Читать книгу A Woman of Firsts - Edna Adan Ismail - Страница 13

Hargeisa, British Somaliland, 1946

The summer of 1946 marked my first visit home after living in French Somaliland for one year. I was still only eight years old and little did I know that this would be the year that my life changed for ever. It felt good to be home as I had missed my grandmothers and my father especially. I couldn’t wait to tell Dad my news and share all that I’d learned in school.

The strangest thing about being back was that I had a new perspective. My time in a French-run co-educational and largely secular environment had shown me that girls could participate in life as fully as boys, so to return to a place that put so many constraints on my gender felt all the more difficult to accept. None of the local girls I’d left behind were ever seen outside their homes and only the boys seemed to have any freedom – or fun. The camels had more freedom than we did.

When I was growing up I’d noticed something else unusual about the girls in our district. There was a mysterious event that made them disappear for a month or so and when they returned they were different – far more subdued and not participating as much as they’d done before. I thought that maybe they’d been ill and slow to recover, or that their mothers had warned them to behave in a more adult manner. Usually I was too busy playing with the boys to worry too much about why any one girl was acting strangely.

Circumcision for boys was an accepted part of our society, although I had little or no understanding of it. We’d often see the boys walk around gingerly afterwards in their lunghis or long overshirts, carefully holding the cloth away from their groins. As I had no knowledge of the human anatomy, periods or anything like that I didn’t associate what had happened to them with their genitals. In any event, it was an unwritten rule in our society that we never discussed such matters. We girls were especially ignorant and blind so, despite being an inquisitive child, I knew nothing of the traditional rites and rituals because all that was one big secret.

One day that summer, I found myself alone in the house with my mother. My brother was in Borama visiting our grandparents and Dad was out of town visiting the nomads for a few days. These were people who’d often never seen a doctor in their lives and managed any health problems as best they could or with the ministrations of traditional herbalists, bone-setters and spiritual healers. The sick often fell prey to quack ‘pharmacists’ who sold them anything from pills to ward off the evil eye or an injection with something that could potentially be fatal. Whenever my father returned from these trips he’d be exhausted.

That particular morning after he’d left I awoke to find our house bustling with unusual commotion. For some reason, several women – cousins, neighbours, and relatives I called ‘aunts’ – had dropped in to talk with my mother and my Grandmother Baada. There was much hushed chatter and conversations clearly not meant for my ears. ‘Why don’t you go play outside?’ Mum said when she caught me trying to listen in, and – although surprised – I was more than happy to oblige.

Early the following morning, one of my mother’s friends turned up at the house with a strange old woman I’d never seen before, and a fattened sheep. These were only ever brought to the house for feast days and, as far as I knew, this wasn’t one of them, so I was even more mystified. Odder still, Mum told me to take a shower, after which I assumed I’d be expected to put on my best clothes. ‘No, no. Wear a clean nightdress,’ she instructed. How peculiar, I thought. Equally strange, my bed was pushed into a corner of my bedroom and a mat laid on the floor. Someone placed a stool in the corridor and when I emerged from the shower room I found a group of women standing around it waiting for me. Smiling shyly at them, I wondered what was happening and then I realized with a pang of hunger that no one had prepared me any breakfast that morning.

No sooner had I sat down on the stool as instructed than mother’s friends grabbed my arms while others yanked up my nightie, grabbed my legs and pulled them apart. One woman gripped my left leg and another my right, while a third held me in a stranglehold, pressing me down firmly by my shoulders. In a well-planned operation that relied on speed and surprise, I spotted a knife glinting in the morning light streaming through the window and screamed as the old woman squatted before me and started cutting between my legs.

I can still remember the pain more than seven decades later, and I live that moment over and over again each time I think about it. I could feel the knife slashing through the sensitive flesh of my private parts and the stickiness of my blood as I screamed and struggled. My mother and grandmother watched my ordeal but neither came to my rescue. They just stood there, ululating joyfully as they witnessed what we now call FGM, female genital mutilation – a barbaric, ritualistic circumcision far more common than vaccination in my country – designed to act as a human chastity belt until the night of my marriage.

I must have passed out because I can remember waking up physically and emotionally exhausted. I had no more fight left in me. There was a horrible wheezing sound coming from my throat. The next thing I knew, the old woman was stitching together my wound with acacia thorns, pulling them together with string like a shoelace. The pain was excruciating. In what felt like a living nightmare, my legs were then bound all the way up to the thighs and hips. The women then lifted me onto the disposable mat that would soak up my blood and had been laid on my bedroom floor for this purpose. It had been so carefully planned. The old woman sprinkled a mixture of herbs, sugar and a raw egg yolk onto my open wound to form some sort of crust.

‘Egg will make you fertile,’ she declared with a toothless smile. ‘And sugar will make you sweet.’ Now that I’m a nurse, I can’t help but think that the mixture was a perfect medium to enable bacteria to grow, plastered onto an open wound by a woman with dirty hands, a dirty knife, using dirty rags. It was so gruesome at the time, and it is still gruesome to recall.

As I lay on the floor bleeding and sobbing in shock and pain, I was astonished that not one person showed me any sympathy at all. There was nobody to cry with or complain to, including my own flesh and blood. On the contrary, they were in a happy, festive mood. The sheep was slaughtered outside and a grand lunch prepared, with many of our neighbours summoned to share the special meal in my honour. The daughter of Adan Ismail had been ‘cleansed’ and all were invited to partake of the purification feast and celebrate the occasion. The women I loved the most in the world and who I’d always thought would protect me had deliberately selected the day for my gudniin or circumcision when they knew my father would be out of town. They then stood by while this horrific ritual was performed on me without any anaesthetic. They saw me kicking. They heard my screams. They paid for my butchery to be performed by someone who was neither medically qualified nor professionally trained.

They never warned me of what was about to happen in what I now understand to be a conspiracy of silence among Somali and other women dating back centuries. Far from being horrified at this brutal thing that had been done to me, they were happy and relieved about it.

As an eight-year old child, I could not comprehend it.

As a woman in her eighties, I still cannot accept it.

***

The next thing I really remember was hearing my father’s voice. It must have been much later that night when he returned from the bush. Unable to move for the pain, I cried out to him. ‘Daddy! My Daddy!’ as he hurried in to see me.

Holding up a Tilley lamp, he took one look at me and fell to his knees, his prone figure casting a huge shadow on the wall. ‘What have they done to you, Shukri? What have they done?’

My grandmother berated him from the doorway, telling him that it was nothing to do with him and that he shouldn’t interfere. The women genuinely believed that if I were seen by a man then it could ‘contaminate’ my purification so that the wound wouldn’t heal, the skin wouldn’t fuse together, and the procedure might have to be done again. Ignoring his own mother, he slumped onto the mat and cradled me in his arms, allowing me to cry and cry until there were no more tears.

‘Aabo wey i qasheen!’ I wept. ‘Father, they slaughtered me! They carved me up!’ I believe I saw tears in my father’s eyes too. For the first time since my cutting I had an ally – somebody who was offering sympathy and seemed to be hurting almost as much as I did.

Then my mother rushed in, shouting. ‘Leave her alone, Adan! Don’t touch her or you’ll infect her. It will undo the stitches!’

I have never seen my father so angry. ‘How could you?’ he raged. ‘Why have you done this?’

From the expression on her face, I think my mother was suddenly very ashamed. My grandmother countered that they had only done what was expected of them. I remember she used the expression ‘the right thing’. There was a terrible argument between the three of them then in the next room; unlike anything I’d witnessed before. I will always associate it with that day. Listening to their row and seeing how upset my father was by what had happened to me gave me a little courage. It made me realize that this wasn’t right. If it had made Father angry then what had been done to me must be wrong.

In silence and with his jaw clenched tightly, he came back into my room with a glass of water, some painkillers, and a few cloths to clean myself with. Grandmother kept telling him not to give me anything to drink, as it would make me urinate before the wound had fused. Tradition prevented him from examining me, sterilizing the cuts or giving me surgical dressings. He remained furious for weeks and continued to support me as best he could from afar, but we both knew it was too late for him to change what had been done.

It was many years before I discovered exactly what the procedure had involved. The old woman, who had the spurious title of ‘traditional birth attendant’, had sliced off my clitoris and labia minora with her knife and then pared the sides of my labia, removing all the skin right down to the perineum until it was raw and bleeding profusely. Without a surgical glove in sight, she attached the folded edges of my vulva or labia majora to the raw flesh, covering my vagina like a hood. This would eventually fuse together to form a hard bridge of scar tissue that would almost completely restrict the opening. The medical term for it is infibulation, and in what these women considered to be a ‘properly infibulated girl’ you should not be able to get anything larger than the head of a matchstick into the vagina from that day on until the night of her wedding. This means that whenever urinating or menstruating, urine and blood has to drip-drip out of a hole approximately 1.5–2 mm wide.

I knew nothing of this as a child, of course. I simply lay trapped and isolated in my room, a prisoner of my mother and grandmother, in agony as the wound began to scab and congeal around the thorns. What hurt the most, though, was the overwhelming sense of betrayal. This changed my relationship with them for ever. Custom dictated that I was to lie on the floor for a week to allow the wound to heal, and hardly drink anything. I was given a little white rice to eat with some sour milk or yoghurt, designed to keep me constipated for several days. But the time came when I needed to empty my bladder, so – although I no longer trusted my mother – I had no choice but to call to her for help. She and my grandmother carried me to the toilet pit and lay me on my side on the floor. ‘Go ahead and urinate,’ they said, as if it was as simple as that.

Can you imagine? My legs were tied to prevent the wound from opening, I was lying on a dirty and cold cement floor, and the urine wouldn’t come. They poured cold water on my feet to make me go, which eventually worked but it stung like crazy. I screamed and tried to halt the flow, but they told me, ‘Don’t stop. You’ve got to keep going.’

I didn’t believe them so, in what felt like a new form of torture, they kept pouring cold water on my feet to make me start again, and then I longed to empty my bladder completely so that I would never have to endure the pain again. At that point, I also wanted to never drink anything again even though I was so thirsty, because I now knew what fresh agonies a full bladder would bring. Little did I know then that the more concentrated the urine is the more it hurts, so drinking more water would have made it less painful, but nobody told me that.

Just like millions of Somali girls before me and since, I went from one day to the next in my little room, separate from the world and from humanity. Every day, I heard women from the neighbourhood drop in to tell my mother, ‘Congratulations, Marian, your daughter has been purified.’ What they were purifying an eight-year-old girl from I have no idea. In time, I grew accustomed to turning over gently and to urinating, even though it still hurt horribly. After seven days, the women undid the bindings from my legs and slowly parted them, causing fresh pain. They removed the thorns to see if the wound had fused together, and thank goodness it had – probably thanks to my father’s medications. Then they tied my legs together again to keep it from coming undone. They got me to stand up, still bound, and helped me to move about a little one baby step at a time. I felt very dizzy – I had lost a lot of blood and had been lying down for a week. One thing I still remember vividly was the horrible smell of sweat, urine and dried blood that emanated from me, as I hadn’t washed for ten days. And this was called purification?

The women who were minding me kept saying, ‘Inan baad tahay, Edna’, which means, ‘You are a young woman now.’ I was no longer an aruur, a child. By this they meant that I had been prepared and was ready to be considered for marriage, even though in our culture girls do not generally marry until they are around fifteen (although there are exceptions). As a ‘cleansed’ virgin, I would be trained to be shy and obedient, respectful and domesticated – the perfect Somali wife.

Eventually the wound mended some more and I was allowed to gently wash myself. They let me sit up, took off my leg bindings and helped me to take a shower. They told me I was healed. Psychologically, I was far from healed. Only then did I understand why the other girls in the neighbourhood had disappeared for three or four weeks and had emerged pale and silent. Just as they must have been, I was terrified that the wound would reopen. Feeling completely alone, I didn’t want to see anyone or go out. When I eventually ventured outside, the neighbourhood women constantly reminded me, ‘Watch out, don’t do too much because if it comes undone we will have to do it again.’ You can bet I was careful after that.

Tomboy Edna who’d been such a carefree, rebellious kid had gone for ever. In her place was a frightened little girl who was instructed not to talk about what had happened, which only made me more aloof. While my friends of both genders were playing and singing, laughing and joking, I felt so different. Every time I walked, sneezed or coughed, I remembered the warning that filled me with dread: ‘We will have to do it again.’

My grandmother Clara had always been such a comfort and an ally to me, so I longed to see her and have her hold and reassure me, but she was in Borama. By the time she came to visit, my wound had healed and I was already indoctrinated into never speaking about what had happened to me. Later I came to understand that Clara too would have considered my mutilation to be completely normal. From that day on, I regarded all the women in my family with something akin to suspicion, even contempt. They had conspired against me, lied, and disfigured me permanently. How could I ever forgive them?

***

I have never written or spoken about my own experience with female circumcision in any detail before. It isn’t easy, but it is time because this mutilating trauma has to stop. Every Somali woman has to live with the memory and then with the physical consequences. It remains with you for life.

Of course the wound heals and gradually you learn to behave normally again. Eventually even the fear that something might happen to undo it subsides. But it takes years to trust people again, or to grow accustomed to the new way of living and urinating. Many teenagers suffer frequent infections and pain. Some even need surgery while menstruating because of blockages, and this has to be done in a certain way and then be certified to prove that the girl’s virginity is still intact or she and her family will be dishonoured.

I knew what had been done to me was wrong, but I had no idea what to do about it. Almost every female I knew had gone through the same experience, and virtually everyone younger than me was going to have it done. It took me decades to pluck up the courage to ask questions about the practice, and many more years before I decided to speak out against it.

I wanted to know where and how it started and was astonished to discover that this paganistic ritual pre-dates Islam and Christianity, going back to the fifth century BC and the time of the Pharaohs. In some countries, it is still referred to as ‘Pharaonic circumcision’.

The River Nile is the lifeblood of Egypt and the story goes that the god of the river was considered to be the most powerful, and had to be appeased. The most beautiful virgins were chosen for sacrifice and thrown into the river to drown. It was considered an honour to the family of a girl to be so favoured by the Pharaoh in order to ensure the survival of her people and the punishment for refusal was severe. If the river ever dried out or flooded the fields then it was presumed that the girl chosen hadn’t been a true virgin, which had somehow angered the god. To ensure that all future ‘gifts’ would be appropriate, girls were circumcised and sutured and taken to the temples to be guarded by eunuchs until it was time for them to be killed. In time, the practice was adopted as an initiation ceremony by most of the people who lived along the Blue Nile, which rises in Ethiopia and flows north to Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea, joining the White Nile from Burundi. The custom travelled across the equatorial belt through the Nubian tribe to the Ethiopians, the Sudanese, the Somalis, and sixteen other countries in Africa as well as a few in Asia. Female circumcision is largely an accident of geography.

Later, slave traders adopted its use to keep their female ‘goods’ from getting pregnant (they also earned more money for virgins), and nomadic herders also accepted the tradition for population control or to ‘protect’ their women from rape. It is still widely practised by African Muslims, as well as non-Muslims, west of the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea, as far south as parts of Kenya and Tanzania. In some instances it is the local blacksmith who performs the cutting rather than a birth attendant. Nations on the other side of those two seas don’t do it at all, or only so that it sheds a symbolic drop of blood. In truth, it is not a religious obligation required by any faith, but primarily a cultural tradition from a time when people believed in river gods.

Thanks to ignorance and fear, female circumcision is now a widespread practice that is still carried out on an estimated three million girls between the age of five and ten every year. In my country it is estimated that the most severe form, as practised on me, affects 76 per cent of the female population, a trend that is down from the 100 per cent of my youth and the 98 per cent prevalence we found two decades ago. Because of migration, the practice is also emerging among the refugee communities of Europe and North America, and British hospitals currently treat around 9,000 cases every year.

For now I want to send comforting thoughts to the terrified eight-year-old me who was so bewildered and confused by the heinous thing that was done to her that she still weeps at the cruelty of it.

***

When I returned to Djibouti City at the end of that summer I could tell from the look in my Aunt Cecilia’s eyes that she knew what had been done to me. Not that she said anything – not even ‘sorry’. As I was fast learning, to say nothing about FGM is the considered wisdom among my people.

It was years before I realized that my mother and aunt, as Somali girls from a highly respected family, were also cut but would have been spared the most radical infibulation like mine, and that in French Somaliland Cecilia was free of the social and cultural pressure to have her own daughters ‘cleansed’. Rita, Madeleine and Gracie were all untouched, so I was the first daughter of my generation affected. My sister Asha was born in 1948 while I was away at school, and I hoped she would be spared. No such luck.

I now know that families are very often shamed into it, with friends and relatives warning them that their daughters will be spinsters because ‘Any husband would expect it.’ This is what happened to my mother, who had married young and moved to an environment very different to her childhood. She desperately wanted to fit in and be seen as a good Muslim wife who’d done the right thing for me. As the eldest child of Adan Doctor I had to be of impeccable moral standing.

The pressure to conform doesn’t only come from adults. Children pick up on the language and often tell an ‘uncut’ girl, ‘Keep away from me. Mummy says you still have your shame. You’re not halal.’ Without even knowing what the procedure involves, girls beg to be ‘cleansed’ so that they can be just like their friends. It is a mystery to them but a natural response from innocents who also want to fit in. And as in every country where female circumcision is practised, religion plays no part because it happens to all girls, be they Christian, Muslim or from a pagan background. There is little chance of escape.