Cut

by Hibo Wardere

  Eventually a woman called Margaret appeared – she was an older woman, maybe fifty, and her face was lined with kindness. She spoke a few words of Somali, enough to ask our names and how old we were. She asked if we were hungry and I nodded so hard I felt sure my head might roll straight off my shoulders. She left the room and returned with a tuna sandwich and a banana, which I ate quickly. A few moments later she reappeared, this time with a man who would be our translator. The immigration officers sat in front of us, with Biros and serious set faces, and wrote down on a form everything our translator reported back to them. They wanted to know everything about us: where we were from, why we left, where our parents were, if we had any siblings.

  The questions were exhausting and endless, and when eventually they’d finished the translator explained to us that Margaret would be taking us to a hostel in London. There we would receive income support – £25 a week – while they processed our application for asylum. Finally, after a whole day spent in the airport, we were on our way, and I sat in the back of Margaret’s small car, watching the lights of London loom bigger and brighter towards us. I was here in this city which sounded so wonderful, and to me everything about it was beautiful and so different from anything I’d ever seen. It was December when we arrived in the UK and as we got out of the car, snow crunched under my feet. I looked down at it, mesmerised by the whiteness of it, and when I bent down and picked it up between two fingers, the delight on my face must have been obvious because Margaret laughed before beckoning me to follow her into the hostel.

  Cecil House was right in the centre of London, in an area called Holborn; it was a dark-brown brick tenement building with white sash windows. Anyone else might have thought it was an ugly-looking place, but to me it represented the first bed that I’d slept in without my mother on the other side of my door, and for no other reason than that I thought it was wonderful. But I was tired, so tired, and when Margaret showed me the room I’d be sleeping in with another Somalian girl, which had two single beds and our own toilet, I crawled straight on to one of the beds. I cuddled myself up within the duvet, the first I’d ever seen in my life, and, wrapped up in this warm cloud, I stopped shivering for the first time as sleep took me far away in my dreams, to the only place they knew, the dusty streets of Mogadishu that had once been so familiar.

  Margaret returned the next day and took me shopping, and I fell in love with London that day as we walked down Oxford Street, Margaret pointing out all the Christmas decorations that twinkled and shimmered above my head. I’d never seen anything so beautiful before. In London, as if to embrace this new sense of freedom, for a time I abandoned the headscarf I’d worn since I was a little girl.

  In the days that followed, I got to know more of the other Somalian girls at the hostel. It was strange how tribal everyone was: despite the fact that we were miles from our homeland, the girls from northern Somalia only wanted to speak to other northern girls, which left me with the girls who, like me, were from the south. Except they weren’t like me at all, they weren’t young and naive – Nasra and Habiba were ten years older and a lot more confident. They’d been living in Italy for six or more years so they were used to the Western way of things. Unlike me, they didn’t marvel at the fact there were flushing toilets in the hostel, standing and flushing them over and over, wondering where the water might go, or stare astonished as a seemingly endless supply of water shot from taps after just one little turn. They also looked cool. Nasra had a white Afro and Habiba had bright-red hair, and I felt so juvenile with my long black hair, which Hoyo had allowed to grow down to my bottom. Inspired by Nasra and Habiba, I took a pair of scissors to it, chopping it away until it reached my neck. I put the pile of hair at my feet into the bin, and along with it some memories of my mother.

  ‘What have you done?’ Nasra asked me the following day. ‘We loved your hair!’

  But I didn’t care; it would grow back and, anyway, I loved my new short bob.

  We’d go out walking in the late afternoon, exploring the streets of London. Every time I’d see a dress covered in sequins in a shop window, I’d long for it, stopping to admire it.

  ‘I wish it was mine,’ I’d say.

  And the girls would tease me. ‘You’re addicted to sparkly things,’ they’d sigh.

  There was a whole range of different women at the hostel, not just African girls like us, but English ones too. There was one older woman, who never told me her name, but she must have been in her seventies. She was beautifully dressed and wore colourful beaded necklaces that rattled on her chest every time she moved. She made jewellery and I used some of my income support to buy her beads. I wanted to try everything this country had to offer – short hair, jeans, beads, the lot. Many days I’d waste just trying on clothes in shops, twirling in the changing-room mirror in tops that showed my midriff. I felt like anything was possible, and it was. First, though, I had to free myself physically.

  I’d been in the hostel for two weeks when I asked to see a doctor. The lady who ran the hostel booked an appointment for me at a GP’s surgery around the corner, and I went along on my own, determined not to tell the other women what I wanted; instinct told me not to share my secret. We had never discussed gudnin in Somalia, and I knew it would be no different in London.

  I walked into the surgery, and up to the receptionist’s desk. As I waited in the queue I looked around the room, at the white walls covered with colourful posters, containing words that meant nothing to me. On hard chairs sat patients waiting with serious faces, some flicking through old magazines, mothers chastising their children for not keeping still, all of them so aware of the process, so familiar with their surroundings, the sterile smell, the hush that hung heavy in the room. When my name was called, I took a deep breath and went through the door the receptionist gestured towards. The doctor was sitting behind her desk wearing a warm smile, red jacket and black trousers. Her lips were pink and her eyes were blue, and she had painted blue mascara on to her lashes, which mesmerised me, momentarily distracting me from my purpose.

  ‘How can I help?’ she said.

  ‘No English,’ I told her, swiping my hands outwards.

  So in turn she touched her head, her arms, her stomach. ‘Does it hurt here? Here? Here?’ she asked.

  I shook my head, then tentatively pointed down between my legs. She nodded, understanding. She stood up from behind her desk and led me over to a couch, motioning for me to take off my trousers and get up on to the bed.

  I did as she said, noticing, as I unzipped my jeans, that my hands were shaking; my heart was pounding against my chest so loudly that I was sure she would hear it. I climbed on to the couch and lay down, staring at the stucco tiles on the ceiling, trying to mentally bat away the images that flooded into my mind, because suddenly and quite unexpectedly I was six years old again, on my back, naked from the waist down, exposed. One after the other the images came: the sight of my mother beside me, my auntie pulling at my leg, the cutter’s strange eyes, my fear. My hands shook violently. My knees stayed clamped together as I tried to breathe, slowly in, slowly out. I had wanted so much to be here, to get help, and now I wondered how that might happen when I couldn’t bring myself to open my legs and allow the doctor to examine me.

  The doctor saw my distress.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she said gently, touching my knee. ‘Can you open?’ and she gestured with her hands, as if miming opening a book.

  I tried, really I did, but the images were coming harder and faster.

  ‘It’s OK, it’s OK,’ she said again.

  But all I could see was the cutter, slowly adjusting her scarf, dipping her hands in the kettle of water, those two long pincer nails . . .

  I took another deep breath, and then another. You’re here now, Hibo, I told myself. Let her help you – this is your chance. So somehow, ever so slowly, I allowed my legs to fall apart, just a few millimetres at first, her hands gently guiding them. And then finally, I was exposed and she saw for hersel
f what I’d never yet dared to see with my own eyes. Skin snipped away, a hole just the size of a matchstick where my vagina should be. All other evidence of my femininity deleted and stitched over.

  I burst into tears, just at the thought of what she saw before her, and feeling so ashamed of the way I looked, of the way they’d left me. I didn’t want this doctor to think I was a freak, because that’s how I thought of myself. She handed me a tissue, and then she went over to the small sink in her room, splashed water on to her face and dried it with a paper towel, before turning back to me. Noticing that she was so moved by what she’d seen somehow made me feel like I had an ally, that at last someone could see what they’d done to me back in Somalia. For the first time since I was six years old, someone was sympathising with me. Just her look told me that, and suddenly I wasn’t frightened anymore.

  She nodded and gestured to me to get dressed, and handed me an appointment card for 3:30pm the following day.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she asked, taking my arm before I left her office. And I nodded. ‘OK,’ I repeated, because I trusted her.

  I didn’t go straight back to the hostel after I left the surgery – I needed to gather myself together before I went home, because I knew that if anyone there found out what I was planning there would be repercussions. As I sat in a nearby park, watching the male pigeons dance around the females in an attempt to woo them, I understood that something now separated me from those other girls at the hostel. In sharing this secret with that doctor and showing her what had been done to me, I had taken the first step towards speaking out. For the second time in my life, I knew it was about to change irrevocably.

  I couldn’t sleep that night. I lay there in my bed, watching the beams of vehicle lights flicker across the walls of my room and listening to the sounds of the street. Perhaps it was the excitement that was keeping me awake, and perhaps it was the fear of what might happen the next day, when I returned to the surgery. It was probably a combination of both.

  The following afternoon, back in the GP’s waiting room, I sat across from another more official-looking Somalian woman. I guessed she was my translator. We smiled and said hello, but nothing more, although I could tell from the way her eyes crinkled when she smiled that she was a kind woman. She must have been in her thirties, and was dressed in a very Western way, smart with long trousers, and she had a wide smile underneath a red hijab.

  A few moments later we were both called into the doctor’s office and I felt relief, not fear, to see this kind doctor again. She spoke and in turn the translator said to me in Somali: ‘The doctor wants to know what you want her to do.’

  So I told her: ‘I want her to open me.’ And I watched, seemingly in slow motion, as my words took away the smile and replaced it with a look as if I’d just slapped her across the face.

  ‘What do you mean “open”?’ she asked.

  ‘I want the doctor to open me up down there,’ I said. ‘Can you tell her?’

  ‘No! What do you want to do that for? You can’t do that!’

  ‘But I’m in pain . . .’

  Her eyebrows bedded themselves down in lines which pointed angrily towards her nose.

  ‘You are Somalian, just like me,’ she said. ‘If you do that it will have massive consequences for you. I don’t want to be responsible for you being opened! I won’t tell the doctor that. You will be talked about, your mother will be devastated and your family dishonoured – people will call you a whore, no one will marry you . . .’

  For a minute, all I could do was stare at her. I couldn’t believe the words that were tumbling from her mouth. We were thousands of miles away from Somalia, in another culture. This couldn’t be happening! This white woman wanted to help me and the translator wouldn’t tell her how. The doctor sat behind her desk and watched, her eyes flicking between the pair of us, obviously trying to understand what was being said.

  ‘I don’t care who marries me or doesn’t marry me,’ I said firmly. ‘I don’t care what Somalian people think. I want to be opened. Can you please tell the doctor what I want? That is your job.’

  She point-blank refused. ‘Mayo,’ she said – no.

  I tried again. Again she refused.

  ‘Mayo. I’m not going to be responsible for you destroying your life.’

  ‘I’m not destroying my life,’ I told her. ‘I’m trying to build it. And you need to tell her I want to be opened.’

  She shook her head, and wagged her finger at me. ‘Mayo, mayo, mayo.’

  The doctor was leaning across her desk at this point, I assume asking the translator to repeat in English what I was saying, but the translator just sat there shaking her head.

  ‘Who the hell are you to refuse to translate for me?’ I said suddenly, frustration now bubbling over into anger. ‘You are not my auntie. We might be Somalian but I don’t know you. You’re an evil woman. Just do what you’re paid to do!’

  And again she said no.

  ‘Burn in hell,’ I spat out at her. And at this point, the doctor stood up from behind her desk. She’d obviously seen enough. She led me to her door, and gestured for me to sit outside. The door closed and I heard them arguing behind it – I think everybody in the waiting room did. I longed to know what was being said, but a few moments later, when the translator left the room, slamming the door behind her and opening her mouth to give me one last lecture, I had an inkling.

  I put my hand up to silence her. ‘Bye bye,’ I said. And she was gone.

  When I went back into the office, it was clear that the doctor now knew what I wanted, and gave me an appointment to go to a different surgery a few days later. I was going to be opened. I knew that for certain.

  As arranged, I attended a different surgery to undergo the procedure. I was taken into the room where I’d be operated on and I noticed a shaped knife, a needle and an apron. The smell of antiseptic permeated the room, the sterilised tools glinted in their packaging, and rolls of gauze were stacked neatly nearby. How different from the crude tools used to inflict this mutilation upon me.

  I undressed as the doctor instructed, and lay upon the couch. She showed me the needle and did her best to explain that she was going to numb the area. All these surgical objects seemed so alien, and yet, despite how terrifying it felt to expose myself again, to open my legs so she could do her work, the equipment she held up looked so clean, everything was so professional, so calm, compared to what I’d experienced before. This time I was in control, I was deciding what happened to my body, so there was no need to be scared; I just had to listen to what she said, try to understand, and let her help me. There was no translator this time, perhaps because of what had occurred before.

  The sharp prick of the needle as the anaesthetic was injected into my skin was nothing compared to the pain I’d known all those years ago. There was a flowery curtain that separated the couch I was on from the rest of the room, and so as she got to work, I focused on that, until a few minutes later the doctor looked up and indicated that it was done. She had opened me, just as I’d wanted, not all the way, just an inch or so, but enough to expose my urethra so I could wee properly.

  As I lay there, a part of me hoped that the process of being opened would undo all of the damage – that somehow it might give me back the life I’d had before I was cut, and that it might magically restore my relationship with my mother. As if by repairing what had been done to me physically, I could wipe away the psychological scars too.

  I rested on the doctor’s couch for over an hour after the surgery, waiting and recovering. Every so often she checked on me, making sure I wasn’t in any pain, asking if I was OK and receiving my nod in reply. And then finally I asked to go to the toilet.

  Once the doctor had helped me down from the bed, I hobbled to the cubicle, pulled the string to turn on the light and shut the door behind me. Carefully I lifted my gown and slowly lowered myself on to the toilet. And there, in that tiny room, I weed normally for the first time in twelve years. Out it came, in on
e great gush, a full flow at last. And suddenly, my mind took me back to being six years old, of dashing in and out of the toilet as I had as a child, my mother chastising me for being too quick. ‘Go back in there and wash your hands!’ I heard her saying, and I smiled then because I’d been given back a happy memory of a better time. For a second, I had my Hoyo back, and then she was gone. I let out a huge sigh, and several great sobs, as I sat on that plastic toilet seat and felt a release that was both physical and emotional. I was one more step closer to freedom.

  8

  Yusuf

  The man who came to pick us up from Leyton station was tall, slim, with a huge smile. His name was Yusuf, and this was to be the first time I clapped eyes on my future husband. Not that I knew it at the time. Nasra and Habiba had been talking about us getting a place of our own for a few weeks now. Three months had rolled by in the hostel, queuing up for our breakfast each morning and paying £1.70 for an evening meal. We got used to the rules of the place, that we had to be in before 10pm or we’d be locked out by Melanie, who guarded the front door. Nasra said a place of our own would give us more freedom; we’d be able to cook together, come and go as we pleased.

  Margaret offered to help me fill in the forms for housing benefit, and Nasra had heard of some other girls who had found their own place. They’d had help from some Somalian guys who knew an estate agent in Leyton, east London, so Nasra said she’d go and meet them for us, to find out if we could do it too. She arrived home that evening, not full of news about the house, but of Yusuf, and when I saw him arrive at the station I felt heat race to my cheeks because I understood why.