by Hibo Wardere
He put down the knife and fork he’d been about to use to tuck into his lamb odka, rice and spinach.
‘Are you sure?’ he said. ‘Do you think you’re ready?’
I nodded yes.
‘I need to do it for girls like Halima, I need to tell people exactly what FGM is, that it’s more than just three letters, about what it does to a girl, what it takes away from her, I need to help try and stop it.’
Yusuf took a deep breath.
‘Do you really think you can change people’s minds?’ he asked.
‘I have to try,’ I told him.
So after we’d got the kids to bed, I sat with my laptop in the living room while Yusuf sat on the stairs – I’d told him I wanted to be totally alone to write; I knew it was going to be hard and I didn’t want him to see me break down. But he refused to go to bed; instead, he stayed out of the room but close enough in case I needed him. It was hard going back to that day and, with each word I typed, the little details came back to me ever stronger: the cutter’s cold, impassive face, her terrible tools, the smell of blood in the heat. Each time I felt myself crack and crumble under the weight of my own story, Yusuf was beside me, an arm around my shoulder, a tissue to wipe away my tears.
‘You don’t need to do this now,’ he told me.
‘I do,’ I said. ‘It’s important.’
I just closed my eyes and thought of Halima, and the image of her desolation was enough to keep me writing, however painful it was. More memories flooded in of the barbaric and medieval abuse I’d suffered – the sense of abandonment, the hours that passed in a haze of burning, the stench of urine, the agonisingly slow process of weeing. It was as if by opening that small gap in my mind, the ugliness of all those years ago seeped in like an acrid smoke, blackening everything in the world I lived in now, leaving its sooty fingerprints on all that was good and clean and new. I’d convinced myself that being in Britain was enough for me to leave the past behind, but on dark nights when I couldn’t sleep or at dawn when I’d woken up too early even for the birds, I’d imagined the girls back in Somalia. But in my mind they’d been thousands of miles away, they weren’t in London, at my Walthamstow school. They weren’t running around the playground with my own children.
And so I kept writing, and by the time I’d finished it was almost time to get the children up for school. I applied my black eyeliner thick that morning, as if it might somehow hide the lack of sleep and my puffy eyes. But I was armed with more than just make-up. At school I printed off four copies of my own story of FGM: one for the head teacher, and one each for my eldest children, the two boys – Abdinasir, by now twenty-two, and Ali, twenty – and my eldest girl, Amal, seventeen. It wasn’t just time to tell my employers my story – it was time to tell my own family.
After the head had seen all the pupils arrive safely at school, I followed him to his office. There, I went in and shut the door behind me.
‘I need you to read this,’ I said, placing the printout in front of him. ‘It’s important.’
It was only a six-page document, yet I felt as if the weight of it had landed on his desk with a heavy thud. He picked it up and started to read, and as I stood in front of his desk and I watched his eyes scan the paper from left to right, he was soon overcome with emotion.
When he finished it, he looked up at me, clearly moved.
‘Hibo, I had no idea this happened to you,’ he said quietly, as he put my assignment down. ‘But I promise you that from now on FGM will be in our child protection policy.’
Already, with this one small act, I had made a difference. He got up and left the office and when he returned he had two deputy heads with him. I sat with them as they both read the same transcript.
‘You need to share this with the rest of the staff,’ one of them said, running her hand over her face.
But I shook my head, overwhelmed by the prospect. That was 120 people.
‘No,’ I insisted. ‘This was only for you,’ I said, looking to the head teacher.
I was known among my colleagues as Hibo the joker, as someone who was fun, who always wore a wide smile. I didn’t want them to think of me as a freak. All my very worst fears about how FGM had, in my mind, singled me out rushed up from my belly, lying heavy on my chest. I didn’t want my friends to look at me differently, and yet I knew that this was a story they also needed to read if we were going to protect more children. So I agreed to think about it.
That night, I left school with the remaining copies destined for three readers who meant more to me than anyone. My two eldest sons were out so I placed a copy on each of their beds, and then I handed one to Amal. She glanced up at me quizzically when she saw the title and the name of the author.
‘What’s this, Mum?’ she asked.
‘I’d like you to read it.’
I sat across the living room from her as the story that had taken me all night, a thousand tears – and a lifetime – to write was eaten up by Amal’s eyes in a matter of minutes. When she looked up at me, I saw that they were glistening with tears.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about this before?’ she said. ‘I had no idea this had happened to you.’
I nodded.
‘But I thought we talked about everything,’ she said. ‘How could you not tell me about this when it was such a huge thing that happened to you?’
I could see she was upset for me, but there was something else in her eyes too, an anger perhaps that I hadn’t told her about it before, that I thought she couldn’t handle the truth. Maybe even betrayal. I needed to explain.
‘This was a conversation I needed to have myself first,’ I told her. ‘I’m sorry I never discussed this with you, but I haven’t been able to speak to anyone about it apart from your father until now.’
She turned the essay over in her hands, as if examining its contents while the full meaning of it sank in, a secret about her mother she never knew.
‘You kept the biggest part of your life a secret from me,’ she said.
I’d always vowed to be open with my children, but now I realised that she was looking at me in the same way I had looked at my mother, and all I could say was sorry.
‘It consumed me for so many years,’ I said. ‘But now I’m in a position to tell you.’
I think, just like all children, she appreciated my honesty.
‘I have heard of FGM,’ she said. ‘I had a friend at school and she was cut.’
Now she was telling me something I didn’t know. For years I’d thought I’d been shielding her from a truth, but she knew about it all the time.
‘Why didn’t you ask me about it?’ I asked her.
‘I didn’t know how,’ she replied.
When she was younger, I remember asking her if she had any Somalian friends at school and what they talked about, trying to find out whether FGM was something she might have heard of from them. But it seemed to me that she didn’t know a thing about it and, back then, that’s how I wanted it to stay. Now, though, it was time for me to tell her.
‘I did hear about it, but it never seemed important because I just knew it was something you wouldn’t do to us,’ Amal said.
And that in itself was success.
‘I can’t believe this happened to you,’ she said, spotting my tears and crossing the room to wrap me in a hug. ‘You are so courageous, and such a wonderful mum. Thank you so much for protecting me.’
We talked a little more that evening in the way that only mothers and daughters can – or should be able to. When my boys got home they read it too, but they didn’t want to ask me questions like Amal had.
‘I only heard about FGM recently as part of my medical training,’ Abdinasir said. ‘But I never thought it would have happened to you, Mum.’
And all three of my children agreed on one thing – that they were proud of me for finally telling my story. Their reaction, along with that of the head teacher and his deputies, convinced me that I needed to share my story wider still. A week
later, I stood in an empty school assembly hall. It was the end of another day, and slowly the hum of children chattering as their parents collected them from school was replaced with silence in the playground as the last ones left through the gates.
In one hand, I clutched my essay, those three letters – FGM – now as familiar to me as my own name. Slowly, my colleagues started filtering in and taking up the rows of seats that had been laid out by the caretaker. The empty hall was filled with the quiet conversations of the staff, tired from a day’s teaching, but curious to know why I was standing in front of them. Finally, the head introduced me. I was by now forty-two – it had taken me thirty-six years to speak about what had happened to me back in Mogadishu, and within days I’d gone from telling my children to addressing a hall packed with people. But as I stepped up to the microphone at the front of the room, on legs that I felt sure were about to give way, I knew that it was time for somebody to speak out, and if not me, then who?
I cleared my throat. ‘Hello everyone,’ I said tremulously, and I heard my voice waver.
So many faces stared in my direction, some I had come to think of as friends, others were my bosses and mentors, but none of them knew the secret that I hid deep inside. I closed my eyes and thought of Halima. And that’s who I spoke up for.
‘I want to tell you my story,’ I started. ‘You might find it uncomfortable, but it’s one that you should know.’
I started off by telling them about the four different types of FGM, and how it was Type 3 that was carried out on me. I did feel exposed; it was incredibly hard for me to divulge to them that under the colourful dresses I wore to school, under my abaya, I had been mutilated. That as I’d joked with them in the canteen, or stood at the school gates looking like any other British mum, something separated me from them. I was different. I had been abused as a child and, tearfully, I told them what had been done, how it had been done and by whom.
When I’d finished, I looked out at a sea of faces, many of them wet with their own tears, and for a few minutes, as I gathered my breath, nothing filled the school hall except a heavy silence as the weight of what I’d told them sank in. Finally, someone spoke, and once they did, it was like the floodgates opening.
‘I remember one girl a few years ago, she went to Somalia and when she returned she was never the same . . .’
‘I had a pupil a few years ago who suddenly became very withdrawn . . .’
‘I mentioned my fears to a former head teacher of mine but she said that it was their culture and we shouldn’t interfere . . .’
I felt the loneliness of every child that my colleagues mentioned they’d come across over the years. Many of the girls they talked about were in Year Two or Three, the same age as my Ikram, and that thought alone was enough to turn my stomach inside out with horror. Now they’d heard my story, more and more stories of their own began to surface, and so did more and more questions.
‘Is it a religious practice?’ someone asked.
‘No!’ I said. ‘There is nothing in the Koran that says girls should be cut. It is purely a cultural practice and it is one hundred per cent child abuse.’
The weight of that statement settled in the room, and I knew it changed everything. Perhaps people had tiptoed around the subject thinking that they needed to respect a religious belief, but now that they knew the plain truth, I could see their understanding of it grow in a second. This was not a religious command, it was a choice, and just as Yusuf and I had made the choice not to have our daughters cut, so too could every other mother and father.
‘Religion should never be used as an excuse for abusing a child,’ I told the staff, and they nodded. I felt liberated and empowered. And I realised that by talking about it, I stood a chance of saving one more girl.
Finally, the talk was over, and as I left the stage, staff came up to me one by one to congratulate me.
‘You were so brave to speak out,’ one said.
‘I had no idea,’ another said.
My colleagues were incredible and so supportive; they had made me feel safe to tell my story. Many of them came to hug me, some were in tears, others angry that this could happen to little girls, but all of them were determined that this message needed to be heard.
‘You have to talk to staff at other schools,’ my head teacher said.
The other teaching staff nodded.
‘They need to hear about this too, Hibo,’ someone else said. ‘It’s so important.’
I decided there and then that I would use my own trauma to educate others. I’d spent my whole life feeling sad that FGM had shaped so much of my story, but in that moment, as the staff filtered from the room, energised, determined and grateful to me for my honesty, I realised it could be a blessing too, because my own experiences might just change another girl’s future.
13
Spreading the Word
It had been barely three months since I had first addressed the teaching staff at Mission Grove School, but here I was, on stage again, staring out at rows of attentive faces. The council chamber I was about to speak to was only meant to hold 100, and yet it was alive with the expectant hum of nearly 300 people. I had already given another talk to teaching staff at a school in Leyton, and I felt now the growing wave of action picking up more and more momentum as my story rolled off the platform. These were all people who were rallying themselves in the fight against FGM; who sat up in their chairs that little bit higher when they realised that FGM wasn’t just something I knew about, but something I had gone through myself. And the shame that I’d felt at being potentially labelled a freak had long since been erased by the numerous emails praising me for being brave enough to speak out. But what pleased me most was that people were willing to listen.
My friend and school counsellor, Claire Colgill, had arranged the talk today, and the pair of us sat on the stage as she began to interview me about my own story. I answered her questions with absolute honesty, not missing out one bit of my account. I saw people shift uncomfortably in their seats, I saw them cross and uncross their legs, and often I saw their tears, too, as they imagined themselves in the place of a six-year-old girl who had been pinned down while her own flesh was sliced off in front of her bulging eyes. I wanted them to hear those details, every single one of them, no matter how hard it was, because I wanted my words to leave my mouth and fly across the council chamber, pricking at their consciences in the hope that they might in turn protect another girl. The council chamber that night was packed not just with teachers, but with people from the education department, social workers, police officers and members of the general public as well.
Four months had passed now since we’d sat in my head teacher’s office with Halima’s parents, and she hadn’t been returned to school as they’d promised. The return air tickets that they produced later turned out to be fakes. They also took their eldest daughter from secondary school without the school’s consent. Neither of those girls ever returned. The best I could hope for was that their parents, fearing an intervention from the school or social services, had moved away. The worst fear was that their slight bodies had succumbed to shock or infection in a hut not unlike the one in which I had lain. But at night, when I flopped into bed beside Yusuf, exhausted from a day at school and then another talk at a council chamber or school, I only had to think of them in order to feel reinvigorated about the fight. I wondered why the pull of this cultural tradition was still so strong for some parents, when I’d been able to turn my back on it so easily. Draining as it was, speaking to a room of people about my personal experience seemed a small sacrifice to make compared to the danger these girls faced, and, in a way, vocalising what had been done to me was my own form of therapy.
Soon, the local newspaper was contacting me, asking me to write a piece about my own FGM and the work I was doing with schools to educate teachers about the signs to look out for. My head teacher had told other local principals that I had an important message which they needed to hear; s
o, often at the end of the school day, I’d hurry to the other side of Walthamstow, sometimes with my children in tow, to speak in front of another assembly hall full of teachers. ‘Thank you for listening this afternoon,’ I’d tell them, so much more confidently than the first time I’d had to talk into a microphone. And then professionals further afield heard about my work in Walthamstow. The Metropolitan Police contacted me at the school to ask if I’d give a talk to some of their officers.
‘I don’t know if I can do it,’ I said to Yusuf. ‘What will I talk to the police about?’
‘You can,’ he said. ‘You’ll think of something.’
I met with an officer from the Metropolitan Police, just one at first, and I gave her the same talk as I had everyone about the basics of FGM and what was done to me. And then I moved on to the law.
‘I realise this practice has been illegal since 1985 in this country,’ I said. ‘But the key to stopping FGM isn’t just prosecutions.’
She sat up in her chair and listened.
‘What you have to remember is that the mother who has it done to her daughter is a victim too, even if she doesn’t know it. She was also abused as a child in the same way and she doesn’t realise it’s bad; she only thinks she’s doing the right thing for her daughter – not to cause her pain – but to better secure her future. The police fight against FGM has to be more about prevention than anything else, because even the ones who carry it out are victims themselves, and the best thing you can do is help them to see this.’
Next came the medical professionals: midwives wanted me to speak to them about FGM, and this meant so much to me. I remember the first day I arrived at King’s College Hospital in London to give a talk. The smell of the sterile corridors, the doors to the wards kept firmly shut, and staff shuffling between them, all reminded me of the birth of each of my children, and especially of Abdinasir’s delivery, when I arrived in hospital knowing hardly any English and went through such an intimate experience without anyone explaining to me why I looked different, or even acknowledging that I did, instead just writing it in my notes – it was as if I wasn’t even there. After I explained the basics to the group of midwives who had come to hear my talk, I told them about my own births, about what would have helped me.