Diary of a Druze Woman: The Price of Dishonour inside Venezuela’s Hidden Arab Minority
Her experience is partly documented in Diario de una Drusa, a blog that serves to remind similar others that they are not alone against cultural oppression and coercion.
Originally published in February 2021.
Karina Abou Orm remembers how during her years in medical school, her parents — Kamal and Haníe — began to feel that they were losing their grip on her and Nayla, Karina’s older sister. “It reached a point where they noticed that we were deflecting from their traditions, so they wanted to find us husbands, force us to stay at home, and drop out of college.”
Restriction is a gentle word for what they faced, she says. “We used to live in prison. That time was so brutal that Nayla and I had to sleep with our clothes on thinking that, at any given moment, they would kick us out and make us live in the street.” Karina knew she would be a doctor since she was 10, and they were en route to becoming the first professional generation of their family. Dropping out was out of question, but beyond that, they wanted to go to the cinema, date, have boyfriends, live normal social lives.
Karina watched how Amir, the old brother, had a license to “have fun as he wished but taking care of himself,” while she and Nayla were told to stay still and keep their legs closed. “Dad used to repeat that we should never make him walk in the pavement ‘with his head down’ in dishonour. Because that, and exactly that, is what Druzism is all about.”
As every Druze child, Karina was born into her parents’ sect, which worships prophets from other Abrahamic religions (Noah, Jethro, Moses, Jesus Christ, and Muhammad, to name a few) and incorporates the teachings of its founder (who proclaimed that an XI century Fatimid Caliph was God on Earth) along with those of Ancient Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle.
The Druze worship one God, believe in reincarnation, reject polygamy, and forbid conversion. Marriage with the non-Druze is prohibited — to be a Druze you must be born one. Having dwelt for centuries in Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and Jordan, tens of thousands have settled in Western countries, mainly in Argentina, the US, and Venezuela.
Periods of persecution throughout Druze history have led them to practice taqiyya, the active concealment or even denial of their beliefs, allowing them to blend with dominant groups and disguise themselves as followers of other religions — the reason why figures of Jesus Christ and José Gregorio Hernández can be found in many Venezuelan-Druze homes.
Karina’s experience as a Druze is partly documented in Diario de una Drusa (Diary of a Druze Woman), a blog that serves to remind similar others that they are not alone against cultural oppression and coercion.
Amir, the Arab-Latino womanizer, kept being told that he would eventually have to go to Lebanon and find a wife that could “sort him out” with a male, legitimate, and Druze firstborn. Maracay’s Druze community expected Karina, the rebellious and feminist medical student, to disgrace her family with a Venezuelan man. However, she and Nayla began to notice early on 2012 that Amir’s usually dominant attitude over his sisters had turned distant and laconic. “His island of fantasy as the only male son was under attack,” Karina wrote, after watching her broken brother confess that his Catholic lover was expecting a baby.
“Beware of Venezuelan girls, and if that ever happens, open up my tomb once and for all,” their mother used to say — words that then rumbled the memory of the Abou Orm siblings. Nayla and Karina cried as they listened and watched how Amir’s Druze pride crumbled. Life never demanded him to counter his parents’ will until now.
Kamal, a former electrician at Beirut’s international airport, was living in Lebanon with baby Amir and Haníe when the civil war erupted in 1975. After years of raising the child in a basement with little to eat, mother and son escaped to Venezuela, and Kamal was somehow hired in Kuwait. Soon he would lose his job, and after refusing to fight for the Druze militias, he reunited with his family in Maracay and opened an appliance store.
Despite an inherited sexist reflex and the constant fights between them, Karina says that Kamal was not only an understanding being but also “the noblest and smartest man she knows.” As his old job gave him the chance to travel and absorb diverse cultural perspectives, Karina believes that he became the antithesis of the typical Druze father — allowing his daughters to attend university, which is unthinkable in most Druze households, might be proof of that. When he learnt the news about his future grandchild, Kamal remained calm and told his son that the single course of action was to love that baby, “the blood of my blood,” though he was terrified by his wife’s imminent reaction.
Penniless, illiterate, and on her thirties, Karina’s maternal grandmother learnt how to count in a ship via La Guaira, knowing that she and her husband would need to toil to survive in the booming oil country that lied ahead. Karina likes to believe that they were actually in love, since their families apparently hated each other back in Lebanon. While her parents peddled in the streets of Maracay, Haníe stayed at home after school raising her five younger siblings, and quickly grasped that females are responsible for bearing the weight of Druze honour.
Grandma’s character was relentless, Karina recounts, and endured her children’s transgressions until her last breathe. Aunt Nelly, for instance, was expelled from the family after divorcing a man that she was forced to marry. As grandma agonized from cirrhosis in her deathbed, she told her relatives to ban Nelly from going to the funeral.
Karina’s youngest uncle was also banished after the local Druze became aware of his sinful lifestyle. “He was gay and involved with some very dodgy people out there,” Karina says. She remembers grandma shouting at him on the phone once, when he called from prison asking for a bail payment. One day, when Karina was 11, the newspaper read that her uncle was “fatally shot in handcuffs,” and she recalls how Haníe was throwing things around the house in grief. “If they loved him so much, why didn’t they rescue him?” she wonders. “In the end, dishonour can be heavier than family love.”
“She is the typical Arab woman that carries the family’s pride and sorrow on her shoulders. A housewife, a slave that only lives for her husband and children. She hasn’t got dreams for herself, only for them,” Karina says about her mother. The latter’s grief lasted several weeks after Amir told her about the baby. “That cannot be your son! What am I going to tell the neighbours, our friends, your uncle?” Haníe lamented, according to Karina.
She refused to visit the hospital after childbirth, but told Karina that she wanted to see her grandson when the mother was not around. A few days later, Haníe was able to bless and carry the baby in a bakery shop, and when he was a three months old, he started to spend the weekends at his grandparents’ house, where the mother was still not precisely welcome. The worst part was over by then: during a family visit, Kamal and his daughters exchanged shouts with Marouane — Haníe’s only living brother and the family’s patriarch — after he berated Amir in front of the newborn. “We were the worst Druze to ever live,” Karina says, and recounts how her father used to bin her brother-in-law’s gifts for the boy as he grew up.
Karina, Nayla, and the child’s mother became close during her pregnancy, though the three had met in an Iron Maiden concert in Caracas on 2009, when she and Amir had begun dating. They neither live together nor have other partners, and both still reside in Maracay. The kid, now an eight-year-old, has spent most of the pandemic’s time at his grandparents’ place, watching school lessons on their television. On November 2012, Karina wrote that she would forever be proud of her nephew’s existence, an ode to subversion that likely changed her family’s history for good.
Karina fled to New York City when famine hit Venezuela in 2015. Her parents have paid her two visits, and she recently spent Christmas with Nayla and her sister’s non-Druze boyfriend. Settling down was tough because up until then, she never considered to “let her country die” in her absence, but things thankfully improved when she became a bartender and decent money began to flow in (she used to earn eight dollars a month at the Central Hospital of Maracay). Though she remains a passionate scientist and misses her tenure at the University of Carabobo’s Unit of Gender Studies (an exciting part of her life that this story overlooks), she is currently studying Political Science in Queens College and dreams of becoming a policymaker.
Karina cannot forget how her desire to become a doctor and fight for women’s rights was once at odds with her own family, but she managed to make peace with her roots after years of anger and frustration. Though taqiyya might be making her somewhat reluctant to detail the specific Druze values that she treasures, Karina shows her evil eye bracelets and her wrist tattoo — a Druze star intersecting a Christian cross — before affirming that, without the contradictions of Venezuelan customs and Arab family values, she would not be half the woman she is today.
