Sweetness in the Belly

by Camilla Gibb

  Most of the women ignored me as I hung back by the kitchen, keeping an eye on another pot of milk and water about to boil on the fire. Two sisters from down the road, who clearly found me amusing, shouted: “Tell us, what new Harari words have you learned lately?”

  “Absuma gar,” I replied plainly, wanting to keep the attention on Rahile, who was looking a little put out.

  They roared and raised their hands above their heads.

  “Absuma gar! Allahu akbar!” cried one.

  “Allahu akbar!” repeated the others one after another, until the ripple of a whisper threaded its way through the crowd and the women fell silent. A large elderly woman with drooping eyelids and deep lines etched into her sagging face entered the compound, followed by a young Oromo girl gripping the creped legs of two upside-down chickens.

  “Abai Taoduda,” Nouria fawned, rushing forward, dropping to her knees and kissing the fleshy part of the woman’s hand where the thumb and forefinger meet. Abai Taoduda exchanged greetings of peace with the women while the young Oromo girl handed the two chickens by the legs to Anwar, who was standing far back by the fence with his brother. Anwar held them proudly, talking to them as they protested this change of hands.

  The elderly woman made her way into the center of the circle and raised her palms in praise of Allah. A chorus of praise shuttled through the air. She approached Rahile on the bench, pulled her to her feet and kissed her on the forehead before sitting down precisely where Rahile had been sitting and pulling the girl down onto her generous lap.

  “Uma Sherifa!” called the midwife. Sherifa, a blind woman who lived in the neighborhood and had a reputation as a wonderful singer, rose to her feet. She was often paid to perform at weddings, but having never been invited to such an event, this was the first time I’d heard her sing. Her eyes were clouded by a white film, but her voice was so clear that I could hear the river of sweet water cascading down the mountainside, I could see the wall being built around the city inch by inch, I could feel the bittersweet joy of being ge kahat, a “daughter of the city,” one whose protection serves the community as a whole.

  The midwife lifted up her skirt and spread her plump, dimpled legs. She pulled up Rahile’s dress as well and tied the girl’s thighs to the soft insides of her own with two long black scarves. Then she put a cloth in Rahile’s mouth, told her to bite hard, tugged at the folds of skin between Rahile’s legs and swiftly ran a metal blade down over them.

  “What is she doing?” I couldn’t help but cry out.

  “Uss!” the women closest to me chastised.

  I stood with my hand over my mouth as the midwife made several quick slices with the blade, removing thin bits of skin. All the color drained from Rahile’s face. A tremor rippled throughout her body as a thick pool of blood grew between her legs. I lost all sensation in the lower half of me, watching in horror as the blood began to creep over the side of the bench. Rahile caught sight of it as it lurched toward the ground and she let out an agonized cry.

  In the background, one of the chickens, which Anwar had beheaded with the last downward pull of the midwife’s blade, ran amok around the compound. The women raised their heads and cupped their hands over their mouths: a celebratory chorus of epiglottises as they ululated heavenward. I wanted to catch Rahile’s blood in my hands and give the color back to her. She was whimpering, her lips trembling, her eyelashes fluttering over her glazed eyes.

  Nouria blotted her daughter’s wound with a rag, and then the midwife tugged the scarves loose and scooped the girl up under the arms. Nouria grabbed the deadened heap of her daughter by the ankles, and the two women lay her down on the bench. The midwife pinched together the two remaining flaps of skin between Rahile’s legs and began piercing them perfunctorily with a row of six sharp thorns. I bit my knuckle so hard I drew blood. The midwife inserted a matchstick in the space between the last two thorns, and Rahile’s whimpering slowed and deepened. She breathed heavily, as if through a blanket.

  Abai Taoduda dragged her by the underarms and held her over a small smouldering pit of aromatic wood so that the smoke washed up over the wound. She held out her callused hand, and Nouria passed her warm ashes from the fire, which she patted up and down between the thorns with her flat fingers. Two women held Rahile by the shoulders as the midwife wrapped a bandage round and round her legs, binding her immobile from her hips to her feet. They carried her into the hut and lay her on the foam mattress.

  I couldn’t bear it: Nouria was pulling Bortucan forward.

  “She’s too young!” I protested.

  Rabid whispers all around me.

  Nouria said, “She is old enough to remember the pain.”

  I had to turn away. I had to push my way through the crowd of women and stand alone in the street. I heard nothing from Bortucan, only the jubilant chorus of ululating women. A manic, headless chicken brushed my calf as it ran down the street. Anwar chased it a few feet before throwing himself upon it and stifling it with his chest.

  This was the party Rahile had been waiting for.

  the doctor

  The girls were instructed to lie bound for forty days, long enough for scar tissue to form, and to drink as little as possible so as not to have to remove the matchsticks to let their urine pass. Rahile—though she mewled when she had to urinate—told me she felt special, she felt loved.

  The women had lined up single file and entered the room one by one to congratulate the girls and offer them sweets and money and kisses on the forehead.

  “Now they will grow up to be respectable women,” Gishta told me with pride. “This is the greatest occasion in a girl’s life, Lilly—next to her marriage, of course.”

  And the latter depended on the former, according to Gishta: no one would dare marry an uncircumcised girl, a sharmuta, a girl wild with heat. Such a girl could only bring fitna—chaos—and shame to her family.

  Bortucan, however, did not appear to be faring as well as her sister. She moaned in a most unholy way. I gathered she’d lost consciousness during the operation, and although she awoke and took a few small sips of sugary tea the day after, her bandages were soaked in blood. I helped Nouria unravel and change the bandages, trying not to reveal my horror, lest I should alarm Bortucan even more.

  Her legs were stone cold and her teeth chattered while we wrapped her in fresh cloth. We covered her with blankets and every article of clothing we had. She drifted in and out of sleep, muttered as though delirious, and by the end of the second day Nouria was concerned enough to call for the faith healer.

  The old man came with his ink and quill. He sat in the doorway of the hut, and I watched over his shoulder as he wrote a few verses from the Qur’an onto a tiny square of paper that he rolled up and placed in a thin red leather cylinder. He strung a piece of thread through the open ends of the cylinder and handed it to Nouria, who tied it around Bortucan’s neck.

  I fingered my own amulet. To ward off the bad jinn, the Great Abdal had told me. But this situation was not the work of evil spirits. It was the work of a midwife, with the full support of every woman in the neighborhood. It was the outcome of a little girl demanding: “Ab-su-ma!”

  On the third day, Nouria called for the herbalist. The tattooed woman with the henna-bright hair stewed a sulfurous concoction over the fire until it thickened into a claylike paste. She applied this mixture to all of Bortucan’s orifices—her mouth, her ears, her eyes, the spaces between the thorns—and dragged her out into the sun on a blanket so that the paste would harden and crumble.

  Bortucan awoke the fourth day, her bandages once again soaked in blood. Now, Nouria lamented, we would have to call for the doctor. Nouria had never called for a doctor in all the months that I’d been here, though she and the children were often sick, their bodies unwitting hosts to parasites, tormenting them with diarrhea, inflating their bellies into hardened balloons. The doctor was the last resort in a community where midwives and faith healers and herbalists ruled.

  I lay betwe
en the girls in the dark corner, trying to distract them with the story of the Arab missionaries who had come to Abyssinia and heard the call of Islam’s first muezzin while passing through the eastern mountains. They had prayed to God, for it was a miracle, asking him if this was a sign that it was here that they should settle. Their answer came when a great wind swept down from the sky and created a fertile valley before them fed by rivers as sweet as those of Mecca. Some stayed to build a city in the heart of the valley—a labyrinthine maze of intersecting lanes, some of which are so narrow that a man must lift the jerry cans from the side of a donkey to let the animal proceed—while others continued westward, spreading news of the miracle of Bilal al Habash’s voice across North Africa.

  The neighborhood women suddenly scurried out of the compound. A man bent down and stepped over the threshold into our home, a room I was quite sure no man had ever entered. Nouria was at his heels.

  I had expected an old man, a grandfather wrapped in white layers, not a young, tall, handsome man with butter-soft dark skin and bright teeth, wearing a jacket and matching trousers.

  Dr. Aziz Abdulnasser had clearly not expected me either. He did a double take, squinting in the dark, then turned to Nouria.

  “Did the midwife at least disinfect the blade?” he asked, not masking his anger.

  Nouria replied in a quiet whisper, her eyes cast downward.

  He turned to me. “Perhaps you could describe what happened,” he said in perfect English

  But I didn’t have the words in any language. All I could say was that I thought Bortucan might have lost consciousness while it was happening.

  “Shock and hemorrhaging, I imagine.” He nodded, biting the pink at the center of his bottom lip.

  He cradled Bortucan in one arm and unwrapped the bandages with his other hand. I held a candle for him while he inspected her, but it was only seconds before he straightened his back. “We must get her to hospital,” he said.

  Nouria tugged at his sleeve with both hands. “Please, I beg you. Tell us how to take care of her here, but please, not the hospital, anything but that.”

  “They hate the hospital,” he said to me in English. “They think it’s a place where people go to die.”

  “And is it?” I asked him.

  “Often,” he said, “but only because they come to us when it’s too late.”

  Ignoring Nouria, he picked the little girl up, threw her over his shoulder, bent through the doorway and walked straight out into the sunlight of the courtyard, leaving a faint trail of sweet cologne behind him. His black curls glistened in the sun, and he stood unapologetically tall.

  “Go with her,” Nouria urged me. “Please.”

  I stepped into the courtyard. “Wait!” I called out to the doctor. “I’ll come with you.”

  “Fine,” he said, “get your shoes, then.”

  I hesitated. I had only what I was wearing on my feet, the flip-flops everyone wore: national dress. I looked down at his bright white socks and newly shined lace-up shoes and I suddenly felt ashamed.

  blood

  The Ras Makonnen Hospital lay just beyond the wall, along the eucalyptus-lined road that led into the city from the west. The yellow-brick building stood far bigger and grander than anything inside the city walls, intimidating all but the beggars who were strewn across the front steps, displaying their third-degree burns and waving their imaginary limbs in a bid for sympathy—preferably expressed in the form of cash. The farther up the stairs they crawled, the closer the beggars came to being poked in the ribs with the barrel of a guard’s gun or kicked down the steps to begin again their agonizing climb.

  It was not only the hospital’s reputation as a morgue that the Hararis feared but the neighborhood. To the north, south and east of the city lay their farmlands. This was why the people of the city were rich by Ethiopian standards: the Hararis owned the land and controlled the lucrative trade of the waxy, intoxicating leaves and the crisp green beans that grew upon it. They rented the land to peasant farmers, all Oromo, who tilled and tended the gardens in return for a 10 percent share of the harvest. While there was the occasional threat of hyenas or banditry, these lands were theirs: neatly ordered plots passed down through the generations.

  But on the west side lay a new city, a largely Christian Amhara neighborhood that had evolved since the time of Harar’s annexation into the Ethiopian empire. In 1887, the Muslim city at the heart of an expansive kingdom became a regional capital in a Christian empire. One jewel in somebody else’s imperial crown. A royal residence stood across the road from the hospital, home to the duke and duchess of the province.

  Hararis thought of this neighborhood as a site of sin and depravity, a haven for buda, the evil eye, and forbade their children to enter these parts. But one had to pass through the area to leave the city for destinations west. Like Dire Dawa, the market town an hour away, or the capital, Addis Ababa, three days away over winding roads. Hararis shut the windows of minibuses and held their noses when they passed through, alleging the stench of brothels and beer.

  Outsider is what they smelled; contamination is what they feared.

  I did not see sin and depravity. I saw a wide boulevard where the austerity of buildings and asphalt was interrupted by the velvet trunks of eucalyptus trees and the occasional burst of color from a flame tree. I saw people swinging their arms freely because they were not funneled between compound walls. I saw the whites of people’s eyes because the road was flat and dry and did not demand their complete attention. I saw Dr. Aziz’s back and Bortucan’s chubby cheek mashed against his shoulder, her eyes closed, drool sliding from the corner of her mouth. I saw the sun bouncing off Dr. Aziz’s shoes.

  Inside the hospital, people leaned against the peeling green paint of the corridor walls or held their heads in their hands as they slumped over on hard wooden benches. Men and women in white coats strode down the halls with clipboards in their hands, ignoring the pleas of “Yaa docture! Yaa docture!” from the leaners and the slumpers.

  “Assalaamu alaykum,” Dr. Aziz greeted one of his colleagues; “Good morning,” he greeted the next; “Ciao, ragazza,” a third; and to a fourth, “Have you finished with that book yet, Mouna?”

  “What have you got here?” asked a young man with a stethoscope hanging around his neck, stopping to rub Bortucan’s cheek.

  “Another botched infibulation,” Dr. Aziz groaned.

  “You’re a hero, Aziz,” said the other doctor, slapping him on the arm. His English was equally as good. He was just about to move on when he caught sight of me. “Who is this?” he asked his colleague.

  Dr. Aziz appeared unable to answer.

  I said plainly: “I’m her sister.”

  “Masha’Allah,” said the man, savoring each syllable. “A farenji speaking Harari! I’ve never seen such a thing in my life! Where, dear God, did you find her?”

  “Goodbye, Munir,” Dr. Aziz said sternly.

  I pulled my veil closer, lowered my head and carried on down the corridor, staring at the heels of Dr. Aziz’s shoes, which seemed to squeak in protest with each step.

  Moments later, I was watching the doctor thread a needle into Bortucan’s arm. The needle was attached to a tube that ran from two plastic sacs hanging from a hook on the wall.

  “If you must circumcise, we try to tell them,” he said as he squeezed one of the sacs, “make a cut in the clitoris, but do not remove it. And do not in any circumstance infibulate.”

  Fluid dripped down from both bags, disappearing into Bortucan’s arm. Her eyelids fluttered closed. Dr. Aziz helped a nurse unwrap the bandages, sponge away the blood and clean the wound, and then he pulled out the thorns. I could not watch, although he was swift and efficient and there was no more blood than what I had already seen each morning. He restitched the wound with surgical thread, leaving a hole much bigger than the size of a matchstick at the end.

  “At least this way she’ll be able to urinate and menstruate properly.” He sighed. “You get t
errible infections otherwise.”

  I watched his large hands do their work, thinking how different he was from anyone I’d ever met. So plainspoken. No awkwardness, no metaphors, no proverbs or quotations and the assumption that I understood, though he was using words I’d never heard before. Words in English.

  “There is a great deal of resistance,” he said. “The mothers want to see their daughters suffer. They believe that girls must pay this price to be guaranteed the reward of marriage. They fear that no man will want to marry their daughters otherwise, and they’ll remain a burden on their parents for the rest of their lives.”

  “And is that true? Does that happen?”

  “Well, yes,” he admitted. “But it’s largely the midwives who perpetuate this idea. As soon as they deliver a girl they start pressing her mother, saying, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry for this burden of a girl that has been delivered to you. Don’t worry, I will return when she is old enough to make sure she remains pure.’ This is their livelihood,” Dr. Aziz said with a dismissive wave. “They make considerable money this way, and the more radical absuma pays much more than the simple removal of the clitoris, so of course they have a vested interest in continuing the practice.”

  “But they say you are not a true Muslim if you don’t have absuma,” I said hesitantly.

  “Yes, they say a lot of things, but it is custom, local custom, which they attribute to Islam in order to justify it. There is nothing in the Qur’an that suggests this is necessary. Or even desirable.”

  Perhaps he was right: I had never heard of anything like absuma happening in Morocco. I had had a flicker of worry that perhaps this business was alluded to in some section of the Qur’an the Great Abdal and I had neglected to explore in serious depth. There were certain parts he was more comfortable skimming over—the whole matter of women’s courses, for instance.

  The first time I’d had bleeding, I told the Great Abdal. He sent me to the Berber woman in the village who washed our clothes, and she bleached my skirt with lemon juice and left it to dry in the sun. She gave me a cup of green tea and tore a cotton sheet into strips. She said I was to return the used cloths to her and she would boil them in a special pot so they would be ready for the next month.