Cut (13 page)

‘I’m at the hospital,’ Yusuf told me. ‘Your mother has had a stroke.’

In that second, my world fell to the floor. Yusuf was terrified what the upset might do to me in my heavily pregnant state; he begged me to stay away from the hospital. But too many years had
been lost between Hoyo and me; I wasn’t going to let the past get in the way of what little time we might have left. The stroke left Hoyo bedbound for four years and many of those were spent
barely recognising me, let alone being aware of the birth of Aisha or even Abdilahi, two years later. My children missed her, and I did too. When my sister needed to go away on holiday for a few
weeks, she asked me to care for Hoyo. I stayed with her for the whole time, carefully tracing a cold compress across her skin, talking to her, telling her stories about the children. I made her
delicious soups, and fed them to her ever so gently with a spoon, just as she had once done for me. And slowly in those weeks, by some miracle, the paralysis left her, the mist lifted, and she
could once again see me as her daughter. She lifted herself up in bed on her hands; she wanted to talk for the first time in years.

‘I need you to forgive me, Hibo,’ she said in a frail voice.

I knew instantly what she meant, but I needed to hear it. I moved closer so that she could see me better. I felt her breath against my face and I clasped her cheeks in the palms of my hands; her
skin felt paper-thin and hung around her jaws where it had once been fleshy and plump. I remembered suddenly the mother who had pulled me on to her knees and fed me
anjero
; she was the
same woman, nothing had changed, not when I looked into her deep-brown eyes.

‘Forgive you for what?’ I asked, one tear making its slow trail down my cheek.

‘I know how you felt when you were cut,’ she said. ‘I know how it disturbed you.’

Even to hear her acknowledge my pain was enough to take the breath from inside me. I tried to find some words to reply but it felt like my heart had stolen them all.

‘I forgave you a long time ago,’ I said eventually.

‘When?’ she asked.

And I told her then about that first scan I’d had when I was pregnant with Abdinasir. ‘If I hadn’t forgiven you then, I knew I wouldn’t be a good mum. I’m sorry I
didn’t tell you before.’

‘Thank you, Hibo,’ she said. ‘God bless you.’

We both knew there hadn’t been the chance to say this before, that we couldn’t talk to each other about what had happened. If I closed my eyes I could still see the hut that had been
erected in my honour; I could still smell the canvas that had been heated by the sun, and see the smoke that wound its way up out of the hole in the roof and into the stars above while the rest of
the family ate and chattered in the house just yards away from me. But I also knew that it had been taken down a long time ago, that if I went back to that villa now, if I stood in the yard, I
might still find the same trees, but there would be no place where I had lain. The hut had been dismantled, and we were here in Britain. We were free. The past was in the past and I was now a
thirty-two-year-old mother of five, but I needed Hoyo to know that
gudnin
would have no place in my children’s future. Even if it broke the spell of this precious moment. I needed
her to know that I had a legacy of my own.

‘You know my girls? They will never be cut.’

I waited for the reaction on her face, and there it was, undeniable disappointment sprang to her watery eyes. Now Hoyo knew that it ended with me, I wasn’t going to repeat her mistake.
Instead of feeling angry with her and my heart breaking all over again, I felt sorry for her. For the first time, in that bed, I saw a woman who had been cut just like me, another victim of this
barbaric practice, but unlike me she hadn’t been able to talk about it, read about it, or ask why. She had accepted being cut as her fate; she had believed her own mother who’d told her
that she must be cut in order to remain pure. She didn’t know or think to question what was being done to her; she had no idea that this modern world would see it for what it was –
child abuse.

I felt sorry for my mother for being uneducated. I wondered how many millions of mothers had come before her – and since – who hadn’t been able to express the pain they’d
felt when their genitals were cut, when pieces of their flesh were sliced off them, all for the sake of a man. But I still couldn’t rationalise how, as a grandmother, she still wanted my
children to go through that pain – her cultural ties were more tightly knitted inside of her than her blood bond to my children. And that made me sad for her, not angry, because I knew my
children were safe.

When my sister returned from her holiday I went back to my own house and my own family, and the following day my mother was rushed into hospital after suffering another stroke. I sat by her bed
but I knew this time she would never recover. I thought of the last few weeks we’d shared, of her sitting in the bath while I gently wiped her skin with soapy bubbles. She’d sat there,
smiling and remembering Somalian folk songs.

‘Do you remember, Hibo?’ she’d asked. And when I said I did, she’d begged me to sing for her.

‘But I have a horrible voice, Hoyo,’ I’d tried.

‘It doesn’t matter, just sing,’ she’d said.

So as I dipped the cloth into the warmth of the bath, and made her skin shine with the water, I sang to her and she’d joined in, and every so often I pulled her near and planted a kiss on
the side of her head. Just like she’d done to me that morning. She died a week after the second stroke, and I was devastated.

Now she was gone, and her old beliefs died with her. I remain convinced that had Hoyo lived for another ten years and seen how my life was to change, and how my role as an activist would gather
strength, I could have convinced her that FGM is abuse and has no place in today’s world. Two years after I lost Hoyo, my son Adam was born in 2006, followed by another daughter, Ikram, a
year later. Yusuf and I doted on her just like we had all the others, and knew that she would be safe too. But deep down inside, it was becoming increasingly difficult for me to ignore what was
going on in my own community, increasingly difficult to ignore my suspicion that girls were getting cut here in London. And yet I wasn’t strong enough to move on from the past and face it
fully. That would come though. It had to.

12

E
very morning, the kitchen of our Walthamstow home would be filled with the noisy clatter of cutlery and china as my children chattered
over breakfast. Instead of standing at the stove, ladling
anjero
batter into a hot pan as my mother once had, I filled our dining table with brightly coloured boxes of cereal that my
British children gobbled up, leaving just the odd hoop, flake or splash of milk in the wake of their bowls.

Four years had passed since Ikram was born and after seven children, Yusuf and I were sure that our family was complete. The children were our lives. Abdinasir was now twenty, a reserved and
serious boy, studying at university to be a doctor; Ali, eighteen, was the funny one with the big personality; Amal, fifteen, was just like I had been at that age, honest and feisty; Aisha, eleven,
was the mother hen even then, caring and responsible, always helping out with the younger children; Abdilahi, nine, was cheeky and smart; Adam, even at six, was the pretty boy, obsessed with
getting his hair just right; and, although she was only five years old, Yusuf and I were convinced Ikram would one day grow up to be a lawyer, with her argumentative yet caring nature.

Yusuf would go off to his job working nine to five, and I would busy myself – just as my mum always had – with housework and home-cooked meals. Every second of every day I ploughed
into my family, making sure that the kids were up to date with their homework, sitting with them at the kitchen table after school and going through what they’d learned each day. When
Abdinasir had first started school and was having trouble getting to grips with maths, I’d volunteered in his classroom to learn the way his teacher taught them, and with each child I did the
same, knowing in my heart that education was the key to their future success. I was happy, and despite everything I’d said to my own mother – how the last thing I wanted to do was turn
into her – part of me could understand why she’d been so content to be at home with the family too. Except I wanted more for my children than our life in Mogadishu had allowed her. It
was only after I’d checked every single one of their books, and only when I was sure they’d completed and understood every task set by their teacher, that I would let them sink into the
sofa, a tangle of arms and legs, engrossed in the Technicolor world of cartoons.

Not a day went by when I didn’t impress on them just what opportunities they had open to them living in Britain. ‘You can be whatever you want to be,’ I told each of them.
‘The only thing that will stop you is you.’ I wanted them to be British through and through; I wanted them to embrace everything this country had to offer. I didn’t want them to
be shackled by the old cultural traditions I had endured, so while I was friends with Somalian women, I encouraged my children to make lots of different friends at school and I shielded them from
my own community. I dreaded the day when they would hear about things such as FGM and I knew when it happened I would talk to them about it, no subject would be out of bounds like it had been for
me. But I enjoyed the years that rolled by without one of them asking me what it was; I savoured their ignorance and innocence in that respect, that they hadn’t been forced to grow up as
quickly as I had.

But after almost twenty years of bringing up children, of chatting with the other mums in the playground about
EastEnders
or
Coronation Street
, of really feeling like this
country had embraced and accepted me, I realised I now wanted to fulfil my own ambition and become something more than just a mother. So when Ikram started in reception in 2011, I decided to
volunteer at her school. One morning, as I dropped my four youngest children off, I asked the head teacher if there were any opportunities there for me to lend a hand. He looked at the deputy head
for a moment before turning to me with a smile.

‘I think we can do better than that, Hibo,’ he said. He told me that the school had been given some funding to train parents who wanted to be teaching assistants. I would need to
volunteer eighteen hours a week, and use my spare time to complete my studies and assignments. It sounded perfect. I started working at the school a few months later. I loved to see the children
tearing round the playground, the girls so free and happy. Until one day I was sitting in the head teacher’s office, with two Somalian parents I’d often said hello to in the playground.
Their daughter was ten-year-old Halima, a girl I’d seen many times skipping with her friends at breaktime, or working hard in class. She was a slight girl, slender, and she always had a
smile, except not today. My head teacher had asked me to sit in on the meeting; he hadn’t given me any clue as to why, but it soon became apparent.

‘We need to take her out of school to visit a sick relative in Somalia,’ her father explained urgently.

I glanced at Halima, thick tears magnified her deep-brown eyes. She tried desperately to swallow them down each time one of her parents glanced her way, but her distress was plain to see. And I
knew why. I knew what she feared, and suddenly the meeting room felt smaller and hotter as the realisation dawned on me fully.

The head teacher tried again.

‘But Halima is just about to sit her SATs, she has been studying for them for a long time.’

Her mother and father shook their heads.

‘Is there no one she could stay with while you go? A friend? A relative?’

‘She must come with us,’ her father insisted.

Halima looked up at me then with big pleading eyes; if I could have picked her up and run with her from that room, I would have done.

I didn’t speak as my head teacher tried everything to convince them not to go, or to persuade them to leave Halima in the UK, but they were adamant. The decision had already been made.

‘We will only be away for two weeks,’ Halima’s father said. ‘She won’t miss too much school.’

So it was agreed that if they could produce the airline tickets showing that the return journey was already booked, the school would grant them permission to go. But as I watched them lead her
by the hand out of the office, I didn’t see Halima, I saw a six-year-old me, and a chance to prevent the past being repeated, so I ran after them. I stopped her mother.

‘Please listen to what the staff are saying,’ I pleaded. ‘Halima has been working so hard for her SATs, her education is so important.’

Her mother looked down. ‘I know, but she needs to come to Somalia,’ she said. And they left.

That moment, standing alone in the school corridor, was a real wake-up call for me. I had spent years in the Somalian community in London; I’d heard whispers about
gudnin
, but
perhaps I’d closed my eyes and ears to the reality. Perhaps because Yusuf and I had decided not to cut our girls, I told myself others weren’t doing it either. After all, it was never
spoken about openly, so it made it easier to pretend it wasn’t happening. But not in that stuffy office – FGM had walked right up to me and tapped me on the shoulder. If our suspicions
were right, it was happening here, not out there, not beyond Walthamstow, but right here, in our own school, and that thought made me feel physically sick. I was a part of that community and that
culture, and yet I didn’t truly know it was happening, or at least I chose not to know, and so I was amazed that my employer had the same hunch. How did he even know about it? I had to ask
him.

‘What do you think is going on?’ I had to hear him say it.

‘We have real fears that she may be subjected to female genital mutilation.’

He told me Halima had been crying to her teacher, saying that she didn’t want to go to Somalia, but she wouldn’t say why, which had aroused their suspicions.