However Long the Night

by Aimee Molloy

  Over time, Molly couldn’t help but question the choice of going public with the decision, knowing that it might only get worse. “You can’t control what journalists write or put on television, and things may become even more distorted,” she said to the women one afternoon. “But it’s not too late. If you want to stop discussing this with the media, we can do that. We can stop bringing people here to speak with you so that others will no longer write about Malicounda Bambara.”

  The women debated the best way forward, and as they did, Kerthio sat quietly in her chair, one hand fanning the flies from her face, the other resting on her stomach. Inside her, she’d recently discovered, another baby grew, her fifth. While she’d been happy with the news, she couldn’t help but feel the familiar pangs of sadness and worry that accompanied the discovery of another pregnancy, bringing memories of the day a decade earlier when she’d lost her daughter, Mariama. She caressed her swollen stomach as she listened to Molly and the women of her village debating the possibility of no longer speaking to the press about their decision.

  But she knew. Because of what she and the other women were doing, because of the information they’d been given and the courage they’d found, this child inside her, if she was a girl, would never be cut. She would never have to experience the pain and suffering, or the risk, of a custom that no longer made sense. That was enough to convince her that no matter what, no matter the hardships that might await them for what they were doing, no matter how many times they might be met by anger or disappointment, no matter the names they were called, for the health of this baby inside her, and for all the daughters of Senegal, she was never looking back.

  She spoke to the group. “We will not stop speaking of this to others. Before something is beautiful, it might have to be difficult. We made this decision and believe in what we did. We must therefore have the courage to explain to other women why we ended the tradition here. We cannot forget our sisters and our daughters. Change like this takes time, and we must persist.”

  THE WOMEN WERE TRUE to their word. A few weeks later, they received news that the women in the nearby village of Keur Simbara, where many of their relatives lived, were preparing to cut their girls. Despite the tension they continued to experience in their village, the women of Malicounda Bambara remained committed to spreading the knowledge they’d received. After all, theirs was a village of just three thousand residents, and while their efforts would spare their daughters pain and suffering, thousands of other girls in the region would still be cut.

  Kerthio called Molly at the Tostan office in Thiès. “We’ve decided we’d like to visit our relatives in Keur Simbara to share our knowledge with them and speak about our decision. Can you help us get to the village?”

  Molly agreed to rent a bus for the occasion, and a few days later the women prepared for the two-hour journey from Malicounda Bambara to Keur Simbara. Despite everyone’s excitement and nerves that day, there was something else on their minds: the weather. It typically begins to rain in mid-July in Senegal; here it was August, and it had barely rained at all. Once on board the bus, the women kept glancing at the sky, hoping to spot rain clouds. Molly found herself doing the same. Having lived through a drought during her years in Saam Njaay, she fully understood the suffering, hunger, and poverty that accompany a lack of rain.

  As the bus drew closer to Keur Simbara, the women put aside their worries about the weather, and stirring with excitement, they strained to hear the sound of drumming and music that always welcomes guests—especially visiting relatives—to any village. But when the bus finally slowed to a stop in the village square, the women were surprised to find there wasn’t any drumming or music. While a few people were there to greet them, they climbed off the bus to complete silence.

  Kerthio took her mother’s hand. “Has something happened? is there a funeral today we weren’t told of?” she asked.

  Maimouna shook her head in confusion and looked at Molly for a possible explanation, but she was as bewildered as the rest of the group. She had, of course, called ahead to give notice that the women were coming to discuss their recent decision. “I distinctly remember the sinking feeling I had at that point,” Molly says. “I’d expected a celebration and much joy from people, happy to see their relatives, who’d made considerable effort to get to Keur Simbara. That was the moment I began to grow very unsure about what we were doing.”

  More people eventually began to arrive in the courtyard, and chairs were brought and placed in a large circle under the great neem tree in the center of the village. The village chief greeted the women, and after everyone had solemnly taken their seats, Maimouna explained that the women had prepared a theater about their recent decision to end the tradition in their village. There was silence as the women stood to take their places, and throughout their performance, there was very little reaction from the audience.

  Afterward, Maimouna stood to speak. “We know you may be upset that we made this decision, and we want you to know why we made it. We’re here to talk to you, our relatives, so you can understand what we’ve learned through our Tostan classes and why we’ve chosen to do this. We are part of the same ethnic group, the same family. And we want you to join us.”

  Molly, seated in a chair in the circle, noticed a few women from Keur Simbara exchanging annoyed glances, others wrestling with the desire to take leave of the conversation, and she felt the uneasiness rising inside her. The heat was stifling in the courtyard. Beyond the large circle, children looked on with curiosity. Demba Diawara, one of the most respected men in Keur Simbara, stood to speak.

  A slight man with deep-set eyes and a graying goatee, Demba was born—at least according to the identification card he keeps in a small leather billfold—in 1937, which made him, on that day, sixty years old. Demba’s family had been among the first to settle the village of Keur Simbara in the late 1800s, when his mother’s father first came to Senegal from Mali in search of richer soil for his peanut crops.

  “Thank you very much for coming all the way here,” Demba began. “We appreciate the effort you’ve made. As you know, the tradition of which you speak comes from a very long time ago, from our mothers and their mothers. As a way of recognizing our ancestors, and showing them the respect they deserve, we hold this tradition in very high esteem. We are a very small village, a small community, but we are also part of a large community beyond this village. You have made a decision to do things your way, but that is not how we operate here.” He paused to clear his throat. “You have all come here and you have told us why you have stopped. But you made your decision without consulting with others. You have not included your family members in the dialogue. I know you now want us to join you, but we will not.”

  Molly looked around the circle at the crestfallen expressions on the faces of many women from Malicounda Bambara, and though she was loath to admit this to herself, the nagging doubt she’d been feeling over the last few weeks finally took hold of her. She leaned closer to Bilal, the head of training at Tostan, who had come to witness the meeting. “Come with me,” she said with some urgency. They stepped away from the circle. “Maybe we shouldn’t be doing this,” she whispered.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m no longer sure. Maybe this is too sensitive an issue for us to address. Maybe we made a mistake in getting involved in all of this.”

  “Why are you saying this now?” he asked.

  “This is much deeper than I may have realized. People are not welcoming their own relatives. The tension here is so thick, and the women are being ridiculed in their own village. I’m beginning to wonder if we know enough about what we’re doing, if Tostan has a right to be doing this.”

  Bilal pointed toward the seated crowd of people. “They are the ones doing it, Molly.”

  “I know, but Tostan is an American NGO, and I’ve seen too many instances of outside groups trying to impose their own ideas on villages like this. I’ve been so committed to
not making that mistake. Maybe we should not be dealing with these cultural issues, which run so deep. Maybe it’s too much.”

  “We’ll talk more about this later,” Bilal said.

  They walked back to the circle, and just as they did, Molly felt it: the first drop of rain. People jumped from their chairs as the leaves above them shivered softly with raindrops.

  “Rain. At last! Rain!” people shouted, catching the drops on their uplifted cheeks and down the backs of their boubous.

  Kerthio, who had noticed the look of concern on Molly’s face, rushed to her side. “This is a sign,” she said. “I know this is difficult, but the rain is telling us something. This is what we have been waiting for. We are doing the right thing.”

  “Let’s move inside,” Demba suggested, as above the wispy gray clouds thickened with moisture. Everyone grabbed a chair and moved into a small circular hut nearby. One by one, people placed their chairs around the room, and because there was not enough space for one large circle, the chairs took the shape of a spiral. Molly was among the last to enter, and she placed her chair in the middle of the circle. Just as she did, she had the strangest feeling of déjà vu, as if she had been here before, in this exact place.

  And then she remembered. This was her dream.

  She’d had it more than twenty years earlier, in the weeks just before she was scheduled to first come to Senegal for the six-month student-exchange program. The trip had been proving to be highly disorganized. Molly had come to regret her decision and was about to give up her efforts to make it happen. But then she’d had the dream. In it, she was in the middle of a circle of Africans, in the belly of a pregnant woman, and she felt safer than ever before, filled with a feeling of tremendous well-being and peace. She woke the next morning awash in the vividness of the dream, feeling a lingering sense of joy, and she decided that despite the challenges she might face, she was going to Africa.

  Now, two decades later, standing in the middle of a hut in Keur Simbara, she looked around the room and suddenly felt flush with the emotions of the dream, as if she were being cradled in a spiral of harmony and comfort. Despite the number of years she’d lived in Senegal, she hadn’t quite absorbed the people’s deep belief in spirits and signs. But maybe this was a sign: the dream and the rain, which had become a downpour.

  Maimouna spoke to the room. “Take your time and reflect upon this as we did. At any rate, we share the same traditions as you, and we have made up our minds and are convinced of what we are doing.”

  Molly went over to where Bilal sat. “I take back everything I just said,” she whispered.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We have to support these women no matter what. No more hesitation. No more vacillating. No more turning back. In fact, we’re going to see where we might take this. And we’re going to do it together.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Molly looked around the room, at the spiral and her empty chair in its center, knowing that she had arrived in this place, in this moment, for a reason. “Completely.”

  BOOK TWO

  Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. … Such as the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.

  —ELEANOR ROOSEVELT,

  WRITING ON THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE ADOPTION OF

  THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS

  16

  Yewwiku (Deliverance)

  Not long after the meeting in Keur Simbara, in a nearby village called Nguerigne Bambara, a woman named Ourèye Sall finished rinsing a dinner platter before placing it on the mat beside the washing tub and calling to her six children.

  “Finish your chores,” she said to them. “And remember you’re to obey your aunts this week. I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone.” She wrapped her pagne tightly around her waist and slipped her feet into a pair of plastic sandals that sat by the door of her hut. After grabbing the small bag she’d packed, she began the walk to meet the bus that would take her on the long journey to her home village of Sinthiou Bamambe, many hours away in an area traditionally called the Fouta, located along the Senegal River.

  Once on board, Ourèye rested her head against a diesel-stained window and spent the daylong trip watching the small villages of Senegal pass by, thinking about the first time she’d made this trip many years ago. She was fourteen then, on her way to be married to a man she’d never met, from a village she’d never heard of, called Nguerigne Bambara.

  “It’s a long trip from here,” her mother had said, with very little ceremony as they readied the millet couscous for that evening’s dinner. “Prepare to leave early tomorrow morning.” Ourèye was speechless. She hadn’t any idea her mother had found her a husband or that a week earlier he’d sent a representative to Sinthiou Bamambe to ask for her hand in marriage. She didn’t know her mother had been working for months to arrange this marriage, that she had fed this man her best rice dish and told him only about Ourèye’s best qualities: her peaceful and friendly nature and her ability to cook and clean house.

  Apparently, Kadidiatou had sold the man on Ourèye’s value as a bride, and Ourèye accepted the news that day, smiling at her mother and nodding. But as she quietly stirred the leaf sauce over the couscous, her head became crowded with questions: Who was this man? What was he like? She knew it was best to keep these questions to herself. Marriage was not between two people; it was a joining of families, and she was now expected to be obedient and trusting.

  Her sisters and brothers were called. They collected on the mat around the bowl and dug into their dinner, but Ourèye had trouble eating. Trying to contain her mounting nervousness, she focused on the fact that this was very good news. After all, no girl wanted to grow old without a husband.

  As soon as the meal was finished and she had helped her mother and sisters with their chores, Ourèye hurried to find Gedda. Gedda was not only Ourèye’s closest friend—closer even than any of her five sisters—she was also her sehil am wonki ngooti. The term means “friends of the same heart” in Ourèye’s language, and that was exactly how Gedda and Ourèye felt about each other—as if since the day of their births they had shared the same heart, beating deep in each of their chests in one perfect, unbroken rhythm. Ourèye spent most nights sleeping in Gedda’s room, their bodies sprawled next to each other on a thin mat, their arms touching. Long into the night—especially nights far too hot and sticky to find sleep—they discussed the events of the day and wondered aloud about their futures: their anticipation of marriage and children, their hope that they wouldn’t be worked too hard by their mothers, or later by their husbands. Gedda had cried with surprise that evening when Ourèye told her the news that she was going to be a bride. In Gedda’s room, under the bright blue glow of the moon, they mulled over their questions. Ourèye had been able to discreetly wrestle a few key details from her mother: her husband’s name was Modou, and he was a peanut and millet farmer. But what was he like? Would she know how to please him and thus bring honor to her family? Would he be kind? Gedda encouraged Ourèye to remain confident. Of course her mother had chosen a generous and peaceful man, she reassured her, one whose family would welcome her as one of their own. What they did not venture to discuss at all was the one detail that might break their shared heart: Nguerigne Bambara was many hours away from where Ourèye and Gedda lived. This was likely the last night the two would get to spend together for a very, very long time.

  The next morning, before the sun rose, Ourèye’s aunts Binta and Myriam, the eldest sisters of each of her parents, arrived to accompany her to Nguerigne Bambara. Ourèye did her best to appear strong and stoic, and although she knew it was impossible, she
wished that Kadidiatou could come with her. Ourèye was a woman now, and it was time for her to set off on her own. Before leaving to catch the bus to Nguerigne Bambara, Ourèye and her mother stood outside the dusty courtyard in front of their family’s compound, trying not to show their grief in parting. Ourèye was unsure of how to say good-bye to her mother. She didn’t dare tell Kadidiatou of the fear she felt—so uncertain of what the future held, unable to imagine days without her mother there to orient her to life as she always had, like the most brilliant among the stars in the northern Senegalese sky. Ourèye’s father joined them, and he held out his hands to offer a blessing for Ourèye.

  “Don’t be afraid, my daughter,” he said when he had finished. “God is great and all will be fine.” Ourèye accepted her father’s blessing in her cupped, outstretched hands and slowly pulled them to touch her forehead, so that his words were sure to cloak her entire being.

  It took many hours to reach Nguerigne Bambara, and along the way, outside the window of the crowded bus, the world opened up before Ourèye. The sky was endless and deep blue, like the feathers of the blue-necked birds she and Gedda had once chased through the nearby fields before stopping to peer at the boys sitting under a tree studying their books at Koranic school. The bus passed forests of baobab trees as villages came and went, most just like the one she had come from and the one that would become her home. It was nearly midnight of the following day when the bus finally turned down a dirt path and she arrived, exhausted and sticky, the taste of diesel and dust on her lips, in Nguerigne Bambara.