Cut

by Hibo Wardere

  I remember that day so vividly. How I went over and over everything that my mother had told me. How in class, sitting behind my school desk, I’d chewed my pen almost frantically, trying to work out what it all meant. At breaktime, I didn’t stand and chat with my friends; all I could think about was trying to fill in the missing gaps. I’d gone through so much pain because the women in my family had done so before me – that wasn’t an explanation. I had gone through all this suffering for marriage, to stay pure for a man. What did she mean ‘for a man’? I looked around at the boys in my class, and wondered why I needed to be pure for them, and why what they thought of me mattered so much. Girls had to be ‘preserved’, subjected to all this pain and disfigurement – to the extent that even basic bodily functions like urinating and menstruating became difficult – all for a man.

  But I didn’t care what he would think of me, some nameless, faceless man I’d never laid eyes on. I only cared about the body that had been chopped and cut and mutilated. My body. I’d heard enough tales about girls who had gone into those huts and never come out. I thought about all those girls who, like me, were showered with gifts and food and parties, but whose own gudnin hadn’t gone to plan. ‘It was God’s way,’ is how the women put it, discarding their lives with just a few words. And all that, the blood, the flesh, the loss of life, that was all for a man?

  I thought then of my cousins, and the other girls I’d known who had got married, and I remembered how after their wedding we’d hear whispers that they weren’t sleeping in their marital bed, but in a hospital one instead. It happened to every single girl without fail. And months later, when they finally returned to visit, they were gaunt and skeletal, all light gone from their eyes. What had happened to them?

  My cousin Fatima was two years older than me, so we always knew she would get married before me. Fatima was excited, but as our other cousins talked about the engagement party I saw fear in her too. Of course she wanted to marry – she wanted to have her own home, and a family of her own – but she knew, too, that her wedding would probably be followed by a hospital visit, even if we didn’t understand why.

  When her wedding celebrations came around she was taken to visit various relatives, who gave her beautiful-smelling treatments to smooth her hair and lighten her face, and drew delicate henna designs on her fingers. The day before the ceremony we sat cross-legged in our bedroom for what would be our last night together. As the day had come closer I’d become more worried for her.

  ‘Please come back and tell me what happens after the wedding,’ I begged her, taking her hands in mine. ‘No one else will tell me.’

  We were both crying.

  ‘I don’t want you to go to hospital,’ I said, kissing her.

  ‘I’m scared, Hibo,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to go to hospital either.’

  ‘Promise me you’ll tell me,’ I pleaded.

  She nodded.

  ‘You have to promise on the Koran.’

  I crossed the room and picked up a copy. With shaking hands, she did as I asked.

  The wedding day was a huge celebration and I watched along with the rest of my family as the traditional red-and-black headdress – the shash – was placed on her head by the older women, a sign that she was now married. But I didn’t whoop in celebration for Fatima, because I was too terrified for her. Nobody is allowed to visit the bride and groom for the first seven days after they are married, but it didn’t stop me asking my family if they had any news of my cousin. I just wanted to know if she was OK, but nobody would tell me anything. Nor did I hear anything on the grapevine; this time there were not even any whispers, at least not any that reached me.

  I’d lie in bed at night and look over at her empty bed. ‘Where are you?’ I’d ask the darkness.

  Each day, for weeks, I’d ask my aunties when Fatima would come to see us.

  ‘She’ll come when she’s ready,’ was a stock reply.

  ‘She’s busy with her husband,’ was another.

  I knew in the pit of my stomach that she was sick, of course I knew, the ties that bound us so tightly were stronger than the miles anyone could put between us, but I was helpless; all I could do was pray that she would come soon. Fatima’s name had just disappeared from everyone’s lips, and when they did speak of her it was in hushed mutterings.

  And then finally, after three long months she came home to our villa. But the tall and beautiful girl I’d said goodbye to had gone, and in her place was a woman who had lost so much weight her cheekbones jutted out at sharp angles from her skull, her eyes sinking into the void that they left. Fatima had always been happy, carefree, forever helping her mother out in the house, nodding in concentration as her mother taught her how to apply kohl to her eyes in the months before she was ready to be married. Now she was like a ghost flitting between the rooms of our villa where once she’d darted in and out, laughing. I looked at her and all I could see was misery.

  I held on to her hand and pulled her to follow me into our old bedroom. Once we were there I shut the door and we sat down on my bed, just like we always had – except now, everything had changed. The sun shone in through the window shutter in slices, casting fragmented shadows on her drawn features, her hollowed cheeks. I threw my arms around her, feeling her ribs sticking out under my hug, both of us swallowing hot tears.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked her. ‘Why do you look like this?’

  She looked down.

  ‘Remember you promised,’ I said.

  ‘I was sick, I was in hospital,’ she said.

  ‘But why? You have a beautiful new house and a good husband, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Hibo,’ she said. ‘I have a nice husband but you have no idea what awaits you.’

  I sat back, frightened of what I was about to hear.

  ‘You know how we go to the toilet and we can’t even wee?’

  I nodded, slowly.

  ‘Imagine you have a rolling pin, and then imagine that going through you . . . down there.’

  I looked at her, confused. ‘Why would a rolling pin go in there?’

  She swallowed hard.

  ‘I’m comparing something to a rolling pin,’ she said. ‘You know your husband, he is the rolling pin . . . I don’t know how to tell you this, Hibo, but you have to sleep with your husband . . . He has a thing, and that thing becomes bigger, like a rolling pin, and that has to go through your tiny hole. That’s what they call sex.’

  What did I know about sex or the acts that men and women commit in the name of love? My mother had certainly never told me. Fatima knew this, of course, because she would have been just as naive on her wedding night as I was now. The women would have taken her aside at some point after the ceremony, once she was wed; they would have told her gently, but with little fuss, that she had duties to perform for her husband – that was the deal, the bargain for a ring on her finger and a home away from us. That was the price she would need to pay. And still she would not have understood, not until she was on that bed, with him approaching her. We were pure – as my mother had said, women in our family were known for their purity. She saw me floundering in possession of this new information and tried to explain it another way.

  I stared at her, still uncomprehending.

  ‘. . . I tore badly and I caught an infection, that’s why I was in hospital.’

  Everything around me just crashed, that’s the only way I can describe it.

  ‘They cut us to make sure the men find us like that.’

  And then, horrifyingly, the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle fell into place. My mother had told me that she wanted to preserve my virginity, that our family were known for being clean, and I hadn’t understood properly what virginity was, until now.

  I let go of Fatima’s hand then, and I staggered to the other side of the room. I sat on the floor in the corner and put my head between my knees. I rocked there, back and forth, praying a million times over that the same thing wouldn’t happen to me. I’d rather die
than go through that, I thought. And in that split second I hated men.

  ‘The pain hasn’t finished,’ Fatima was saying. ‘There is more to come.’

  Why was it my fate to be born a woman? I was in a nightmare and there was no escape. By now I was only catching the odd few words, as my thoughts ricocheted off the walls of my mind – ‘Lying on the bed in a pool of blood . . . Making noises like a wounded animal . . . His family dancing around the bed . . . Congratulating him on how pure you are . . .’

  I looked up at her, my face aghast as the horror of it washed over me in waves. This is what was waiting for me, to be torn open all over again, by someone else? I had survived the cutting, only to be served a second punishment? The fear had taken hold of my brain and with its grasping spindly fingers it was squeezing, squeezing, squeezing. Please God, I begged. I don’t want to be in pain anymore. I pleaded, I bargained, I begged. I prayed.

  ‘Hibo . . .’ I felt my cousin put her arm around my shoulders, as she sat down gingerly beside me again. ‘You said you wanted to know.’

  And I did, I did want to know. We were kept pure for men, and then broken in by them. And what happened to us in the meantime was completely irrelevant in the pursuit of their pleasure, or their integrity, their masculinity. Were females really valued so little? Would my own daughters face the same fate?

  I was back in that hut, on that raging river of pain and unable to get off because this was my life, this was my destiny. I would be married to one of my scruffy cousins – I will have been deformed, defiled, kept pure for him, so he can open me up again, and then my daughter will be chopped and maimed for her own husband and, just like my mother told me, there would be nothing I could do about it because it has happened to every woman before us. I sobbed and sobbed – for myself, for my daughters, for all the women and girls in Somalia, past, present and future.

  If only I could have vowed then that I would change the future, that I wouldn’t let what befell Fatima happen to me, but I knew it was out of my hands; it was what I was born into. And so I decided in that moment that I would rather die than face the same fate, endure more pain, and that I would protect any daughters of mine from the same.

  And this was a promise I intended to keep.

  7

  Freedom

  From up in the clouds, the lights below twinkled a starry welcome to me. My forehead had been stuck to the tiny window of the aeroplane since we’d taken off from Nairobi. As the plane had lifted up from the ground, I’d waved goodbye to the arid land beneath me, and watched the eight-hour movie that whizzed by at my window. We’d soared up above the clouds into the deep blue sky, each hour bringing me closer to Britain, to freedom. I hadn’t slept for the flight like most of my fellow passengers; instead, I’d kept upright in my seat, not wanting to miss a minute of the journey that would change my life.

  I was eighteen when that plane took off from Kenya. Never in my wildest dreams had I imagined ever leaving Somalia, but then civil war had broken out in our country and our president was overthrown. None of the tribes could agree on a replacement for him, and fighting between rival factions meant that the country could not deal with natural disasters like drought and therefore famine. The stories of homes that were broken into during the night, girls who were raped in front of their parents by militia, had grown increasingly loud and increasingly close in the months that preceded my father sending my mother, my brother and sister and me to Kenya. He thought it would be just until the country settled down, and we’d gone into Kenya illegally and without paperwork. Our villa had been the only home I’d known, life in Mogadishu was all that I’d ever known, but the day I was told we were leaving the country that had brutalised me was one of the best of my life. Who would have thought that out of such destruction could come the freedom I’d longed for?

  In Kenya we had been refugees, travelling from home to home without paperwork, at risk every day we spent in Nairobi of being sent back to possible death, and yet I was never scared, not as scared as I would have been back in my homeland. That country might have been my home, but, as far as I was concerned, it had betrayed me and every other woman like me.

  To be a feminist as an African woman in those days was an unusual thing, but when I look back now there is no other word to describe the person I was. As a child I’d questioned why my mother was happy to cook and clean for the family, why she had no ambitions of her own. And she would tell me: ‘Those are not jobs for women. Your place is with your husband, with your children.’ I never understood that as a child, and as a teenager I was appalled by the idea, because I’d known from just a few years old that I didn’t want to be my mother. I wanted to be something more than her. It wasn’t just because of what she’d done to me; it was the way she viewed womanhood, as if it were only something truly satisfying as long as there was a man to take you and accept you, someone for you to cook and clean for. It started off as a feeling for me, that desire to be something more than my mother, and over the years as my hatred for her grew it became a determined act of defiance. I would be more than a wife and a mother. I felt as though each mile that took me further from Somalia would give me the opportunity to be more than her.

  I loved Nairobi. The roads were tarmacked, so different from the dusty, unfinished ones back in Mogadishu, and the houses had an upstairs. I loved the tall buildings, and the green parks where people took rowing boats out on the lake.

  Even though Hadsan was married, my mother had insisted we weren’t leaving Somalia without her. So there was me, Hoyo, Hadsan, two of my cousins and my brother. Hadsan’s husband followed us out there, and we relied on the generosity of friends and family to keep us hidden from the authorities. Each time the police found us, we managed to send them away with the money they wanted, but whatever they asked for only bought us twenty-four hours before they’d be knocking again at whatever new door we were then hiding behind. It wasn’t an easy life, but, as far as I was concerned, it was still better than Somalia.

  After we’d been staying with friends in Nairobi for a year, my father phoned my mother in the middle of the night. In the morning, when she sat us down, fatigue had carved deep grooves beneath her eyes, and she looked older than I’d remembered from the night before.

  ‘Your father says you are to make your own lives now,’ my mother told us. ‘He said we can’t go back to Mogadishu.’

  If I’d shared a closer bond with my mother, if it hadn’t been broken, I might have wanted to stay with her, but when I knew I was free to go wherever I wanted to claim asylum as a refugee, I couldn’t wait to leave her side. Ninety per cent of Somalians were choosing Canada, my people were leaving on planes in their thousands. But I didn’t want to go there – there was a name that appealed to me more than anywhere, a word that sounded so different, so intriguing, so interesting: London.

  ‘I want to go to London,’ I told my mother.

  So when my mother heard of a family friend, Zahara, who was flying to London, she agreed I could go with her. Zahara was in her thirties, an older, responsible person for my eighteen-year-old self to travel with, to be my chaperone as I headed up into the sky on a new adventure. But to me, leaving Africa didn’t just mean safety from the civil war; it meant freedom from my own culture. It meant saving my life.

  The plane circled the airport before making its descent, and then finally I heard the captain address us over the Tannoy: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to London Heathrow.’ I had arrived. Hibo had arrived, and I knew this was just the beginning. Tears started running down my face.

  I was free.

  I was free.

  ‘Don’t you want to be here?’ asked Zahara, seeing my tears.

  But I wanted it more than anything I’d ever wanted before.

  We disembarked, but not to the balmy evening we’d left in Nairobi. Instead, there was a breeze so cold that when I arrived at the plane doors to exit, the shock of it pushed me back into the aircraft. Goosebumps stood to attention on my arms like they never
had before.

  ‘Are you OK?’ the stewardess said.

  I looked down at the long trousers I had on and the thin shirt, and she immediately seemed to understand I was too terrified of the cold to step outside. She kept me on board until all the other passengers had filtered off, and then Zahara gave me her denim jacket and one of her big scarves. But even as I walked carefully down the stairs, seeing the lights of the night shimmering against the tarmac, my teeth were chattering. Inside the airport terminal, out of the cruelty of the wind, I asked Zahara if I could stop to use the first toilet we saw, and in there I burst into tears again. A million thoughts raced through my mind: this is freedom, this is my life now. I will choose who I love; I will choose who I marry. But, most importantly, I would choose not to have my own daughters cut. Just by arriving in this country, I had saved future babies from mutilation and I cried because there was no other feeling of freedom like it. I knew from that moment on I would decide everything and be in charge of my life in this new land, with these pink people who call themselves white. And even then, I knew one of the first things I was going to ask for: to be opened.

  When I came out of the toilet, Zahara was waiting for me.

  ‘Why are you crying again?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m just so happy,’ I told her.

  We followed the last of the crowds from the plane towards a large area where a huge queue of people snaked its way round the room. There, two police officers came towards us, and we handed them the fake passports with which we’d travelled and embarked the plane. We told them the word we’d been taught to say back in Kenya, the only English word we knew then: ‘Asylum.’ And they indicated for us to follow them. They took us to a room and motioned for us to sit. It was difficult to know whether I was shaking with nerves or from the cold, but one of the police officers saw I was shivering and handed me his jacket, then he came back with two steaming coffees for us. They were so kind, right from the start, and although I realised that my life was in their hands until we made it out of the airport, I never worried they’d send us back to Kenya.