Cut

by Hibo Wardere

  When my aunt came back later with more fizzy orange, I knocked it out of her hand with a feeble swipe. The heat under the canvas must have been over 30 degrees, but I was too terrified of passing urine again to take another sip of drink.

  ‘Are you hot, Hibo?’ she asked.

  I nodded. Yet I refused to drink, so instead she brought ice cubes and rubbed them over my forehead, across my lips.

  On my own again, with the fading daylight came some respite at last from the heat. I took my mind off the stabbing, shrieking, incessant pains by watching soft white smoke from the burning loovan snake into the air above me, swirling and curling in patterns, making a silvery trail up to the tiny hole in the roof of the canvas where the sticks met. The woody scent, a little like pine, was some comfort, and if I closed my eyes I could pretend I was lying in a forest, a long way from this mattress, and these binds that cut into my knees and ankles.

  I tried to focus not on the pain, but on getting better. As soon as I was better, I would find out why this had happened to me. In those hot nights I was to spend alone over the following weeks, a thin piece of cloth covering my body, I vowed that I would ask my mother every day until she told me the truth.

  Two days later, I was allowed to eat something for the first time. Just two or three sips of soup, my auntie holding the spoon up to my lips and helping me to sit up a little so that I could drink it down. I’d existed on the shock of the trauma alone – the last thing I’d thought of was eating, the pain still a heavy knot in my stomach, replacing any appetite I might have had even if they’d tried to feed me. Which, of course, they didn’t because I was bound from hip to toe: it was impossible to go to the toilet even if I’d wanted to, and they encouraged me to do the bare minimum.

  My mother had wandered in and out of the hut as I drifted in and out of sleep. Each time she spoke to me, I stared straight ahead, up at the gap in the canvas. My body was in that hut, my mind far away. If she offered me a drink, no matter how thirsty I was, I wouldn’t accept anything from her. She was a fraud and a traitor.

  The smell from the hole in the ground beside me where the women lifted me over to wee was awful. They covered it over with leaves, but nothing could disguise the stench of the urine in that searing heat. The loovan masked it slightly, but it couldn’t take it away.

  After a few more days, my cousins came into the hut to say hello to me. I didn’t want to speak to them. They went away.

  Then, on the fifth day, my auntie brought in some rice and milk on a spoon.

  ‘Please, Hibo,’ she said. ‘Please eat a little something.’ I refused. She went away and came back a few moments later; this time it was covered with honey to tempt me. I took one spoonful but I couldn’t so much as chew it; my body was rejecting even a mouthful of food, and as the days went by I grew weaker and weaker. But my mind, my mind was strong.

  And then, on the tenth day, the cutter returned. When I looked up and saw her enter the hut – those eyes, those pincer nails – I decided that today would be a good day to die. If I could have run, I would have, but my legs were still tightly bound by the cloth. She placed her stall in front of me again as my mother hovered behind her, and my tiny heart pounded in terror inside my chest, as she slowly started to unpeel the dressing.

  ‘Open your legs,’ she said, after she’d removed the bandages. ‘I won’t hurt you.’

  As if I was going to trust this woman, the same one I’d cursed time and again in my head since that morning ten days ago. I’d decided she must be a sheydan – a devil. How could she cause so much pain to a child with such a complete absence of remorse?

  After the binding had been unpeeled, try as I might to protect myself, to keep my legs clenched shut, she forced them apart with little real effort. I caught sight of the dull glint of the razors again and I begged God then please just to take me. Let me die now. I screamed and screamed, deaf to the cutter’s words. ‘I’m not going to touch you. I just need to take these stitches out.’

  The pain as she cut at each knot with the razor, dragging the thread through skin that was still raw, was unbearable. In my head, I cursed her a thousand more times. I called her all the names that my six-year-old brain could conjure up. You devil woman, I thought deep inside, my body weak but my eyes trying to burn my insults into her skin. You deserve to die for what you did to me! You’re nasty! You’re evil!

  When it was over, she gathered together her wicked tools again and raised herself up from her little seat. Before she left, she gave me a final hard stare with those terrifying eyes. She had a message for me: ‘You don’t speak of this. You never tell other girls about it.’

  I was shaking then. It was difficult to know whether it was through fear or anger.

  And then my mother said: ‘If you talk about it you will look like someone who is not brave enough, people will see you as a coward, and you’ve been very brave.’

  I didn’t want to speak about it ever again, not what they’d done or how they’d done it. I never wanted to think about the pain ever, or those days spent in that hut alone.

  I only wanted to know why.

  That day, after those crude stitches had been removed at last, I tried to stand for the first time since the cutting. But ten days with little food and drink had left me weak and wasted. Just one look at my arms told me how much weight had dropped off me as I’d lain in that hut, under the scorching Somalian sun. I had always been a slight and skinny child, but now the bones in my hands jutted visibly against my skin, and my wrists had been whittled down to twigs. It needed both my mother and my auntie to grip an arm each and walk me out of the hut and around the yard. I blinked hard as the full force of the sun’s rays hit me for the first time in almost two weeks.

  Later my auntie held me over a tin bath while my mother sponged water over me. She was gentle, but her touch felt a world away from that last bath she’d given me, a mockery of the role she had once played. My skin bristled at the feel of her hands on my body. I wanted it over with; I wanted to go back to the safety of my hut, the small space that had been my security while I’d recovered. It hurt to walk; even if my muscles remembered what to do, my joints still stung from where my auntie and the cutter’s assistant had pulled at my legs, and in between my legs . . . in between my legs . . . I couldn’t bring myself to think about what they’d done there.

  My mother brought out one of the new dresses from my party for me and slipped it on over my head as I sat there, scrawny arms aloft. None of the clothes looked as lovely in this new light as they had when I first received them. Now, they represented a betrayal. Those presents, the congratulations, it had all been a trick. I couldn’t imagine a day when I would ever eat halwa again.

  My mother and my auntie tried to feed me up again, but I didn’t want to eat. I didn’t want to speak. I decided then I would never call my mother by her name again. I was up on my feet, but the world looked completely different now.

  6

  The Truth at Last

  Each and every morning that followed after my gudnin, I would look my mother square in the eyes and ask, ‘Why? Why did this happen to me?’ On good days she would tell me to go and play in the yard; on bad days, I would see a flash of irritation in her eyes and she would chase me around the house to get rid of me, picking up any object she could find along the way to shoo me out. Some days she would simply ignore me, and it was then that I’d feel most angry. I’d wonder how she could dismiss what had happened to me so easily, but she did. Whichever way my mother responded, she never gave me the answer I sought, and I would vow again to ask the following day, and the one after that, and the one after that.

  I never asked her to do anything for me, I never said hello or goodbye or goodnight. I never even called her Hoyo. The woman who cooked my meals, who saved an extra can of fizzy orange for me in the fridge, who never told me off if I walked home from school slower than the others, she was not my mother. She was a shadow of the woman whom I once called Hoyo – a shadow of the woman who had
always answered my incessant questions about the world outside of our compound and who’d always laughed at my curiosity. Now I had only one question, and I could see from her face that she dreaded my asking it.

  I could still think back to a time when she had indulged me and my inquisitive nature. I could still remember the day when she told me that there were people in the world who had pale skin, much paler than ours. She told me they were called ‘white people’.

  ‘What do they call us?’ I’d asked, my eyes wide.

  ‘Black,’ she’d said.

  And then I argued: ‘I’m not black, why do they call me black? My skin is brown. I’m not black!’ And she’d thrown her head back and laughed.

  I remembered going with her to visit a relative in hospital, and how as we walked the corridors one of these white people appeared ahead of us. I saw her legs and gasped and pulled at my mother’s hand in mine. ‘She’s not white, Hoyo, she’s pink! Why do people say she is white? White is this wall. She is not white.’ And Hoyo had laughed again. I remember the pink woman had given me a lollipop, and I’d decided these pink people were nice after all, even if they couldn’t get their colours right.

  But that was another life. There was no laughter between us anymore, there was no talk. She still tucked me up in bed at night, even when I was almost eight, but when she bent down to kiss my forehead just like she had always done, I moved my face away or covered myself over with the sheet.

  I’d answer to my aunties, I’d smile and talk and even give them hugs, and I’d look over their shoulder as I did and see the hurt in my mother’s eyes. And they’d say: ‘You can hug your mother too, you know?’

  And I’d reply: ‘I know, but I don’t want to.’

  ‘Why?’ they’d ask. I wouldn’t answer; they knew why. As far as I was concerned, my mother had forfeited the right to be close to me when she chose to look the other way instead of answer my pleas. I hated her, deep inside, and no passage of time, no wounded expressions or entreaties from my aunties would change that. Nothing could shake my sense that all the affection, all the love, all the patience she had shown me had been a deception.

  Each day took me further away from the horror of that hut, and yet the memory of it was still branded on my mind. It wasn’t just to my mother that I looked for answers in those weeks and months that followed; it was to the other girls in the school playground, the ones with whom I walked to and from madrasa. Sometimes I’d find a group of my friends sitting on the yellow ground, the earth’s dust streaking their long skirts, and I’d say to them: ‘Why did they do it? Why did they cut us?’ And one by one they’d stand up and walk away, or they’d stare at the ground as if it offered an escape from my questions. I guessed that they’d been given the same warning as me: never discuss this with anyone. And yet when I think about it, who really does talk about such intimate things in the open air of the playground? Why did I think anyone would ever tell me why it had happened?

  I lost count of the number of nights I woke up screaming from nightmares, my face covered in a film of sweat, and my cousins standing at the foot of my bed, telling me that it was OK, it was only a dream. I’d wipe my own face and go back to sleep, but whenever I closed my eyes I’d see the images of that day playing out on the inside of my eyelids.

  Repeated urine infections were brought on by the fact that my urethra was sealed over, which meant I was constantly being taken to hospital to be treated with antibiotics, as were all the other girls I knew. And still we never spoke to one another about what had happened. They didn’t seem as keen as me to understand what had been done to us; they didn’t seem to feel as alone or as burdened by this great, heavy secret. So I learned not to talk to anyone. I never went to another gudnin party, though – I couldn’t be part of the lie; I wouldn’t pretend it was just a little cut.

  The years gathered pace and my relationship with my mother continued to deteriorate. It was almost ten years after the cutting when I awoke one night and felt wet between my legs. I’d got up in the darkness, tiptoeing my way to the bathroom, but I hadn’t wet myself in my sleep. I climbed back into bed and drifted off again. But the following morning when I pulled down my knickers to go to the toilet, the gusset was dyed scarlet, and terror tore through me. I was bleeding, down there. I had to be dying.

  I rushed back to my room and checked my sheets – they, too, were covered in blood. By the time my cousin Fatima found me, I was hysterical.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she said, surely seeing the stricken expression on my face.

  ‘I’m dying,’ I told her. ‘I’m dying!’

  She tried to calm me, to stop me from pacing the room, but the panic had claimed every rational thought I had.

  ‘Shut up and sit down,’ Fatima said, in an attempt to get some sense out of me. ‘Now, why do you think you’re dying?’

  I took a deep breath. ‘There’s blood . . . in my knickers,’ I told her. ‘I don’t know what’s happening to me. I don’t want to die!’

  Her expression lightened as realisation dawned, and she sat down on the bed next to me. ‘You’re not dying, Hibo,’ she said. ‘You’re becoming a woman.’

  ‘What do you mean “becoming a woman”? I’m not a boy! I’m nearly sixteen, I am a woman.’

  ‘No, Hibo, you were a girl – until now,’ she said.

  My face must have shown my confusion, because she sighed in exasperation and then tried again. ‘When you get your period it means you become a woman, and you can get pregnant.’ She crossed the room and pulled out a piece of cloth from a drawer.

  ‘This is mine,’ she said. ‘Use this inside your knickers and keep washing it out. If you don’t, the blood will seep through your clothes and everyone will see.’

  I took the cloth from her and stared at it. It was clearly from an old dress of hers – I faintly recognised the faded striped pattern that ran through it.

  ‘Does Hoyo bleed?’ I asked her.

  ‘Yes, all women do. Now go and wash your bedding.’

  I stripped my bed and took the sheets out into the yard, washing them in a tub of cool soapy water. My mother found me out there, and when she saw the blood she started whooping with happiness, making the sound usually reserved for weddings, a call women make in celebration.

  ‘Why are you making that noise?’ I asked. ‘It’s not a wedding.’

  ‘Because you’re a woman now.’

  I know she told my aunties because from across the yard I saw them pointing and congratulating my mother, patting her back and throwing their arms around her with joy. I watched them, confused, the cloth firmly held in my knickers, and wincing with each stomach cramp that came in waves across my belly. What did this mean ‘to be a woman’? And why did it always seem to involve pain?

  ‘Why are they so happy?’ I asked Fatima.

  ‘Because you got your period,’ she sighed, and turned back to sweeping the yard. ‘You really need to stop your brain asking questions, Hibo.’

  So this was the next stage – there was clearly a distinction between being a girl and being a woman – and unknowingly and involuntarily I had transitioned through the first two phases. I had been cut and now I bled. So what was next? And what would it cost?

  I got used to the pain that would grip my insides every twenty-eight days. I also came to understand that without a proper hole for the menstrual blood to exit my body, the flood would build up inside me, and I would be doubled over at times, in agony for ten days, sometimes for two long weeks. I learned to dread my periods just as I had learned to wait patiently for the slow trickle when I urinated.

  And still I didn’t know why I needed to suffer as I did, still my mother refused to answer my daily question. Until one day, a few months after my sixteenth birthday, on a day that seemed like any other, I got a response that differed from my mother’s usual dismissal. I’d had a shower that day and had styled my hair differently in two tight ponytails. As I came out of the bathroom, steam rising off my skin, my mother looked up from
her sewing.

  ‘You look pretty, Hibo,’ she said. ‘I like the way you’ve done your hair today.’

  I don’t know what it was, perhaps my new hairstyle had softened me around the edges a little, but I felt myself smiling a reply to her. And in response, her face relaxed, the tension eased for a moment. It was a tiny gesture on both our parts, a truce of sorts in a ten-year struggle. I decided then that this was my chance.

  ‘Why did you do this to me?’ I asked, as I had on every single day before that. I wasn’t expecting an answer; I was expecting her to fix that same hard look on her face and say nothing. Instead, she gestured for me to sit down opposite her. I did as she indicated, encouraged by this new and different response from her. I waited for her to speak.

  ‘You’re sixteen now, so I will tell you,’ she said.

  She spoke slowly, as if she too realised the importance of what she was about to share. ‘I was cut, your grandmother was cut, and every mother before her. And your children will be cut too.’

  I listened intently, ready to absorb her every word.

  ‘We are a family whose girls are known for our virginity. We are clean, and that means we can marry well, and you will stay pure until you get married to your husband.’

  I struggled to digest what she’d said, and so I tried to undo all the words before reordering them into some kind of sense, some kind of an explanation. I waited for her to say more, but instead she turned back to her sewing. That was it?

  ‘But why was it done?’ I demanded.

  She looked down at her work.

  ‘And why was it so painful? What did that woman take from me?’

  ‘I’ve told you now,’ she said, without looking up. ‘Never ask me again.’

  And with that the conversation was over before it had even begun. That was it – that short exchange of words was all that I had to sate me after all these years. But it served only to make me hungrier for answers, to leave me with more whys, and each one led to another, and another, and another. I wanted to know why I had been mutilated.