by Hibo Wardere
For almost a year I kept that book at home, renewing it every few weeks. Each evening, after I’d put Abdinasir down to sleep, my finger traced every word on the page, flipping between the English word and the Somali translation in my dictionary, rearranging the words in the sentence until each one dropped into place, their meaning sinking in, often accompanied by devastation and reality. Every so often I’d look up at Yusuf and tell him something that I’d learned. He’d just listen – he knew I didn’t need any comment from him, only an ear as I tried out these new words.
Then, as I made my way through one section, I came across those three letters. FGM: ‘female genital mutilation’. I quickly scanned through my Somali–English dictionary for the translation of mutilation, and then I sank back in my chair. Mutilation. That’s exactly what had happened to me. I couldn’t think of a better word to describe it.
I closed my eyes and thought of the times my hand had strayed to that area as I’d bent down to wash myself in the bath or the shower. My fingers had felt none of the fleshy female parts that I’d seen pictures of in the other medical books I’d looked through during my search of the library – none of the normal pieces that make up a woman. Instead, the picture that my hands had created in my mind matched some of the images in this book. They were labelled in ‘types’, with a description of the extent of mutilation in each case – Type 1, Type 2, Type 3. This last one was the most brutal of all, and that’s what had been done to me.
I put my hand up to my mouth as the simple line drawing settled itself into my brain. What had they done to me? Suddenly I felt curious about how I did look, what that doctor had seen when she opened me, what all the midwives saw at the hospital.
More than that, every page of this book, however painful each revelation I translated was, told me I wasn’t alone. Each tear that splashed on to the page was being shed by another woman somewhere else in the world.
I read about girls in Mali, in Nigeria, in Egypt, all of them had gone through this same mutilation. Although it helped in some ways to realise that other women knew my pain, it made me feel overwhelmingly sad. And again I came back to the question of why.
Over the next few weeks I read further. One eight-year-old Malian girl had told the author how she had been showered in gifts by her family and friends, and had been told by her mother that she was going to be brave and courageous and that this was a rite of passage that would make her into a real woman. I thought back to my own gudnin, the same lies – even the same words – had been told to me. There were tens of thousands of us girls all around the world who’d been tricked by their parents. Who thought that there was some reward at the end of being pinned down in a hut and having bits stripped off them, when in reality there was nothing but nightmare flashbacks and a lifetime of infections and pain.
I read on, translating slowly more words that revealed FGM was to blame for my constant urine infections, for the dryness I suffered, the scar tissue, the constant itching, the damaged nerve endings, and was the reason I felt no sensation of pleasure when Yusuf made love to me.
As I read each woman’s testimony, it was like reading my own. I knew then that I truly wasn’t alone, and nor was I alone in my need for knowledge. Someone had taken the time to ask more questions than I ever had – they’d asked and had answered so many whys that there was enough information to fill a whole book. That made me feel that what happened to me had some meaning for other people too. That it shouldn’t have happened. I realised that this thing that has haunted me since I was a child wasn’t a secret at all. You could talk about it, if only someone was willing to listen. I didn’t feel so alone anymore, but at the same time I began to be haunted by the idea that there were girls being cut outside of my community, outside of Mogadishu, all around the world, maybe even here in Britain – it was that thought which kept me awake at night over the next few months, more than the cries of my teething baby.
By the time I finished reading the book, I knew I needed to see how I looked. Pictures in books weren’t enough – I wanted to see for myself what that cutter had done to me. I was frightened, more than I can ever write here on these pages. I wasn’t ready to position myself awkwardly over a mirror; I didn’t want to be alone with the shock of what I might find in my reflection, and I wasn’t ready to share that moment with Yusuf. I wanted a degree of separation, the chance to shut my eyes; the images in the book were real enough without seeing a living, breathing me held up in front of the mirror. These were the days before smartphones and digital cameras, so the only thing I could think of was a disposable camera from my local pharmacy. I bought one a few days later, throwing it into Abdinasir’s changing bag like a dirty secret. Then, in the privacy of my bathroom while Yusuf was out at work and Abdinasir slept, I climbed into an empty bathtub and opened my legs, looking away as I positioned the camera between them. Click. Click. Click. With shaking hands I wound the film between each shot.
For days I eyed the small black plastic box – it looked so ordinary and innocuous, sitting there in our living room on the shelf above our TV. I knew the weight of what it contained within, though: indelible images already burnt on to the film. Did I have the courage to get them out?
A week later, I went back to the pharmacy, and there I spoke to the female assistant standing behind the counter. She must have been in her thirties, covered, like me, in a hijab. I took that as a sign that she might understand what I needed to explain to her.
‘I have something really private in here that I need to see,’ I told her in my broken English.
Her brow wrinkled slightly.
‘They are pictures of me that I have never seen before,’ I continued, and pointedly directed my eyes downwards.
Her brow ironed itself out again, as a flicker of recognition of what I was trying to say crossed her face. She took the camera.
‘I understand,’ she said, speaking partly in English, partly in Arabic, which she guessed I might know. ‘I will look after it personally.’
The look that we shared between us told me that I could trust her, and as I left the pharmacy there was a sense of relief mixed in with the other feelings of fear and trepidation.
I returned to the pharmacy the following week, and as soon as the bell on the door jangled to signal my arrival, she was instantly at my side to tell me the photographs were ready.
‘Did you look already?’ I asked her.
She shook her head. ‘Did you want me to?’
I nodded. I don’t know why, but something told me that I didn’t want to do this on my own.
As if reading my thoughts she said gently, ‘I have a friend who this happened to. I know what you’re afraid of seeing.’
‘Will you look for me first?’ I asked her, and she nodded.
She pointed to a plastic seat in the corner in front of the counter, and I sat down and waited as she went to look in a private room. When she came out, I was sure that her skin was a shade paler.
‘What do I look like?’ I asked her. ‘Tell me honestly.’
‘It is devastating,’ she warned, and I saw her eyes were shining with tears.
My heart was racing and my hands were covered in a film of sweat as she led me to the back room.
‘You can stay here for as long as you need to,’ she said, closing the door behind her.
It took me a long while to look. I sat there, turning the packet over and over in my hands, sometimes starting to open it before sealing it again. By the time I’d finished, the lip of the envelope curled with its own curiosity, and so before the clock could tick another hand around, I pulled the pile of photographs from the envelope at last. What I saw took the breath from my body. The woman was right, there was only one word for it: devastating.
For the first time I could see what I had been left with. It was just a hole. Everything else had been chopped off and sealed up. Despite the doctor opening my skin enough to expose my urethra so I could wee, there were no fleshy labia like other women had, no protection, no
beauty. The area between my legs looked like dark-brown sand that someone had dragged a faint line through. Then, as if someone had poked a stick into the sand, there at the bottom of the line was a hole. My vagina. I could see it was a little bigger than how it had originally been stitched thanks to the doctor who opened me slightly, but there it was, the only clue that I was a woman. The rest of my genitals had been sliced off and discarded, yet my urethra was just visible where the doctor had partially deinfibulated me during that minor surgery.
I wiped the tears from my face with my scarf, preparing to leave the room. I don’t know what I had hoped for by seeing myself – to reclaim some sense of ownership over my body perhaps? To see my body mutilated like that, to grasp for the first time what the result of all that unbearable pain had been, to know why I had suffered in childbirth and every day since – it was truly devastating. No other word.
‘Please dispose of them,’ I asked the assistant as I left the shop.
I didn’t of course see the photos again, yet the horror of those images was seared on my mind. But did I wish I’d never looked? No. I just saw it as the next painful step on the path to freedom, because I knew then – and I’d always known – that knowledge is power.
11
Family
I might have discovered what FGM meant, but it was still not discussed with me by any midwife, not even the one who picked up the notes to my second pregnancy two years after Abdinasir’s birth. By now my English was much better; I would have talked had there been anyone prepared to listen. But nobody mentioned it and so I didn’t either. This was still the early nineties, and despite the influx of Somalian refugees – which told me that surely I couldn’t be the only woman they had seen who had undergone such a horrific procedure – it was a subject not talked about openly, even by medical professionals on this side of the world, a supposedly more civilised place, thousands of miles away from the shroud of secrecy surrounding the practice.
While making love to my husband remained something that I endured rather than enjoyed, I still wanted to be close to him in that way. I still tried not to deny him simply because I couldn’t bear to see on his face the pain that I inflicted by rejecting him. We went to the doctor’s together and our GP recommended a lubricant to make things easier, but although it took away some of the pain, it did little to combat the flashbacks that accompanied our time together in bed.
‘Are you OK?’ Yusuf would ask.
And I wished so much that he didn’t need to ask me. I wished I was a normal woman.
By now, with a young baby, I mixed with more Somalian women in our community, and even though we all shared the pain of our circumcision, we never discussed it openly. We disguised it with humour, ‘joking’ about how we winced in bed. I look back now and wonder how we could have coped in that way, but you do what you can to get through these things in life. I heard stories time and time again of women who’d been left by their husbands, often because they had found another woman, and even if we didn’t say it out loud, we all knew that the fact that we had been mutilated was to blame. Yusuf had always been such a wonderfully supportive husband, he’d never given me any reason to fear he would be anything but loyal to me, and yet I lived with the constant anxiety that I wouldn’t be enough for him, that one day he might seek pleasure from a woman who could please him in that department. My fear became part of my everyday life, even as our family grew.
During my second pregnancy it was a huge relief when doctors told me that I would be able to have a Caesarean this time around, seeing how I’d struggled so much during Abdinasir’s birth. For me the prospect of not being exposed to any more strangers was enough to help me relax throughout the pregnancy. And yet when the time came to go into hospital, as I waddled in for my elective Caesarean, my belly full of arms and legs, and a drip was put into my back which sent my legs to sleep, I hadn’t realised that they’d need to go down there to insert the catheter. As the nurse looked between my legs, I closed my eyes and tried to take myself away from the room, unsure of whether I really did spot horror flit across her face.
Our second son Ali’s birth was much calmer than the first, but because I hadn’t pushed my boy into the world, I felt that there was something missing from the experience, however traumatic my first labour had been. And then there were the horror stories I heard in the playground as Abdinasir toddled round my knees and I rocked Ali gently in his pram. Other Somalian women told how their friends had been unwittingly sterilised while undergoing Caesareans. I didn’t know whether these were Chinese whispers, but they were enough to make me vow never to have another. So eighteen months later when my breasts swelled and my periods stopped, I told no one. My growing tummy was easy to disguise behind the weight that had been left over from my two previous pregnancies, and although Yusuf begged me to visit our GP, I refused.
I was six months pregnant by the time I went to hospital for my first scan and my midwife was furious. But her disappointment in me did little to dampen the joy I felt when we discovered that this time we were having a baby girl. I loved my boys with all my heart, but having a girl meant something different to me; it meant that I could mend the past. My girl, after all, would never be cut, despite – or, more accurately, because of – being born to a mother whose life had been ruined by FGM. It was my vow; the cycle would be broken.
I would love her well past her sixth birthday; we would play together and talk together about anything and everything, and do all the things that my mother and I missed out on. I would buy her dolls and dress her up prettily and tell her stories, and she would never know the misery that I had felt in my childhood. She would never be let down by me like I was by my mother. I would raise her as a normal human being, with as much chance as any other person in this world, and she would never know the terror that I had met so early on in my life. This time, things would be different.
My hostility towards my mother continued to abate as I watched her become a loving grandmother. What she hadn’t bestowed on me after the age of six, she gave to my sons tenfold. She had moved over to the UK a few months after Abdinasir had been born, and although she didn’t accept my marriage to Yusuf, and refused to speak to him, she showered our boys in more love than I’d known she was capable of. They’d look for Granny out of the window of our flat when they knew she was coming to visit. They loved nothing more than the days she’d surprise them by coming with me to pick them up from school. Each Saturday I took them to my sister’s house where my mother lived and she would take them out to the local market, returning them with arms bulging with sweets and toys. Slowly, we exchanged smiles, and then conversations, and then hugs. And time did soften how she felt about Yusuf too; in fact, the time came when she apologised to him for refusing to acknowledge him in my life.
‘You are a good man, a good husband, and a good father,’ she told him. ‘And I am sorry.’
It was another step towards mending our shattered relationship.
But when our daughter Amal was born in 1996, we grew even closer. As was my wish, I delivered her naturally, and while it was just as painful as my first, I was more prepared for what to expect. Again, no one mentioned FGM to me; it was a knowing silence that pervaded the room, burst only by Amal’s cries as I pushed her into the world.
She quickly grew into Daddy’s little princess. She would wait at the window for him to come home from work, racing to open the door before his key even scratched its way into the lock. And wherever he’d been, he’d have picked up a little present for her, every single day without fail; a bracelet, a dress, a ring. She was a spoilt little girl, but Yusuf adored her. And so did my mother. Seeing her with Amal changed everything. My eldest daughter was a mirror image of me as a child – huge brown eyes, skinny legs and a curious mind to match. I saw the way my mother smothered her with affection and it took me back to how she’d been with me; watching them was like reliving my childhood. The love they shared wasn’t just a gift for them, but for me too. It was like having my H
oyo back.
‘She’s so much like you, Hibo,’ she would say, and a look would pass between us.
But it was inevitable, too, that sooner or later somebody would ask when she was going to be cut. If Yusuf’s family questioned him on the telephone from Africa, he never told me, but it was my sister who first asked me when I was going to do it.
We were chatting in the kitchen, Amal playing at our feet, when Hadsan turned to me.
‘You need to cut her while she’s young so she doesn’t remember,’ she told me.
‘She’s never going to be cut,’ I replied.
She looked at me, shocked, raising her eyebrows in surprise.
‘What? Never?’
‘Never,’ I said.
‘But . . .’
‘I don’t want to discuss it, but I’m not going to cut any of my girls. That’s it.’
‘But what about Yusuf? His family?’
‘His family are not my concern. Yusuf believes as I do that our girls will never be cut.’
‘Who is going to marry her if she’s not cut?’
‘Whoever she marries is her business.’
‘You will change your mind one day,’ she said, staring at me hard.
And I stared back at her thinking, You are crazy if you think I’d put my girls through that.
We moved from Leyton to Walthamstow a few years afterwards, into a lovely three-bedroom flat just a stone’s throw from the busy market. It was the most space we’d ever had, and yet our love for our children meant that we only planned to fill it with more; in fact, by 2001, I was pregnant with another little girl, Aisha.
Right in the centre of Walthamstow there was a great community atmosphere; a whole mix of different cultures, not just other Somalian families. I wouldn’t cook a meal without sending one of my children round with some food for our neighbours, and they would do the same for us, giving the kids sweets for Eid even if they didn’t celebrate it themselves. With each pregnancy, I became less frightened of the birth itself and more excited to meet the new baby. Yusuf and I were happy and our family grew and the years passed, even though in the back of my mind there still lurked the anxiety that he might one day want a more fulfilling sex life – that one day he might grow tired of my wincing as we made love, of my reticence to initiate intimacy. I always tried to reassure him that if I didn’t find some enjoyment from our love-making I wouldn’t keep having his babies. For me, being close to him, the feeling of his skin on mine, was what I enjoyed.
