The strength of two Omani women: From endurance to choice

“I am a woman, phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, that is me. I am the legacy of all the women who dared to be themselves before me,” once wrote Maya Angelou.
Her words remind me that the courage, bravery, and endurance of women echo across generations. My husband’s Omani grandmother and mother are examples of two brave women who began this form of ‘inheritance’.
After all, there is a type of inheritance that never makes its official way into papers or promises. It moves from woman to woman across generations, in what must initially be endured and in the choices later ones, their daughters and grandchildren, are able to make for themselves.
My husband’s Omani grandmother came from the interior of the country, long before the late His Majesty Sultan Qaboos ever took the throne. At that time in Oman, there were hardly any schools, no proper healthcare, no infrastructure. With her thick black hair tucked neatly, and her sharp, determined eyes and strong facial lines giving her an unmistakable presence, my husband’s grandmother was married off to an older man who already had a wife.
Each morning, before sunrise, she went alone to his farm, doing hard work meant to exhaust a man, let alone a woman.
But one day, still without children, she ran from that harsh life and a loveless marriage. An unusually brave act for an Omani woman of that time, my husband’s grandmother crossed the dusty, sunbaked plains on foot. Those who eventually found her were unsure ‘what’ she was at first, human, or something else entirely: perhaps a genie, a desert spirit that they believed appeared and vanished with the wind.
She was brought back to her parents in the village by these kind strangers, and her family quickly realised that her first husband had made no effort to find her. They divorced, another act that was highly unusual for those days.
My husband’s grandmother would marry again to an Omani man, this time to someone closer to her own age and an excellent horse rider. But back then, long before the seventies, Oman was still a land of dust and scarcity. Her second husband struggled with asthma, which at that time was a serious health threat, and eventually passed away.
Following tradition, his brother took over the family. From that marriage came several children, and they moved to Kenya, seeking a healthier and thus better life and establishing a successful and renowned halwa business.
Among their children was a beautiful young woman who would one day become my mother-in-law. A budding entrepreneur even as a child, she sold ice lollies in the streets of Nairobi, where all the neighbours knew each other, and styled hair for money. She eventually fell in love with an Arab man, and they had three children together.
But love alone is sometimes not enough to hold a marriage together.
Perhaps inspired by her mother’s strength, and like so many Omanis living abroad during those days, she returned to her country of birth shortly after Sultan Qaboos took the throne.
There, initially all alone in a nation still under development but with a promising future thanks to wise leadership, and after shedding many tears, she found courage in her mother’s tough love. She became a civil servant and later started her own business, enabling her to eventually bring her children from Nairobi to stay with her in Oman.
The children of my husband’s mother all ended up choosing their careers and their spouses, one even married a non-Omani, myself. Her grandchildren, too, while observing and respecting the Arab tradition that a man must formally ask for a woman’s hand in Oman and that relationships do not begin until marriage, are choosing both whom to marry and what to study and where to work.
The inheritance my husband’s mother and her mother once began, a quiet insistence on resilience, continues to shape the lives of the Omani women after them, who carry the legacy of these two brave women that, against all odds, dared to be themselves.
Thanks to women like them, and to wise national leadership, Omani women today form one of the wings of the country because a bird needs two wings to fly, as the late His Majesty Sultan Qaboos once said.