“Ah, this is a very lucky one,” he announced, softly. “Very, very lucky.”
Did he mean that I was lucky in that my eye wasn’t too badly damaged, I wondered? I hoped that he did. I allowed myself to relax a little. I had been worried for my sight in my left eye, as much as for the survival of my white eyelash.
“What exactly d’you mean, doctor?” my father asked.
“Your daughter—she is very lucky,” Dr. Hing repeated. “You know, she has the white eyelash. In Chinese culture white eyelash very lucky. Very, very lucky . . .”
Dr. Hing busied himself at his desk, preparing some powders and some potions. He asked me to stick out my tongue, so he could examine it. He studied it for a few seconds, making some notes on a chart, and then he turned to speak with my father again.
“White eyelash very special,” he announced, softly. He held up a cardboard packet full of a brownish powder. “This is crushed Chinese herbs. Dilute one part to ten parts with clean water—for shock. Big shock to the system when white eyelash pulled so roughly.” Next he held up a paper envelope with some crumbly yellow pills inside. “And this is to boost immune system, to help fight off infection. And this,” he added, holding up a packet of dark green powder, “very special Chinese medicine to give strength to eye.”
He glanced from me to my father. “White eyelash so very, very lucky,” he repeated, beaming at us.
“So is that it?” my father asked. “It doesn’t need to be . . . cut out? No need for surgery?”
“Surgery?” Dr. Hing asked, quizzically. “Surgery? Why would you want to hurt white eyelash? White eyelash very lucky . . .”
Dr. Hing went on to explain that my white eyelash had its own distinct blood supply. This accounted for why it kept growing at a quicker rate than the others. If anyone tried to operate, it might damage the whole eye. And in any case, why take the risk? A white eyelash signified good fortune. And with the help of his herbs it would heal itself.
Dr. Hing proved to be right. A week later the swelling was almost gone. The Chinese medicines tasted disgusting, but they really did seem to be doing the trick. Even so my father was very angry with the old man who had tried to pull out my white eyelash.
“We’d better get Rathebe off to school,” he remarked to my mother. “Otherwise someone’s going to pull it out for real—and take away all our good luck and her wisdom!”
From then on every time my white eyelash grew too long my father would sit me down, take out a pair of tiny scissors and carefully trim it back to size. In that way he hoped I would avoid anyone else trying to rip it out of my eye socket.
I was approaching eight years old by now, and my father had always said that this was the age when I would be sent away to school. There was no school in our village, and the sum total of my education to date had been learning the Koran. Every Friday morning we were supposed to go to the Imam to memorize verses of the Koran. If we didn’t learn fast enough, the Imam would beat us with a big stick. So when it came to Friday morning and a toss-up between a morning with the Imam, or one climbing trees, fighting with our friends, and causing mayhem, there was no competition really.
But it was now time for me to start my proper learning in the big school in Hashma, the nearest town to our village. Yet before I could do so there was one thing I had to go through: my circumcision. All girls in our tribe were circumcised, most when they were ten or eleven years old. Grandma insisted that I couldn’t go away to school without first going through my cutting time. After my experience with the facial scarring, I was more than a little apprehensive. But I had been to the celebrations for other village girls—and their circumcision always seemed such a time of happiness, brightness, and laughter.
The night before I was to be cut there was a party for the women and girls. My mother, Grandma, Kadiga, and lots of my female relatives were there, and I had the place of honor. In our tradition circumcision is supposed to mark the passage from girlhood to womanhood, and so I was treated almost as if I were getting married. I had beautiful new clothes and shoes, all in red.
Grandma and my mother spent hours painting my hands and feet with beautiful red henna designs, just as if I were a bride. My skin was rubbed with oil, so that when the henna powder was applied it would take on a more intense color. The soles of my feet were painted in a layer of rich, dark red. Fancy whorls and flower patterns were painted from my ankles to just below my knees. The tips of my fingers were painted a splash of bright orange, with intricate circle and spiral designs running up my arms to my elbows.
By the end of the preparations all my misgivings over the cutting were gone. I felt so beautiful, so grown up, and so special that I positively wanted to go through with my circumcision. Early the next morning the taihree arrived—the traditional circumcision woman of our village. She had no formal training, but she did all the womanly things. I was taken into Grandma’s hut and perched nervously on the edge of her bed.
I watched as the taihree prepared her instruments—her razor blade, bowls of water, and cloths. I felt a stab of panic. It was so like my scarring time, when I had managed to run and escape. For a second I considered doing the same, but I knew that my family and friends were gathered outside. I couldn’t run. If I did, I would never live it down.
A huge, grotesquely fat woman came to join us. I recognized her immediately, for all the village children knew her. If we saw her out on the street we’d point and tell each other that that was the woman who held you down during your circumcision time.
“Let me have the child on my lap,” she offered Grandma. “I can hold her, while you help the taihree.”
Grandma nodded. The fat lady sat down next to me, and I felt the bed all but buckle under her weight. She patted her lap, smiled at me, and lifted me onto it. I realized that there was no escaping now. I was enveloped in her embrace, and she was hugely heavy and strong. The taihree turned to me with the razor blade gripped in her hand. As she did so, I saw my mother’s face turn pale.
She glanced at Grandma. “You don’t need me. . . . I’ll go help prepare the food.”
Grandma nodded, and with a quick kiss to the top of my head my mother was gone. Grandma took one of the cloths from the taihree and handed it to me.
“Put this in your mouth. Bite down hard. And remember, you mustn’t scream or cry—it’s shameful. Be brave.”
I did as Grandma instructed. Part of me still wanted to go through with this, to prove that I was a big, strong girl. I felt the fat woman move my legs apart, forcing me onto my back until all I could see was the roof of Grandma’s hut. There was a twitch at the door, as a curious child peeped inside. I heard Grandma yell for him or her to get out. For a second my fearful mind wondered if it might have been crazy Omer. It was just the sort of thing he would do. And then the taihree reached down between my legs.
With the first slash of the razor blade, a bolt of agony shot through me like nothing I had ever experienced. I let out a bloodcurdling scream, and as I did so I started kicking and fighting to get free. But all that happened was the huge woman bore down on me, clamping my legs in her viselike grip. I cried for them to stop, but as I did so I heard the women outside start making the illil. “Aye-aye-aye-aye-aye-aye-aye!” they cried. It was supposed to be a celebratory chant, but in truth they were doing so to hide the noise of my screaming.
The taihree pawed at me again, and I felt Grandma grab me by the arm. She put her finger in her mouth and bit on it, to try to show me to bite the cloth and to shut me up. But as the blade cut into me again I screamed, wide-eyed with terror and pain.
“No! No! Mummy! Mummy! Make them stop! Make them stop!”
I felt Grandma hissing angrily in my ear. “Be brave, girl! You are Zaghawa! Cry and the children will laugh at you! Be brave!”
I didn’t give a damn for Grandma’s words. I was a terrified child with all the adults in the world that I trusted causing me unspeakable pain. The shock of the betrayal was beyond imagining. I tried, desperately,
to fight and to get away, but the huge lady was crushing me into her vast bulk. I twisted my head and bit into her flesh, as hard and as viciously as I could. My hatred for this woman who had imprisoned me in pain knew no bounds. I wanted to wound and to kill her. But she hardly seemed to notice what I was doing.
I felt a gush of warm blood, as the taihree took hold of me again, slicing deeper and deeper. Through a mouthful of the fat woman’s flesh I screamed and screamed, hot tears rushing down my face, but the cutting and the cutting and the cutting just went on and on and on.
The taihree reached down once last time, grabbed something, sawed for a second, twisted, and dropped it into the bowl on the floor. The pain was so unbearable that it had taken over my whole head, driving me to the borders of sanity. I felt as if I was dying, and even death would have been preferable to where I was now. Through a state of half-consciousness I heard my own, pathetic whimpering filtering through to me.
Finally, with her arms covered in blood, the taihree straightened up. She turned to Grandma. “Almost there,” she announced.
“Alhamdu lillah,”—praise be to God, Grandma replied.
“Alhamdu lillah,” the taihree confirmed. “Is there boiling water?”
Grandma reached for a bowl on the fire. As she did so, her eyes met mine and she scowled, shaking her head despairingly—as if I was the one who had done something wrong. As if I was the one who had done something wrong.
The taihree readied a needle and thick cotton thread. As she turned back to me, I felt myself withdraw into some inner world where the pain and the horror of whatever was coming next could never reach me.
With a sickening sound of tugging rawness she began to sew up my flesh. With each tug of the needle I felt a bolt of pain surge through me, but I was now in a place where I was insulated from the physical suffering. I knew that somewhere deep in my lost womanhood there was a burning heart of agony, but I had removed my mind to a place where it couldn’t be hurt anymore.
By the time the taihree had finished I had been completely sewn up, leaving only a tiny little hole. Everything else was gone. I was half-delirious. I barely noticed as Grandma went to the door of the hut and announced that it was done—that I had been circumcised.
A series of cheers went up from outside, and the women made the illil again: “Aye-aye-aye-aye-aye-aye-aye! Aye-aye-aye-aye-aye-aye-aye!”
While my family and friends celebrated, I was sobbing my heart out. Only now did my mother come in to see me. She sat down on the bed and tried to soothe me, stroking my hair and whispering comforting words. She had tears in her eyes, but it didn’t make up for the fact that she had left me at the mercy of Grandma and the circumcision women. She had made some pigeon soup, she told me, a rich broth that would help me recover.
“Every day, Rathebe, I’ll kill two pigeons for you,” my mother promised. “Every day. And the soup will make you well again.”
Grandma and the taihree did what they could to dress my wounds. Grandma had collected some seedpods, and the freshest leaves of the pirgi tree. She proceeded to boil the leaves and bathe me with the warm water. The dry pods she ground into a powder, which she mixed with oil to produce a paste. This she applied to my raw flesh. As for the taihree, she took some capsules of antibiotics, broke them in two and poured the powder over my wounds. She finished off with a sprinkling of baby powder.
The taihree bandaged up my groin area in the cloths she had laid out already. When she was done I was wearing something akin to a large diaper. Then she and Grandma took a thick rope and wrapped it around my thighs until they were locked tightly together. There was no way in which I could move now, even had I wanted to. I would have to stay like this for two weeks, Grandma warned me, to give my wounds time to heal.
Grandma and the taihree went off to join the crowd. At last I was left alone in the hut. I drifted off into a pained, troubled sleep, wondering why on earth they had done this to me. Grandma had warned me that if I went off to school uncircumcised, the girls would laugh at me. “Oh, you still have your stuff? Those big bits?” they’d remark, mockingly. But why would they? Why would they say such things? What was wrong with the way we were born? What could possibly be so wrong that would justify what I had been through?
Day after day I lay on that bed, unable to walk or go outside and play with the other children. Whenever I needed to pee-pee it was such agony, and I needed the help of my mother. The first time I couldn’t crouch down properly, because of the pain and the ropes, so my mother had to hold me as I tried to pee half standing up. As soon as I started there was a blinding, stinging sensation down between my legs.
“I can’t do it,” I cried, as I held onto my mum and shuddered with pain. “It hurts too much.”
With my mother’s help I hobbled back inside. Every now and then I would have a visitor. The children would sit with me and tell me all about the adventures they’d been having, which did cheer me up a little. But the adults just wanted to congratulate me on my cutting, as if it was something to be proud of.
“Ah, clever girl, brave girl,” they’d tell me. “Here. Take this small gift . . .”
It was as much as I could do not to spit in their eye. After a week of this I was beside myself with boredom. One morning I decided to try to take a few steps. Maybe I was well enough to walk and to go out and play? I eased my legs over the edge of the bed and got to my feet unsteadily. But I had barely taken a step when I went crashing down. The ropes bound me too tightly and the pain in my groin was terrible.
I heard my mum let out a cry of alarm, as she caught the noise of my falling. She came rushing in, took one look at me sprawled on the floor and burst into floods of tears. What was I doing, she wailed? It was too early! I would break my stitches and then I would be ruined. She helped me back to the bed, and took an anxious look at me. Everything was still as it should be, she told me. But she made me promise that I wouldn’t try to move again.
As I lay back down on the bed I felt sick of everything—sick of the stupid visitors, sick of the hut, sick of pigeon soup, and sick of the inactivity. But most of all I was sick at the way these people had brutalized and crippled me. My mother’s worries were well founded, of course. We all knew of girls who had died during their cutting time. Sometimes, a vein was cut during the butchery, and no one could stop the bleeding. At other times, a girl’s wounds would become infected, and she would die a long, lingering death. Still more died years later, during childbirth, because they couldn’t give birth properly. The cutting left terrible scarring, and without surgery prior to childbirth it remained horribly risky.
Two weeks after my cutting time my ropes were unbound. I was allowed out and I took my first, faltering steps—but there was to be no running, jumping, or play-fighting for some time. When I first ventured into the village one of the girls tried to tease me for crying during my cutting time. In an instant I had forgotten that I was forbidden to fight: I rounded on that girl and beat her so soundly that she never dared tease me again.
As I had lain in Grandma’s hut recovering, I’d had ample time to think about what had happened. I was angry with my mother, with Grandma, and even my father for what had been done to me. While Grandma had played the lead role, neither of my parents had told me the truth about my cutting time. Had they done so I would have refused to go through with it, just like I had done before with the scarring.
But what I couldn’t for the life of me understand was the role the women played in all of this. My mother and Grandma must have gone through the same torment during their cutting time, and suffered the same sense of shock and betrayal. Yet it was they who had charmed and praised me and convinced me that it was a good and proper thing. They had lulled me into a false sense of security, and then played their part as that huge, evil woman had held me down and the taihree had done her butchery.
It took me weeks to forgive my father for the role that he had played. It may have been a passive one, but he it was who was educated and enlightened and surely
he could have seen another way. It took me months to forgive my mother, because out of weakness she had abandoned me in that hut and left others to do their worst. And I think that perhaps I never really forgave Grandma. It was she who had insisted that if I was going away to school then I would have to be cut, and proceeded to orchestrate the whole thing.
I was the only child from my village being sent away to the big school. The other children would go to a school in a neighboring village, or not at all. That school had no proper classrooms, and lessons were held under a tree. There was no school uniform, and most pupils didn’t even have shoes. My father had promised me something very different. All of my childhood friends—Kadiga included—were envious of my good fortune.
Like most families in our village, Kadiga’s parents couldn’t afford to send her away to the big school. I knew that it was costly, but my father had said that I was more than worth it. As it was too far for me to travel back and forth each day, he had arranged for me to lodge with his brother’s family. They lived in a house in town that my father owned, so I would be staying with my extended family in a place that was still our own. It softened the blow of separation somewhat.
I would stay in Hashma for the school term, and return to my village for the holidays. It was too expensive for me to come home on weekends, or even for half-terms. In any case, I was being sent away to be educated, my father told me, and during term times I should dedicate myself to my studies. I was keen to do so. I was keen to prove to him that his trust in me, and his faith in my intellectual curiosity, was well founded.
As for my mother and Grandma, they were far from happy that I was leaving the family home. Grandma went into a long and dramatic sulk. This going away to school lark had never happened in her day, she grumbled, so why now? Such nonsense, she complained. My mother was worried about me being sent away from home at such an early age. Mo and Omer did little to hide their disquiet, either. They were deeply jealous that I was going away on a big adventure, while they had to stay in the village. But my father was resolute: He had made up his mind and I would be going away to school.
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