Nujood Ali has faced a multitude of horrors from a very young age: being forced into an arranged marriage with an older man at the age of nine, sexual abuse, physical abuse, running away, having family turn a blind eye on your suffering or be an accomplice to it. However, the true horror lies in the fact that Nujood is not the only victim of these atrocities. So, why is Nujood’s story so important? She may not be the first person to experience the true horrors of child marriage, but she is the youngest Yemeni girl to be granted a divorce. Ali shares her heartbreaking with millions across the world in her memoir titled I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced. In this excerpt, Ali utilizes different symbols to further call attention to her mental state as a child and uses diction to create a desperate and hopeless tone to reflect her feelings in order to evoke sympathy from the reader.
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This appeals to the audience’s pathos, as it causes them to focus on the fact that, as strong as Nujood may be, she is still just a child throughout most of the story. Two of the main symbols used in this excerpt are a monster and the blood on the sheet-- the monster representing her husband and her fear of him, and the blood on the sheet representing her loss of innocence and her family’s compliance. The first instance of the symbol of the monster mentioned in the excerpt is when Ali writes, “What a wahesh-- what a monster!” (Ali, 90) after seeing her husband the morning after he had assaulted her. This serves as a way to highlight Nujood’s childish innocence as many kids’ greatest fear when they are young is a monster-- a boogeyman of some sorts. The only way for Nujood to wrap her mind around how someone, a person just like her, could commit such an act