Cut

by Hibo Wardere

  Yusuf must have sensed my fear.

  ‘We don’t have to do anything,’ he said. ‘We can just lie down next to each other; we don’t even need to touch.’

  So that’s what we did the first night we spent together, me lying awake in the darkness, feeling the heat of him beside me, listening to the slow, steady sound of his breathing.

  Then, in the morning, Yusuf’s phone rang. It was Hadsan. He answered it, his face betraying none of the fear that was undoubtedly etched across mine.

  ‘Hibo’s right here with me . . .

  ‘. . . We’re not living in sin . . .

  ‘. . . We’re married.’

  I didn’t speak to Hadsan, but I could hear the fury in her voice from the other side of the room. She must have called my mother because when the phone rang again, it was Hadsan insisting I call Hoyo in Kenya. But I didn’t, not then, not for days. I may not have been ready to experience everything marriage had to offer me, but for now it was a cocoon, a safe place for me.

  That’s where I stayed for days before speaking to my mother, protected by my husband’s arms – nothing more, nothing intimate, and Yusuf never asked more from me. Each morning I’d jump out of bed to shower, ready for a new day of being his wife, but as the sky started to darken from afternoon into evening, the fear would seep into my bones; the terrifying thought that he might want to attempt to make love to me that night. Often it would turn me from a loving wife into one who was cold and aloof.

  ‘What’s wrong, Hibo?’ he might ask, trying to pull me into a hug as I watched the TV.

  ‘Nothing,’ I’d say, shaking him off, my eyes pinned to the screen.

  I tried to ignore the disappointment I’d spot in his eyes because it made me feel guilty that I wasn’t prepared to make my husband happy in the traditional way that other wives do. But I knew I couldn’t keep avoiding my husband forever.

  Four days after our wedding, I finally spoke to my mother. The conversation went as I predicted it would.

  ‘How could you?’ she yelled down the phone. ‘How could you do this without discussing it with anyone?’

  ‘I did discuss it with someone,’ I said, after I’d finished holding the receiver away from my ear. ‘I discussed it with my husband.’

  Yusuf winced on my behalf from the other side of the room as she ranted down the line. Eventually, when I realised she wouldn’t let me speak, I hung up, and Yusuf held me in a big, strong hug.

  My husband couldn’t have been more gentle and supportive in those first few days and weeks of marriage, and I wanted desperately to be the wife to him that he deserved, and so very carefully, I let him inch closer to me in bed, to hold my hand under the covers, to let his hand stray further over to my body.

  There were many false starts when my heart would tell me that I was ready to make love to Yusuf, and then as he loomed over me, all I would see in my mind’s eye was the cutter, and all I would feel was the pain, and panic would creep up my throat and strangle me from the inside. I’d cover my face and cry ‘no’.

  ‘Stop!’ I’d say and he’d back off immediately, scooping me up in his arms.

  ‘We don’t have to do anything,’ he’d say. ‘I don’t mind if we never make love.’

  I wished that would make me feel better, that it would ease the pressure as he obviously hoped it might, but it didn’t, it only left me riddled with guilt. So the next night we tried again, and the next, and the next. The nights turned into weeks and the weeks turned into months; and then finally, I allowed Yusuf into me, we consummated our marriage, and the pain was everything I thought it would be. I forced myself to bat away the images that flooded my mind. I closed my eyes and squeezed away the tears, and I tried instead to focus only on my husband’s pleasure. But how could that be satisfying for either of us?

  ‘Are you OK?’ Yusuf asked me afterwards.

  And a nod was all I could muster because even his gentle nature, his care and attention, were a reminder to me that I wasn’t a whole woman, that I couldn’t satisfy him or be satisfied in the same way as a woman who hadn’t been cut. I’d heard gossip in our community about Somalian men leaving wives who couldn’t satisfy them, and so in those disappointing early days I was plagued by such thoughts as I lay there with my husband in what should have been post-coital bliss.

  Making love served only as a painful reminder that there was something missing from me that even Yusuf’s love couldn’t replace.

  10

  Forgiveness

  The smile that stretched across Yusuf’s face seemed to include far more teeth than it usually did, or perhaps I’d just never seen him smile quite so much. Yet at the same time, my own face was lined with worry. The source of our conflicting emotions lay buried deep inside my belly, a tiny bean of a thing that was busy growing arms and legs and a little nose while I went about my day. Our first child. Not that I wasn’t happy about it, far from it. Since the first feelings of nausea and the early signs of my swelling stomach, I’d been delighted at the thought of this tiny person we’d created growing in there, safe and sound. Delighted and worried. Because it meant I was going from wife to mother and I didn’t know if I could do it.

  I hadn’t told Yusuf straight away, I hadn’t told anyone. For weeks I disguised the sickness that took hold of me every day, stripping pounds of weight off me. I ignored the fact that I hadn’t had a period for months, and refused to go to the doctor even when Yusuf guessed what was wrong.

  ‘How will I know how to be a mother?’ I’d ask in the darkness, as we lay in bed alongside each other.

  ‘You will know,’ Yusuf would answer, taking my hand under the sheets. ‘You will be wonderful.’

  I would wish then that I could be as sure. What kind of role model did I have to learn from, after all? What happy memories of my own childhood could I draw from that would tell me how to love my own child, given the betrayal I had suffered at the hands of my mother, and the distance that had existed between us ever since? Her kind of parenting was not the sort I wanted the new life growing inside me to have.

  This evening, as if reading my mind, Yusuf gave my hand a squeeze and told me again: ‘You will be fine, and we will look after our baby together – boy or girl. As long as it is healthy, that’s all that matters.’ And I prayed again in the darkness to keep our child safe until it was in my arms.

  As I heard Yusuf’s breathing descend into a heavy rumble, I lay there blinking out at the black and wondering how on earth I’d be a mum. And not any mum, a good mum. How would I know if my baby was happy? Would I know how to comfort it when it cried? Could I do this, could I love this child as much as I wanted to when the love that my mother had shown me had also known its limits? And when it came to the birth, how would I ever let a doctor look at me down there to deliver my baby? Yusuf and I had been married for three months by the time I had allowed him to penetrate me. After that the trust had built up and I’d allowed him to look at me between my legs.

  ‘You look normal to me,’ he’d insisted.

  I’d uncovered my face from my hands and looked into his eyes for the reassurance I so desperately needed, and there it was, I could see it, but even that wasn’t enough to convince me. So how would I let a stranger look, even if they were going to deliver my baby?

  The child inside my belly was undeterred by my fears, though – it was determined to let me know it was coming whether I was ready or not. The following day, as I took a bath, it gave me a kick that sent ripples through the soapy water.

  ‘Yusuf!’ I cried, wide-eyed and curious about this little person growing within.

  He burst into the bathroom thinking I’d fallen over, and when instead he’d found me safe and sound and I’d taken his hand and placed it on my warm skin, he beamed.

  ‘That’s our baby,’ he said.

  We were still living in the house Yusuf shared with two friends, but we knew that, with the baby coming, we’d need to get a place of our own. But one thing at a time; first we needed to have the s
can.

  A few days later we went to the hospital, and the first scan revealed I was a lot further along in my pregnancy than we had first thought. In fact, I was eighteen weeks, that’s why I’d felt that little kick. The sonographer squirted cold jelly on to my belly and showed me arms and legs, ears, nose and eyes. She was even able to tell us that we were expecting a boy.

  As Yusuf chatted away to her, I stared at the image and felt hot, fat tears rolling down my cheeks, because right there, on that screen, everything became real to me. The life inside me already needed me to be a mum, and in that instant I saw the future, rather than the past, and I knew that to move forward into it I needed to forgive my own mother. I needed to be filled with love, not anger; with tenderness, not bitterness. I needed to put down this sack of resentment that I’d carried around with me since I was cut, the one that weighed so heavily on my shoulders, and I needed to embrace this new start.

  After that day, I revelled in the changes I could see happening to my body. I rubbed my tummy and wondered: had my mother done the same when I was growing inside her? How would she not have felt the same love swell inside her with each passing day? Somehow, knowing we’d shared this experience brought me closer to her than I had felt in years. She became human to me again.

  Yet, in equal measure, I felt confused; as my own maternal instinct grew, I wondered again how she’d been able to turn away from me when I’d needed her most.

  I tried to shake those thoughts right out of my head, though. ‘The future, not the past, Hibo,’ I reminded myself. But it was difficult to keep telling myself that when the past was always here, a part of my body, and that’s what I dreaded the most, the past coming back to haunt me when medical staff needed to examine me. I’d escaped any kind of examination during my pregnancy, and my biggest fear was that doctors and midwives would think I was a freak, that they wouldn’t regard me as a human being because of the mutilation that I had undergone. I couldn’t look at myself, so how could they?

  And then finally, after nine long months, came the first pain from deep inside, a sharp pain. Not that I told Yusuf, not even when I felt wet between my legs. Instead, I locked myself in the bathroom as the pains grew stronger and swept through me in waves, but I was more troubled by the anxious thoughts racing around my head: how is this baby going to come out? How will I deliver him if I won’t – I can’t – open my legs to anyone? What are they going to do? Am I going to die? Is this baby going to die? But even worse than any of that, the idea of myself or my baby dying, was the thought of medical staff looking between my legs – that’s how huge my fear was.

  But by midnight, my pains were so strong that there was no disguising them anymore, and, as soon as Yusuf realised, he insisted we go straight to the hospital. There, a midwife felt my stomach and attached a monitor to check the baby’s heart rate.

  ‘How long have you been having contractions?’

  My English wasn’t very good; I spoke only a few words, so Yusuf translated the bits that I didn’t know.

  ‘Not long,’ I lied.

  She studied me for a second.

  ‘I’d like to examine you down below,’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  She tried again. ‘I need to know how dilated you are.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Please, Hibo,’ Yusuf begged me. ‘Think of our baby.’

  But I shook my head.

  The midwife left and went to get a doctor. She came back and said it was fine, they would continue checking the baby’s heart rate through the monitor. But she had a warning that Yusuf tried his best to translate.

  ‘You have been carrying this baby for nine months; you don’t want anything happening to him because you refuse to be checked.’

  But then nature took over. They kept me in overnight and by 5am my contractions were stronger than ever; the baby was coming and I didn’t have a choice in the matter. But even as my baby started to make his way through my body, as the doctors insisted I had to let my knees fall open to allow him to come out, my fear of their judgement still made me cover my face with a pillow and burst into tears because the images in my mind were not of the baby that was about to be born, but quick flashes of the cutter, my mother, the bag of rusty razors.

  ‘We need to cut her,’ the doctor told Yusuf. I needed an episiotomy so that my son could come out, the third time someone had taken a blade to my genitals, the second time it had been done without anaesthetic. The instant I saw the scalpel I was back there in that hut – only this time it wasn’t my life I was fighting for, but my son’s. I had to dig deep and push those images out of my head along with my son out of my body, so I took a deep breath but I couldn’t stop the tears because I realised then that everyone in this hospital would know about me now, they knew what I looked like; that although that doctor had opened me so I could urinate, it was just a few centimetres, not entirely. There was no translator there, but I knew that the midwives were talking about me, not to me, about me. I just wanted to get away. Please God, I prayed, just let it be over.

  Just to make things even more horrifying, Yusuf was looking over my shoulder, between my legs.

  ‘He’s coming!’ he said. ‘I can see his head! Keep pushing, Hibo!’

  Then suddenly, a cry pierced the air. My son. And it is true that in that instant you forget everything. All the pain suddenly evaporated; he was something I could concentrate on instead of the faces of those around me. In that one second, he became my world, ten little fingers and ten little toes, he was perfect. We called him Abdinasir.

  I’d suffered far more than I’d realised I would – having been stitched so tightly by the cutter, and crisscrossed with scar tissue, both of our lives had been endangered.

  The stitching that was needed to put me back together took months to heal, and the pain made it impossible for me to sleep. Each time I closed my eyes I was that six-year-old child again, looking up at the tiny gap in the canvas. But in those dark nights when I couldn’t sleep, I’d look over into Abdinasir’s cot and watch him sleeping, and remind myself again: the future, not the past, Hibo.

  Because there was the future, swaddled in blankets, sleeping peacefully. The pain would eventually go, the memories would fade again, and he’d still be here, the son who had given me life. My love for him overwhelmed everything else, the joy at holding him to my breast as I fed him overshadowing the past.

  It was only after Abdinasir’s birth that three letters appeared on my maternity files: FGM. I had no idea what those letters stood for, no one had explained them to me, yet instinct told me that everything I wanted to know, everything my mother hadn’t told me, would be explained in those three letters. If I could just find out what they meant.

  As soon as I was well enough to go out after the birth of my son, I put Abdinasir into his pram and wrapped him up in thick blankets. Our destination wasn’t far as the wheels of the pram crunched through the last of the snow on the ground. In the months that I’d spent convalescing since the birth, in between the sleepless nights, the nappy changes and breastfeeds illuminated only by the moon that shone in through the bedroom curtains, those three letters kept going round in my mind. They had to have something to do with being cut.

  I’d asked Yusuf to go to the library for me while I was busy with the baby, but each time he’d returned without any luck. ‘I couldn’t find anything,’ he said, looking as frustrated as I felt. So I knew I needed to go myself, and luckily the library was just across from the new flat in Leyton we’d moved into in preparation for the birth of our son. But where to start among the endless rows of shelves? My grasp of the English language still stretched little past a hundred words, nothing like the vocabulary I’d need to skim the titles of hundreds of books. So I decided to start from the beginning. My son was just six months old, but I’d start teaching him English words as I learned myself. We sat there for hours, surrounded by the colourful spines of children’s books and bright murals on the walls, as I held a picture book just inches from
him in his pram. In this part of the library, it was usual for the silence to be broken by toddlers clambering up and down from chairs as they thrust another book into their mother’s lap.

  ‘Banana!’ I’d say, showing Abdinasir a picture of a bright-yellow fruit, and he’d gurgle his appreciation as the letters made more sense to me in turn.

  ‘Apple,’ I’d turn the page. ‘Orange.’ His legs kicked happily inside his Baby-gro.

  And like that, the pair of us learned English from children’s books, until one day I was ready to ask the librarian for a Somali–English dictionary. Then my search really began. Wheeling Abdinasir’s pram through the towering aisles, I found a section that looked like it covered medicine though the sheer number of books was daunting. Carefully, one hand rocking Abdinasir as he slept in his pram, the other running a finger along each spine, I found a book that had the words ‘female circumcision’ in the title. I knew what ‘female’ meant, and I tried the next word out loud, my tongue tangling itself around those new syllables. An ‘f’ and a ‘c’ in the title . . . No ‘g’, but instinct told me this could be what I was looking for.

  I took it down from the shelf and checked it out of the library, tucking it into the bag that I had slung over the handles of the buggy. At home, as I fed Abdinasir spoonfuls of puréed banana while he sat gurgling in his high chair, I flicked through the pages. And there, I found my answer. It was pictures rather than words that did the talking at first. They were just line drawings, but the shock of them was enough for me to snap the book shut.

  So that is what I looked like.

  Yusuf looked up from the television, startled by the unexpected sound. ‘Is everything OK, my love?’ he asked.

  ‘This is what I’ve been looking for,’ I told him, and the tears started flowing, even though I didn’t yet understand a single word. He got up and came over to comfort me, briefly picking up the book and turning it over in his hands before returning it gently to the table.