Ophelia

In Egypt, I knew a woman who called herself Ophelia.

At first, we spoke only online, on a forum made for lovers of books and readers. She flirted, but soon figured she was barking up the wrong tree and opted for a friendship. We met for coffee sometimes or walked the Nile’s edge for hours.

A small, meek-looking woman in a hijab that ate half of her face. She spoke in riddles and rarely laughed. Like Hamlet’s Ophelia, she had no control over her future. She claimed that her father was forcing her to marry a man she had never met. A metaphorical throne was being built on the outskirts of Cairo: a home for her and her future husband to couple, consummate, and raise children and cats.

I had no idea what attracted me to a friendship with Ophelia. An endlessly tragic woman who had nothing to say other than her sad stories and the sighs punctuating them. The longer we walked, the shorter my temper got.

“You ought to lift up yourself,” I recall saying. “You carry yourself painfully weak.”

She nodded, and our walk soon ended. Days later, on the forum, she posted Queen Gertrude’s final words to Ophelia, then deactivated her account.

Sweets to the sweet, farewell! I hoped thou shouldst have been my Hamlet’s wife; I thought thy bride-bed to have decked, sweet maid, And not have strewed thy grave.

Some speculated that she planned to kill herself. To drown in the Nile the way Ophelia drowned in the brook. Others accused her of being a drama queen—a fitting description, my younger self thought. I hadn’t yet learned the empathy I should have had for a woman with no power in a society that stripped her of her agency even before she was born.

Years later, I saw her in a mall, dragging a young offspring by the arm. The child threw a tantrum, and Ophelia stood there, drowning in her boy’s screams.

I walked away without saying hello.

Over the years, I have come to hate Hamlet.

The endlessly indecisive mama’s boy got on my nerves. His inclination to a good poetic speech was only matched by his inability to make up his damn mind. The villain is not the plainly clichéd uncle who stole the crown. It was Hamlet himself, who saw the ghost of his dead father informing him of the name of his murderer and decided that the best way to deal with this was to stage a theatre play.

The real hidden gem of that play was always Ophelia.

The woman is complicated: She is driven by her desire for her father’s approval, joined by her sexual awakening, admiration for the power that comes with marrying the crown prince, and understanding of her ability to navigate the court. Yet she was blocked, walled in, and betrayed at every corner. Accused of adultery, mistreated by her lover, and used by her father. When she went mad, her words made more sense to me than those in the overly dramatic jester’s skull scene.

To be or not to be? That’s the question? Yes. If you are an idiot. No, listen to the way Ophelia delivers Hamlet’s gifts back to him when he proves to be a fuckboy.

My honour’d lord, you know right well you did,

And with them words of so sweet breath compos’d

As made the things more rich. Their perfume lost,

Take these again; for to the noble mind

Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.

There, my lord.

Such a small space offered to this noblewoman, yet she finds the words to insult and throw shade on the hesitant man. She gains power by rejecting to play a part in his ploys. Even when she goes mad, it comes across to me that madness was the only way for her to break free from all the conning men in her life. Madness was not her tragedy. It was her absolution.

I saw John Everett Millais’s painting Ophelia at the Tate Gallery in London a couple of years ago. The painting, vividly detailed, almost comes to life as it shows the final moments of Ophelia’s drowning in the brook. She holds flowers in her hands, and white jasmines rain upon her body from the riverbanks.

I stood in front of the painting for a long time.

The golden dress melting away in the river’s waves, almost leaving her through her feet as she submerges into water. The dissatisfied look upon her face: not to reject death, but to refuse the life she was offered. Her palms, offered up above the stream, as if waiting for her righteous stigmata marks, indicating her holiness. In the play, Hamlet orders her sent to a nunnery—at the time a slang for a whorehouse. Yet she looks like a saint in Millais’s painting, drowning in too shallow a river.

The painting feels like a healing. As if the painter wanted to admit the guilt of all those who harmed Ophelia, yet she managed to remain uncorrupt. She emerges a survivor and a winner.

Today, as I look at Mélanie Rocan’s Swinging/Balancer painting, I am reminded that the tragedy was never the woman: it was always the river.