Cut

by Hibo Wardere

  These are images that I’ve had to learn to live with. These are the pictures that my mind scrambles to avoid each time I close my eyes. But the worst thing about it is that these scenes are not relegated to history, they are being played out every day for other girls – and this is happening in Britain. A country that has given me refuge, a country I thought was a million miles from the barbaric practices of my own homeland.

  The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared FGM a global epidemic. Due to migration, there is not one country in the world where girls are not at risk of FGM. Worldwide, it is estimated that 3 million girls undergo the procedure every single year and 130 million women live with the effects of female circumcision. I am one of them.1

  Until I read that book, I’d had no idea exactly what had happened to me as a child. All I knew was that I urinated differently after I’d been cut, that instead of rushing to the bathroom, in and out in less than a minute, chastised by my mother for forgetting to wash my hands, it now took up to fifteen minutes to empty my bladder. All I knew was that I lived in pain and discomfort every single day. And so I set out to learn more about what had been done to me. The journey has lasted more than twenty years, and continues to this day. It has taken me from that book on my kitchen table to this one you are holding in your hands now, via schools and police stations and hospitals, where I’ve worked to raise awareness of the situation. Because after I’d discovered what FGM was and that it was still happening to girls today, it became clear to me that this wasn’t just my problem, that it was a complex and widespread issue everyone should be made aware of. And this is what inspired me to write and educate.

  The WHO has declared a list of twenty-nine countries – across western, eastern and north-eastern Africa, and in parts of the Middle East and Asia – in which FGM is prevalent. It defines FGM as ‘procedures that intentionally alter or cause injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons’ and lists four different types2:

  Type 1 –

  Clitoridectomy: partial or total removal of the clitoris (a small, sensitive and erectile part of the female genitals) and, in very rare cases, only the prepuce (the fold of skin surrounding the clitoris).

  Type 2 –

  Excision: partial or total removal of the clitoris and the labia minora, with or without excision of the labia majora (the labia are ‘the lips’ that surround the vagina).

  Type 3 –

  Infibulation: narrowing of the vaginal opening through the creation of a covering seal. The seal is formed by cutting and repositioning the inner, or outer, labia, with or without removal of the clitoris.

  Type 4 –

  Other: all other harmful procedures to the female genitalia for non-medical purposes, e.g. pricking, piercing, incising, scraping and cauterising the genital area.

  I had Type 3 carried out on me – my clitoris and my inner and outer labia were removed and then the whole area was stitched up, leaving a narrowed hole which partially covered my vagina. Through this tiny hole I was expected to urinate and menstruate. With no urethra exposed, it meant that my urine had to travel down inside the area that had been covered with my own skin and slowly trickle out one drop at a time. It was no wonder I was constantly suffering from urinary tract infections. The skin that has been sewn together eventually fuses, and so what remains of ‘normal’ genitals can only be described as looking like what’s between the legs of a Barbie doll. A complete blank where my sexual organs should be, and just one tiny hole where once my vagina was. It is, if you see even a sketch of it, a complete denial of womanhood. To this day, I still cannot look at an image of FGM without feeling – and often being – physically sick.

  And this is a procedure carried out every single day on women and girls around the world, often without anaesthetic or painkillers, frequently by untrained villagers with little anatomical knowledge, and rarely in any kind of sterile environment. Is it any wonder, then, that girls die? From shock, or haemorrhaging, or subsequent infection.

  As a child growing up in Somalia, I can remember many girls who were prepared for their gudnin – their circumcision – who I never saw again. Their devastated families called it inshallah – God’s will. And yet FGM is not a religious practice; there is nothing about FGM in the Bible or the Koran. It is a nonsensical cultural tradition of maiming girls that has been practised for generations. It predates Christianity and Islam, its roots stretching as far back as ancient Egypt, and has survived for thousands of years despite the havoc it can wreak on the female body.

  There is not an area of the world that has not, at one time or another, practised some form of female circumcision, including in the West. Until the middle of the last century – and particularly in Victorian times – clitoridectomies were seen in both Britain and the United States as a cure for excessive masturbation and even epilepsy. Victorian gynaecologist Isaac Baker Brown claimed that, after clitoridectomy, ‘intractable women became happy wives; rebellious teenage girls settled back into the bosom of their families; and married women formerly averse to sexual duties became pregnant’.3 It was thought that removing the clitoris would stem a female’s sexual desire, that it would ‘tame’ her. And this – to some extent – is why the practice continues, worldwide, to this day.

  In July 2014, a report released by City University London and Equality Now estimated that there are 137,000 women and girls living in the UK who are affected by FGM. The report went on to predict that there are 60,000 girls under the age of fifteen in Britain who are at risk of being mutilated.4 That’s tens of thousands of girls who could be exposed to this barbaric cultural practice, held down and cut against their will. Who could be maimed for life, or even lose their life to a tradition that should long ago have disappeared. These are girls that your children and mine go to school with, the girls they share a desk or playdates with. These are the babies in cots next to your baby’s on the maternity unit. These are children who listen to the same pop music as your children. There is no difference between those girls and their classmates, except thankfully most of their classmates will not live in fear of their parents telling them that it is time for their rite of passage, that it is time to know what it is to be a woman.

  In some cultures, to be a woman is to be condemned to a lifetime of pain. To be a woman means subjection to child abuse, to ensure that your ‘virtue’ remains intact, that your sexuality is controlled and that you are accepted by your community. Unfortunately, by chance, I was born into one of those cultures – just like 60,000 other girls in Britain.

  FGM is a British problem. FGM is a global problem. But we can all play our part in making it stop.

  2

  Kintir

  The dust was kicked up from the dry earth in huge swirls, blurring my vision as the particles drifted in front of my eyes. I coughed as the air, thick with dirt, caught in my throat; when the dust settled back down to the ground where I sat, they were still there, their faces hungry for their pound of flesh, which was my humiliation.

  ‘Are you cut?’ the first girl said.

  I looked down and started picking at a stray blade of grass that had unfurled from the dry earth. I knew not to lie, so in resisting the temptation I instead said nothing. Then another girl spoke.

  ‘Is the kintir still on you, Hibo?’

  Despite everything that my mother had said, they weren’t going to go away. They knew the answers, but they’d keep on and on until I confessed it. Finally, with the last bits of the dusty air sticking in my throat, I spoke: ‘No, I’m not cut, my mother says I’m not ready.’

  ‘Not ready?’

  ‘I was cut when I was four!’ one boasted.

  ‘I was three!’

  My eyes stayed focused on the earth, desperate to look anywhere but at their taunting expressions, anywhere but around this exposed school playground.

  ‘You’re not cut!’

  ‘You still have your kintir!’

  ‘You’re dirty!’

  ‘I am not dirty!’ I sa
id, leaping to my feet. ‘My mother gives me a bath every day!’

  It was pointless, though. The girls laughed and clapped, and jumped around. Another victim plucked from the crowd, another girl with kintir caught out.

  ‘The kintir is dirty! Hibo is dirty!’ And then they danced and skipped, great plumes of dust being swept up from the floor by their sandals. They sang and chanted and I rubbed my eyes, pretending it was the dust that had made them weep.

  ‘My mum says I’m not ready to be cut,’ I tried again.

  ‘You’re a coward,’ they sang. ‘Coward! Coward! Coward!’

  ‘I am not,’ I said, but my voice was barely audible over their collective taunts.

  ‘Hibo is dirty! Don’t play with Hibo!’ And then other girls looked over from across the yard, and I shuffled back towards the classroom.

  Hoyo was wrong – these girls didn’t stop when I ignored them. She’d told me that bullies get tired after a while, that they find a new victim. But that hadn’t been my experience. Every day they were there; they’d hunt me out from some corner of the playground, intent on resuming their breaktime game. They watched with delight as my face crumpled, as I tried to defend myself, telling them that it said nothing in the Koran about removing the kintir, that it didn’t make you dirty, whatever it actually was. But they just laughed and jeered and sang some more, my words falling on deaf ears. Life at school was a constant battle.

  Between school and madrasa we’d go home for a nap in the shade, where we were grateful for the gentle breeze that slowly shifted our curtains back and forth, desperate for any respite from the 40-degree heat of the Somali sun. The streets were empty between midday and 4pm, the shops shut up while their owners took a break from the thick Mogadishu air; even dogs and cats searched for a shady spot under a tree, or any other shadow that was cast on the dry ground. By the afternoon it was cooler in the classrooms of the madrasa, where we studied the Koran for hours and hours.

  There might have been respite from the heat, but the bullying was relentless. I’d go to pick up my Koran and as soon as my hand reached it the whispers would start.

  ‘Don’t touch the Koran, you’re not cut,’ they hissed. ‘You can’t touch it, you’re not clean.’

  The teacher seemed to be as oblivious to their words as he was to my tears. Had he heard? If he had, he didn’t say anything.

  As I trudged home from school that day, their insults ringing in my ears, I knew there was no escape from them. I’d seen the same happen to other girls; I knew now why some of them lied and said that they’d been cut when they hadn’t. It was too late for me to do the same. Those girls knew now for sure, all their suspicions were confirmed; there was no chance another playtime would go by, or another lesson at madrasa, without them making comments or faces, or singing songs about me.

  I wanted to be the same as them; or, if not the same, I wanted them not to even notice I was there. Why couldn’t I disappear into the dust that they kicked up in my face? Why couldn’t I stay at home instead of going to school? Or why couldn’t I be cut? Was I a coward? Perhaps my mother was wrong and they were right after all?

  When I got home that afternoon, Hoyo lifted me on to her lap and asked me what was wrong. It made a change from other days, when I’d come home with my knuckles red and bleeding after having them rapped with the fat, hard stick the teachers used on us when we couldn’t answer a question in maths. Then I’d long for her to pull me into her arms, to cover the back of my hand in soft kisses, when instead she’d take off her shoe and chase me around the house until I told her what I’d done to offend the teacher. Any Somalian mother would do the same, such was the respect that our teachers commanded.

  Today, though, it was the children who had hurt me, and so she pulled my skinny legs up into her lap and rocked me gently in her arms. Here I was safe, here I was in a place that I could trust. In Hoyo’s arms, everything was OK.

  ‘Tell me what’s wrong, Hibo,’ she whispered in my ear, planting light kisses on my cheeks.

  ‘They say I’m dirty,’ I cried. ‘They tell the other girls not to play with me because I still have kintir.’

  My mother was silent for a second, then I felt her warm, soft chest heave with a great big breath.

  ‘What have I told you, Hibo? Their words can’t hurt you. That’s all they are, just words. Ignore them.’

  My mother was my world – like most young children, much of life’s pain and cruelty could be cured by five minutes on her lap, wrapped tight in her embrace. But not this.

  ‘I can’t ignore them, Hoyo,’ I said, turning to look at her. ‘They won’t play with me – do you hear what they say? They say I’m not cut, that I’m dirty. That I’m a coward.’

  ‘Let them talk, Hibo,’ she said. ‘They’ll get bored eventually.’

  She had said the same thing to me a thousand times, but today I noticed a tiredness in her voice. A sigh that told me she wanted them to stop, too, that she knew that ignoring them wasn’t going to make them give up. My mother never grew tired of my questions, but I detected a profound weariness in the way she breathed out, expelling the air from deep in her chest.

  As the youngest child of three my days were spent at my mother’s ankles, feeling the waft of her skirt as I played on the floor at her feet, or listening – while pretending to look busy with a game – as she chattered with my aunties. I knew they didn’t think my mother should allow me to sit beside them as they weaved, or sewed, or prepared food together; I knew they didn’t want me to listen to their adult conversation. But time and again I heard my mother brush away their concerns, and gently reach down to place a hand on my shoulder instead. ‘She’s no bother there,’ she would tell the other women.

  I’d always shared everything with my mother, and from the moment I could remember speaking it seemed that I always had an endless list of questions for her. Mostly they were things like, ‘Why is it women who do all the cooking and cleaning? Why don’t women work? Who says they have to stay at home and look after their husband?’ My mother’s answers were invariably the same, a mock shock in her voice, a playful reprimand for questioning the role of women, a firm answer that I would do just as she and all women before us had – but always with a welcome ear to greet my next enquiry.

  The conversations between my mother and my aunties were always the same: what to eat, what to clean next, and men. Yet growing up there were never any men around. We shared our villa with them, but the only time we saw them was at mealtimes, and even then they’d sit and eat together rather than with us. This was the way in Somalia in those days, or at least in our home. I never once saw my mother and father together alone; my father didn’t play with me; the men went out to work or mosque, and the women stayed at home. The men ate together, talked together, smoked together, and the women looked after the children. Occasionally I might feel a passing hand ruffle my hair, or the arms of an uncle reach down to pull me up for a brief hug, but that was the extent of the male influence in our family life. We were brought up by women, we were fed by women, bathed by women, put to bed by women, and it was only at night when the midnight sky was spattered with stars that I would listen to the voices of my father and his brothers as they sat in our courtyard talking while I drifted off to sleep. My closest relationship had always been with my mother; she was who I confided in.

  As I cried in her lap, I felt the top of my head wet from her own tears. I didn’t want Hoyo to cry. Would it make her feel better if I was cut too? Was that the answer? Was it really my kintir that was causing all this sadness? If I didn’t have my kintir, would everything be OK? Would Hoyo stop crying?

  They said it’s just a little cut. Gudnin, they called it. I didn’t understand what it meant; I didn’t really understand what a kintir was either, only that it wasn’t meant to be there. The word in English is clitoris.

  It seemed to me that gudnin must be a good thing, otherwise why would the girls in the playground boast so much that it had been done to them? I wanted to be ju
st like they were; that’s why I wanted to have the little cut too, so they would play with me again. I didn’t know why Hoyo had made me wait so long for mine; the other girls in the playground made me feel like a baby when they said they were cut at three or four. My cousins always teased me that I was a baby – that even at six years old, Hoyo still tucked me up in bed and kissed me goodnight – but there was a big difference between their gentle leg-pulling and the cruel jibes of the girls at school. I could remember my cousins’ gudnin, the parties and the presents. I wanted to have the same.

  Finally I looked up and told her, ‘I want to be cut too, Hoyo. Then they’ll let me play again.’

  She took a deep breath then, and her hands wiped the tears first from my cheeks and then from her own.

  ‘Really?’ she said, as she searched my face.

  And I nodded, even though I wasn’t sure what I’d asked for. But I knew it must be something good because suddenly her frown turned into a huge smile, and her eyes lit up, bright and sparkling.

  ‘OK, then,’ she said, kissing my forehead. ‘Let’s do it.’

  Hoyo jumped out of her chair and began talking excitedly about all the plans for gudnin. She was naming all my favourite foods, she was wondering about presents, about the friends and relatives who would come to the house, fiddling with her headscarf at the thought of it all. And I was sure then that gudnin must be a good thing, if it had the power to make the girls in the playground stop being mean to me, if it made Hoyo as happy as she now appeared to be.

  I remember going to sleep that night, under a light cotton sheet and a moon that seemed some evenings to blaze as brightly as the sun it had replaced. I heard the gentle hum of my mother and my aunties planning my party; I heard the rustle of packets of food, of flour, of sugar, and a clang of pots and pans as they pulled them apart from one another.