Cut (14 page)

‘You
know
about FGM?’ I asked him, wide-eyed with surprise because I’d read nothing about it in the school’s child protection policy. It was the first time
I’d heard it spoken to me, or even said it myself out loud outside of our home, and I was amazed that the head teacher of a British school would even know what it was.

‘Of course I’ve heard about FGM,’ he said. ‘But it’s so difficult to prove.’ That’s why he’d asked me to sit in on the meeting, in case I knew for
sure what was going on. But, just like him, I couldn’t say with every certainty, only instinct. And my instinct told me he might just be right.

That evening, back at home, I couldn’t stop thinking of Halima. Each time I closed my eyes I pictured her little face, and her tears.

‘You tried your best,’ Yusuf said, saying what he could to console me. ‘But you can’t stop her parents doing this; we can only look after our own girls.’

‘But why would they do it?’ I sobbed. ‘Why would a mother do that to her child knowing the pain it causes?’

Images of Halima at home flooded my mind; did she overhear her parents discussing it? I thought it unlikely, knowing full well that our community would never talk about it openly. But she knew
enough to make her sob to her teachers and was brave enough to try to get them to help. And that, all of a sudden, made me feel incredibly angry. The thought of her being helpless to stop what was
happening; perhaps being persuaded by her family that she must submit to this rite of passage in order to become a woman; being told, like so many girls before her, that she had to be brave.

I thought of how innocent I’d been before my cutting – just like Halima – and precisely what I had been robbed of afterwards. And I decided then that I had a voice, I could
speak up for her. But how? Because I knew it wasn’t just Halima; when I really thought about it, over the last year I’d been a teaching assistant there must have been other girls who
were going through the same fears, who weren’t as brave as Halima to speak out, who didn’t even know if they would be heard. And if I really forced myself to think, there were also
girls in my own community, in my own social circle; they hadn’t come and confronted me like Halima’s story had, but I could think of plenty who had been taken out of the country and who
had returned smaller, quieter versions of their young exuberant selves.

I mentally scanned through memories I’d deliberately buried and I hated myself now for not being strong enough to speak out, to report those mothers to the police. Just like so many, I had
turned my face away from abuse. I hadn’t asked the questions because I was too scared of the answers. I’d remained content in the knowledge that my own children were safe, but now, I
asked myself, what about all the others? Seeing it that day, right there in front of me, a young girl sobbing over her fate which was already sealed, I knew then that I couldn’t hide from it
any longer.

As I began setting the table for our evening meal, seething with rage and frustration, I remembered that part of my teaching-assistant coursework required us to write an essay on an abuse we
felt strongly about. We’d discussed many different forms of child abuse in class and the warning signs to look out for, but no one had written about FGM. I knew my head teacher was aware of
it, but he wasn’t sure how to tackle it. I spooned the dinner on to the plates, and as the steam swirled up into the air, my plan came together in my head. The kids sat down to eat, and as
they did, I turned quietly to Yusuf and said, ‘I’m going to write about what happened to me.’

He put down the knife and fork he’d been about to use to tuck into his lamb
odka
, rice and spinach.

‘Are you sure?’ he said. ‘Do you think you’re ready?’

I nodded yes.

‘I need to do it for girls like Halima, I need to tell people exactly what FGM is, that it’s more than just three letters, about what it does to a girl, what it takes away from her,
I need to help try and stop it.’

Yusuf took a deep breath.

‘Do you really think you can change people’s minds?’ he asked.

‘I have to try,’ I told him.

So after we’d got the kids to bed, I sat with my laptop in the living room while Yusuf sat on the stairs – I’d told him I wanted to be totally alone to write; I knew it was
going to be hard and I didn’t want him to see me break down. But he refused to go to bed; instead, he stayed out of the room but close enough in case I needed him. It was hard going back to
that day and, with each word I typed, the little details came back to me ever stronger: the cutter’s cold, impassive face, her terrible tools, the smell of blood in the heat. Each time I felt
myself crack and crumble under the weight of my own story, Yusuf was beside me, an arm around my shoulder, a tissue to wipe away my tears.

‘You don’t need to do this now,’ he told me.

‘I do,’ I said. ‘It’s important.’

I just closed my eyes and thought of Halima, and the image of her desolation was enough to keep me writing, however painful it was. More memories flooded in of the barbaric and medieval abuse
I’d suffered – the sense of abandonment, the hours that passed in a haze of burning, the stench of urine, the agonisingly slow process of weeing. It was as if by opening that small gap
in my mind, the ugliness of all those years ago seeped in like an acrid smoke, blackening everything in the world I lived in now, leaving its sooty fingerprints on all that was good and clean and
new. I’d convinced myself that being in Britain was enough for me to leave the past behind, but on dark nights when I couldn’t sleep or at dawn when I’d woken up too early even
for the birds, I’d imagined the girls back in Somalia. But in my mind they’d been thousands of miles away, they weren’t in London, at my Walthamstow school. They weren’t
running around the playground with my own children.

And so I kept writing, and by the time I’d finished it was almost time to get the children up for school. I applied my black eyeliner thick that morning, as if it might somehow hide the
lack of sleep and my puffy eyes. But I was armed with more than just make-up. At school I printed off four copies of my own story of FGM: one for the head teacher, and one each for my eldest
children, the two boys – Abdinasir, by now twenty-two, and Ali, twenty – and my eldest girl, Amal, seventeen. It wasn’t just time to tell my employers my story – it was time
to tell my own family.

After the head had seen all the pupils arrive safely at school, I followed him to his office. There, I went in and shut the door behind me.

‘I need you to read this,’ I said, placing the printout in front of him. ‘It’s important.’

It was only a six-page document, yet I felt as if the weight of it had landed on his desk with a heavy thud. He picked it up and started to read, and as I stood in front of his desk and I
watched his eyes scan the paper from left to right, he was soon overcome with emotion.

When he finished it, he looked up at me, clearly moved.

‘Hibo, I had no idea this happened to you,’ he said quietly, as he put my assignment down. ‘But I promise you that from now on FGM will be in our child protection
policy.’

Already, with this one small act, I had made a difference. He got up and left the office and when he returned he had two deputy heads with him. I sat with them as they both read the same
transcript.

‘You need to share this with the rest of the staff,’ one of them said, running her hand over her face.

But I shook my head, overwhelmed by the prospect. That was 120 people.

‘No,’ I insisted. ‘This was only for you,’ I said, looking to the head teacher.

I was known among my colleagues as Hibo the joker, as someone who was fun, who always wore a wide smile. I didn’t want them to think of me as a freak. All my very worst fears about how FGM
had, in my mind, singled me out rushed up from my belly, lying heavy on my chest. I didn’t want my friends to look at me differently, and yet I knew that this was a story they also needed to
read if we were going to protect more children. So I agreed to think about it.

That night, I left school with the remaining copies destined for three readers who meant more to me than anyone. My two eldest sons were out so I placed a copy on each of their beds, and then I
handed one to Amal. She glanced up at me quizzically when she saw the title and the name of the author.

‘What’s this, Mum?’ she asked.

‘I’d like you to read it.’

I sat across the living room from her as the story that had taken me all night, a thousand tears – and a lifetime – to write was eaten up by Amal’s eyes in a matter of minutes.
When she looked up at me, I saw that they were glistening with tears.

‘Why didn’t you tell me about this before?’ she said. ‘I had no idea this had happened to you.’

I nodded.

‘But I thought we talked about everything,’ she said. ‘How could you not tell me about this when it was such a huge thing that happened to you?’

I could see she was upset for me, but there was something else in her eyes too, an anger perhaps that I hadn’t told her about it before, that I thought she couldn’t handle the truth.
Maybe even betrayal. I needed to explain.

‘This was a conversation I needed to have myself first,’ I told her. ‘I’m sorry I never discussed this with you, but I haven’t been able to speak to anyone about it
apart from your father until now.’

She turned the essay over in her hands, as if examining its contents while the full meaning of it sank in, a secret about her mother she never knew.

‘You kept the biggest part of your life a secret from me,’ she said.

I’d always vowed to be open with my children, but now I realised that she was looking at me in the same way I had looked at my mother, and all I could say was sorry.

‘It consumed me for so many years,’ I said. ‘But now I’m in a position to tell you.’

I think, just like all children, she appreciated my honesty.

‘I have heard of FGM,’ she said. ‘I had a friend at school and she was cut.’

Now she was telling me something I didn’t know. For years I’d thought I’d been shielding her from a truth, but she knew about it all the time.

‘Why didn’t you ask me about it?’ I asked her.

‘I didn’t know how,’ she replied.

When she was younger, I remember asking her if she had any Somalian friends at school and what they talked about, trying to find out whether FGM was something she might have heard of from them.
But it seemed to me that she didn’t know a thing about it and, back then, that’s how I wanted it to stay. Now, though, it was time for
me
to tell her.

‘I did hear about it, but it never seemed important because I just knew it was something you wouldn’t do to us,’ Amal said.

And that in itself was success.

‘I can’t believe this happened to you,’ she said, spotting my tears and crossing the room to wrap me in a hug. ‘You are so courageous, and such a wonderful mum. Thank you
so much for protecting me.’

We talked a little more that evening in the way that only mothers and daughters can – or should be able to. When my boys got home they read it too, but they didn’t want to ask me
questions like Amal had.

‘I only heard about FGM recently as part of my medical training,’ Abdinasir said. ‘But I never thought it would have happened to you, Mum.’

And all three of my children agreed on one thing – that they were proud of me for finally telling my story. Their reaction, along with that of the head teacher and his deputies, convinced
me that I needed to share my story wider still. A week later, I stood in an empty school assembly hall. It was the end of another day, and slowly the hum of children chattering as their parents
collected them from school was replaced with silence in the playground as the last ones left through the gates.

In one hand, I clutched my essay, those three letters – FGM – now as familiar to me as my own name. Slowly, my colleagues started filtering in and taking up the rows of seats that
had been laid out by the caretaker. The empty hall was filled with the quiet conversations of the staff, tired from a day’s teaching, but curious to know why I was standing in front of them.
Finally, the head introduced me. I was by now forty-two – it had taken me thirty-six years to speak about what had happened to me back in Mogadishu, and within days I’d gone from
telling my children to addressing a hall packed with people. But as I stepped up to the microphone at the front of the room, on legs that I felt sure were about to give way, I knew that it was time
for somebody to speak out, and if not me, then who?

I cleared my throat. ‘Hello everyone,’ I said tremulously, and I heard my voice waver.

So many faces stared in my direction, some I had come to think of as friends, others were my bosses and mentors, but none of them knew the secret that I hid deep inside. I closed my eyes and
thought of Halima. And that’s who I spoke up for.

‘I want to tell you my story,’ I started. ‘You might find it uncomfortable, but it’s one that you should know.’

I started off by telling them about the four different types of FGM, and how it was Type 3 that was carried out on me. I did feel exposed; it was incredibly hard for me to divulge to them that
under the colourful dresses I wore to school, under my
abaya
, I had been mutilated. That as I’d joked with them in the canteen, or stood at the school gates looking like any other
British mum, something separated me from them. I was different. I had been abused as a child and, tearfully, I told them what had been done, how it had been done and by whom.

When I’d finished, I looked out at a sea of faces, many of them wet with their own tears, and for a few minutes, as I gathered my breath, nothing filled the school hall except a heavy
silence as the weight of what I’d told them sank in. Finally, someone spoke, and once they did, it was like the floodgates opening.

‘I remember one girl a few years ago, she went to Somalia and when she returned she was never the same . . .’

‘I had a pupil a few years ago who suddenly became very withdrawn . . .’

‘I mentioned my fears to a former head teacher of mine but she said that it was their culture and we shouldn’t interfere . . .’