Cost-Benefit Analysis

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by Itto Outini

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Because I couldn’t afford a graduation gown, I asked a girl in my dorm if I could borrow hers. Just for ten minutes. Just long enough to snap a picture.

Back in my room at the end of the hall, empty except for an armoire, a thin foam mattress on the floor, and a jagged tree limb reaching through the broken window, I slipped into the gown, feeling like an ant crawling into a garbage bag.

Fourteen of us were graduating from the Department of Applied Linguistics at Mohamed V. Thirteen of us possessed not only graduation gowns, but also people to take pictures with and of us: parents, loved ones, friends. One of us had only her diploma, which she clutched to her chest as she’d done with her high school diploma, as she would do again upon receiving her acceptance letter from the Fulbright Program two years later. Alone in her dorm room, engulfed in voluminous fabric, this one began to sob.

Every milestone I’ve passed has cost me. I was never destined to arrive here, at one of Morocco’s elite universities. I was destined for a short and brutal life of domesticity, like my mother before me, or perhaps for an equally short and brutal life of prostitution. Born in a place with no books, no receipts, not even street signs—no written language whatsoever—and blinded before I learned to read, I stood no chance at entering the education system, yet I entered it, fought my way through it, emerged at the top of my class in institution after institution. Days of starvation, sleepless nights, and countless physical injuries have been the currencies with which I’ve paid.

It occurred to me now that my parents’ lives, too, had been my currencies—though I did not offer them willingly.

Behind my damaged eyes, two strands of thought began a no-holds-barred negotiation. More than anything, I wanted my parents to be there, alive, and celebrating with me. But if they were there, alive, would they be celebrating with me?

Why would my mother, who’d never even heard of books, regale her daughter for a bachelor’s in applied linguistics?

Why would my father, who’d run my mother’s life into the ground, keeping her locked in a mud hut, surrounded by their ever-multiplying children, while he embarked on business trips to far-off lands, impregnating and beating her until her body couldn’t take it anymore, and upon her death promptly remarrying, disowning all their children, starting over, praise his daughter for achieving independence?

Would I have achieved that independence if my parents were alive? Would I have dared to venture out into the cities, past the psychological perimeter, lined with emotional barbed wire, that had circumscribed their lives? Would I have found my confidence, discovered my love of knowledge, learned to read?

Or would I have found myself a browbeaten housewife, unable to set her own course in the world?

Would I have lived forever in the shadow of my mother’s fate, beneath my father’s thumb, only to find myself alone eventually—for all parents die eventually—just as I was now, except older, much older, with less energy, fewer faculties, and fewer options ahead of me, and fewer possible paths?

My diploma bent and crackled in my hands. I’d given up everything in my pursuit of education, and now this rolled-up slip of paper—and the knowledge that it represented—was the only thing I owned. But which is better, I asked myself: to own, or to be owned? Or to be disowned? I’d seen countless girls controlled by their fathers and brothers and husbands, tasted disownment for myself before my father died, witnessed peers laid low by every manner of parental cruelty. Better to long for the dead, I knew deep in my gut, than to be tortured by the living.

How long does it take to snap a picture?

The time had come for me to wriggle out of my classmate’s ample graduation gown. The indulgence, the masquerade of normalcy, had sobered me. Within my fiercest wish there lurked a lethal contradiction: I wanted to celebrate something with my parents, something that I wouldn’t even have if I had parents. I wanted the reality for which I’d struggled and fought and sacrificed, and also its negation.

I wanted two lives.

I could only lead one.

Be grateful, I told myself, folding the gown.

Be grateful that you’ve realized your potential. Grateful that you’re living an adventure that your parents never could’ve dreamed of.

Grateful that your parents died.

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