In Latakia, I once had an experience with a woman who had lost her psychological balance, or was “crazy,” as we used to say. Call it whatever you want. Her name was Hiyam. She was very well known in my city, so much so that there are even YouTube videos of her cursing and shouting in the streets.

When I was six years old, around 1994, my mother and aunt finally decided I was capable enough to walk down the stairs on my own, cross the street after looking both ways, and make my way through the neighborhood that, in their eyes, would somehow protect me. That was when errands started pouring in. I became the designated carrier of food from our home to my father and my uncle Elias at our shop.

One day, my aunt packed a bag with two cheese-and-cucumber sandwiches for my father. Just as I grabbed it and headed downstairs, she stopped me and said:

“Give the extra sandwich to Hiyam.”

At the time, Hiyam was a woman tied up with ropes in the alley behind our home. A group of men had restrained her there for their own amusement, listening to her screams and insults as though it were entertainment. She cursed God, prophets, women, men, the earth itself, with the harshest obscenities imaginable.

To this day, I do not know how my aunt found it acceptable to send me to her. But that was the moment I first learned something from the weakest and most miserable among us.

My aunt walked down eleven steps to the window overlooking the inner alley and shouted:

“Let her go. Untie her immediately.”

Then she pointed for me to go down to her, while Hiyam continued screaming and cursing. I rushed downstairs because I trusted my aunt the way I trusted my mother; she had helped raise me. Still, I walked toward Hiyam terrified. I was seven years old.

I saw everything in her eyes. I owe something to Hiyam’s eyes.

She looked at me with an overwhelming surge of love. She was sweaty and furious, yet she looked at me with tenderness as she bit into the sandwich with a kind of sorrow. My hair was blond back then, and my face resembled the faces of foolish little children, mostly because I would often fall silent.

My father’s shouting was thunderous, and so was the slap of his hand, so I leaned toward silence. Toward silence and observation. Then my brother came into the world, a child with special needs whose mind would forever remain that of a six-month-old infant.

Through Hiyam and through my brother, I learned how to study faces more closely, especially when they are crying, silent, strange, or somehow detached from the world we believe we belong to.

My first encounter with Hiyam was filled with everything I would later come to love: the harsh tears that appeared on her face for reasons no one could explain, and a scent I never expected to love.

It was the scent of a body deeply tied to endings: the sour peel of an apple, the tart taste of cherries, the strangely acceptable taste of a banana peel. It was such a peculiar smell. But I loved it.

My aunt Hiyam was sour.

I grew older, yet I never stopped calling her “my aunt.”

Hiyam had once worked in our home, before she lost her mind and her family for reasons no one could ever fully know. She was fierce, and she cursed with a kind of raw vulgarity. She cursed prophets, God, the holy books, and Hafez al-Assad. She cursed Hafez and Anisa. Then, from the early 2000s onward, Hiyam began focusing her rage on the father and the son in long, almost musical sequences, chants so relentless that at times you could barely register them as insults, even though they were vicious beyond measure.

Hiyam was the fear that lost its fear within the city. Fear without a body. Sharp like a mystic searching for God in the material world and failing to find Him, clinging instead to her own hidden rituals: trying to eat from any restaurant by asking only for a piece of bread, begging from those in whose eyes she sensed kindness, singing little songs for strangers who might give her a few coins in return, surviving on fragments of mercy.

She cursed Hafez al-Assad at a time when people were terrified even to think about him, or about his son and their cruelty.

She was never merely an object of pity. More than that, she was a concentrated form of our collective madness, a voice screaming on behalf of all of us.

I learned nothing about writing except through a naked, mad woman named Hiyam, and through her gaze. Not from school. Not from my father. Not from statues. Not from authority.

Hiyam’s broken gaze, loosened from every restraint, gave me my first and harshest understanding of tenderness.

Every form of discipline Hafez al-Assad tried to impose became meaningless in the face of Hiyam. She was stronger than him, stronger than us, stronger than the people who secretly fled from her while laughing.

Hiyam condensed our entire lives into a single scene: laughter, fear, and the servitude we all recognized but never named. She cursed children and hated them because they beat her, though she herself could brutally strike a child if she managed to catch one.

The moment she cursed Hafez al-Assad, people would scatter in panic, fleeing from her in exaggerated terror, while secretly smiling to themselves.

The statue of Hafez al-Assad in Latakia was strangely fitting: towering, grotesquely pompous, standing before a decaying pond. Every year, some municipal committee would attempt to “fix” it by filling it with water without ever cleaning or repairing it properly, until the smell of rot and algae rose from it.

Hafez al-Assad was a statue with a bad smell.

Is it important to ask where Hiyam bathed?

In front of Hafez al-Assad and his statue. She would descend into the long, narrow pool, strip completely naked, sing to her genitals and body, rinse herself, look at Hafez, and urge him to go mad and commit atrocities before her. Hiyam’s nakedness was appalling, and her voice, filled with screams and curses, was incessant, forcing you to watch. I would weep or bury my face in the sand; I could never call out to her. Once, a security patrol arrived to arrest her, so I quickly grabbed some meat pies and said, “Finish your bath, the security forces are here!” I took the meat pies, the security forces took her, and Hiyam disappeared, along with the water from the fetid pool. Hiyam emerged after a while, her head shaved, walking calmly. Less than a week later, she was back to her old ways, abandoning her passionate bath in front of Hafez al-Assad to bathe near any public water tap. In Syria, people place water (known as “sabil”) in the streets. Hiyam would bathe in water meant for the soul of a deceased person, and the family of the deceased would go mad and try to force her to leave. Hiyam would simply cry out, “Let me bathe! I’m praying for him! May God grant him peace!” Hiyam would bathe naked and sing near a water tap in a building in the middle of Eighth of March Street. I begged her to stop; people were gathering around her. I bought a tablecloth from a café and covered her with my body, opening it to cover her and turning my face away. I wept. Then Hiyam promised me she would bathe in a ruin, not in the street. It was difficult to work with Hiyam’s nakedness. I called her “Auntie,” and the world looked at me with disgust, but I loved her. She used to shout to me, “Auntie, I want tabbouleh!” The tabbouleh I made for her meant the world to us. She loved cottage cheese, onions, and tomatoes. She was so sweet when she ate. Hiyam died, and everyone in Latakia will remember that she was the only one who dared to curse both Assad father and son. We saw her nakedness, something we never understood. Hiyam’s nakedness was our nakedness, our sexual repression, and her voice was the voice of the oppression that clings to us and that we fear. Hiyam would shout and curse every day, and she would be taken to the security branches, beaten, and made to wear a shirt that said “We love Bashar.” She would curse him even more and be beaten again and again. Hiyam wasn’t killed; she died having attained her complete freedom, refusing to accept any form of silence. Sometimes, bathing naked is freer than being with people whose minds are filled with fear and who compromise their principles by wearing clothes to appear more silent.

A naked woman was beaten in Beirut. I don’t know why I remember Hiyam. Perhaps because I didn’t see the face of the woman who was beaten there, and I don’t know what I could have learned from her expression. I know Hiyam; I know her strength, her honesty, and her innocence when she ate. I didn’t see the girl’s face in Beirut; I saw her being brutally slapped by a man. How awful the word “nakedness” is when it’s bandied about without us knowing anything about her life, her last contact, or even her closest relatives. We don’t know her voice, how she eats, or what she ate. The image is blurred for the sake of a naive, moralistic purity of the body, reducing her solely to the image of a naked girl.

I never saw her face, and perhaps that is what made her body even lonelier. I wish I had seen it. A face is the only thing that prevents us from turning a human being into an object. The moment the face disappears from view, it becomes easy to say: naked, crazy, scandalous, obscene.

A face would have forced us to hesitate for a moment. To ask more questions: Who is she? Where did she come from? What happened to her before she reached the shore? What kind of ruin was unfolding inside her, or what kind of awakening?

A naked woman on Beirut’s Corniche exposed the lowest possible level of mercy in a single man. She did nothing to him, not a gesture, not a sound. Even when he violently slapped her, she was nothing like my aunt Hiyam. She did not defend herself. And now, we do not even know where she is.

The video preserved the slap only to remind us of how little understanding we possess, how little faith, how little love, how primitive our thinking remains. It preserved the body in its moment of violent, helpless exposure, while erasing the name, the face, and the roads that led her there.

“Naked.” The word erased the entire story.

And once a person’s story is erased, or they are denied the ability to speak, they become easier to hit, easier to circulate online, and easier to forget.

The body is not merely a fragment of the human being, nor some separate part detached from the self. A person is also their body, because it is through the body that they appear in the world.

Her exposure was not an exhibition of her body, because what happened was far clearer and far harsher than exhibitionism. She had lost every possible mediation of appearance. There was no longer any clothing, language, face, voice, or story standing between her and the world.

The body became the only narrative left, for us and for her, and most importantly for her. It was as though she said nothing, yet her body said everything: that a human being can reach a point where they are no longer capable of arranging themselves before others, or choosing the way they wish to be seen.

She did not choose the sea to offend public decency. The sea was simply closer to her because it offered an open horizon, a place to look out without barriers.

There is a cold, buried sadness inside us for the things that appear only briefly before disappearing again. A woman appeared on Beirut’s Corniche, and then we never learned where she went.

The slap remained. The word “naked” remained. The blurred image of the body remained. But the person herself passed through the world like something fleeting, sorrowful, and impossible to hold onto with tenderness.

Nudity is not a scandal. It is a fragile and passing moment, one that should have awakened gentleness, not violence.

Sometimes words arrive far too early. Superficial morality arrives early. Insults arrive early. The slap arrives early.

But true seeing comes late.

To see a human being as they are, before judging them, requires a kind of calm that fearful cities, cities that can barely even call themselves cities, simply do not possess.

We love the body when it is orderly, polished, ready for the picture, free of confusion, or carrying only the kind of confusion we believe we can control, a body fit for desire or for our hidden desires.

But the broken body, the exhausted body, the body that has slipped out of its assigned order, we do not know what to do with it. So the easiest thing is to strike it.

We call it scandalous or naked so that we do not have to admit it carries traces of all our lives within it.

How easy it is for the strong hand to fall upon the weak.

We understand nudity only through the logic of possession. We reduce it to something to be owned, something we do not truly want to see, so we attach to it a linguistic label we pretend belongs only to the body.

A naked woman in a country filled with thousands of displaced people, under the shadow of a genocidal occupation striking at its borders, years after a port explosion that shattered the economy, amid corruption in everything, and endless war.

And yet none of the words we use for ruin, corruption, and collapse seem to carry the same weight as the embodiment of nudity itself.