doaa would slip into the small kitchen at the back of the salon and emerge with a tray of hot tea, or small cups filled with bitter Arabic coffee.
On Thursdays after school, Shokri let Doaa shave him with the electric razor. He would laugh at her earnest face and call her “my professional” as she concentrated on her task. This nickname stirred an extreme sense of pride inside her and only made her more intent on one day earning money to support her father.
So when her sisters Asma and Alaa married at seventeen and eighteen, and her family began to tease her, “You’re next in line!,” Doaa immediately let them know that they should drop the subject and that she wasn’t interested in getting married anytime soon. After their initial surprise, Doaa’s parents accepted that she would take a different path from other girls and would at times dream that maybe she could be the first in their family to go to university. Hanaa always regretted that she never had that chance and loved the idea of one of her daughters achieving her own professional dreams.
Doaa surprised everyone when she announced that she wanted to be a policewoman. “A policewoman?” Hanaa said. “You should be a lawyer or a teacher!”
Shokri hated the idea as well. He despised the thought of her patrolling the streets, mingling with all levels of society, and confronting criminals. And on top of that, he didn’t quite trust the police. Shokri was old-school and believed it was a man’s role to protect society, particularly to protect women, not the other way around. But Doaa insisted, saying that she wanted to serve her country and to be the kind of person whom people turned to in times of trouble.