Cut (2 page)

‘
Salaam alaikum
,’ they said.

‘
Alaikum salaam
.’

‘Are you Hibo?’ one of them asked me, and she allowed her face to wrinkle into a slight smile as I nodded.

Without letting go of my hand, Hoyo guided me into the hut. It wasn’t yet day and already the heat in there was stifling. The ground was covered with a black cloth that crinkled when I
walked on it. To the left a straw mattress that had been made by my aunties lay on the ground, the yellow grass dyed in brilliant reds and blues, and a pattern woven through it. I had sat at their
knees many times as they’d made these mattresses for my cousins to lie on in one of these very same huts, so I knew with only a glance how many hours had gone into creating this one just for
me, and in that moment I felt very special.

There wasn’t much room to sit or even stand alongside the mattress, and the hut was immediately crowded as the two other women and my auntie entered behind us with the third woman
I’d yet to see properly. She was older than the other two – perhaps sixty, maybe even older – her skin darker, and her face wrinkled with lines. I noticed her hands were rough and
ashen, starved – no doubt – of the rich cream we rubbed into our own. Yet she strode in with some authority, not shuffling or hunched over like other women of her age.

When she finally spoke, it was not in a soft tone like the other two ladies who had greeted us at the doorway, but in a bark that instantly silenced everyone else.

‘You,’ she said, pointing to one of the ladies. ‘Sit behind her with your legs open. Hold her in between.’

The grown-ups rearranged themselves in the tiny space to let her pass through, and as she sat down on the black cloth I took my place as I’d been instructed in front of her, facing
forward. Hoyo, who was standing to my left, had let go of my hand, and my auntie, on my right, kept throwing me a tight yet brief smile. I looked to Hoyo, who was no longer smiling, then shuffled
backwards until I felt my bottom nudge against the lady behind me. As soon as I did, I felt her arms clamp down on my own, holding me so tightly across my chest that I thought only of the
anjero
in my tummy that must have been squashed fast.

Panicked, I quickly turned to my left, to search my mother’s face for reassurance, but there was none. Instead, she looked away from me.

‘Hoyo?’ I tried. She stared directly at the ground.

The old woman perched on a tiny stool in front of me, as my auntie and the other lady knelt down on either side. The old woman didn’t look at me once – instead, she rearranged her
headscarf and washed her hands with water from the kettle that Hoyo had brought with us from the kitchen. Underneath the forearms of the woman behind me, my heart was beating so wildly in my chest
that she surely must have felt it, and yet she didn’t relax her grip one bit, not even when I tried to wriggle.

The old woman busied herself, washing her hands with soap, then rinsing them slowly as if in some kind of ritual. The canvas above me was getting brighter, the sound of birds was starting to cut
through the silence of the early day, and as I lay pinned down in this tiny hut, under the arms of a stranger, my heartbeat was pounding in my ears. I tried to remind myself what Hoyo had said,
that I would be fine, that she would be there, but I didn’t know what was happening. What were they going to do to me?

And what if I had known? Would I have even entered the hut? Would I have let go of my mother’s hand before we’d even left the kitchen? Would I have run away, out of the compound,
into the streets, and then to where? My safety was here, in this hut, with my mother . . . I didn’t know then that she was about to betray me in the most cruel of ways. Instead, I searched
the faces of the women I loved for something, anything, to tell me I was OK. But I saw nothing.

‘You’re going to hold her leg,’ the woman – the ‘cutter’, I would later discover – barked at my auntie. To my left, the other lady grabbed one of my
thighs, pulling on it so hard, I felt that my leg might pop clean out of its socket. My auntie took hold of my right leg, without any of the gentleness of touch I’d known from her my entire
life.

‘Pull up her dress,’ the cutter ordered the woman sitting behind me.

For a split second I felt the respite of her hands release from my torso, just long enough to catch my breath, and in that moment she pulled at the sides of my dress, yanking it over my bottom
in one swift movement. Even if there had been enough time to try to escape, I doubt my legs would have worked anyway. Instead, I remained paralysed by fear.

‘Hoyo?’ I tried again. But she kept her gaze down. ‘Hoyo?’ This time with more urgency. Nothing. My racing heart threatened to steal what little voice I could muster from
beneath this woman’s grip.

I stared instead at the cutter sitting in front of me, searching her face for any trace of warmth. I watched as she slowly unzipped the leather bag that hung from a long strap around her neck
and rested on her belly. As she did, I noticed the index finger and thumb on her right hand were each tipped with a long fingernail, longer than any I’d ever seen before, almost turning them
into a pair of pincers. She dipped her gnarly hand into the leather bag and, as she did, the bag fell open to reveal dozens of razors. These weren’t like the ones I’d seen in our
bathroom, though, they weren’t clean shiny silver razors. These were brown and rusty, and caked with dried blood.

As the old woman selected one and dipped it into the kettle of water, she glanced up at me just for a second. And then I saw them, those black eyes, within each iris was a terrifying cloudy
circle of white. She looked like a monster.

I screamed.

But it was as if no one could hear my pleas at all.

1

T
wenty-three years ago, I sat down at my kitchen table with two books in front of me. One was a Somali–English dictionary, the other
was a book about female circumcision.

I wasn’t really sure what I was looking for; I didn’t know what information I would find in there. I hadn’t been living in London very long, and I didn’t speak English at
the time. But I knew this book had some relevance to me. I knew inside its pages I would somehow find what I was looking for. And so, night after night, once I’d put my baby down to sleep, I
would lift my tired ankles, swollen from my second pregnancy, on to a chair and read.

It took me nine months to translate that book, pausing beside each English word to look up the Somali equivalent in the dictionary. Each sentence, each paragraph, each page coming to mean more
and more to me as my knowledge of the English language grew.

And then I saw three letters that were somehow familiar: FGM. The dictionary told me they stood for ‘female genital mutilation’. I was twenty-four, a mother of one, and yet this was
the first time I had read about what had been done to me when I was six years old. I closed my eyes and remembered my maternity notes at the hospital, those same three letters written and boxed in
thick Biro at the top of my files as I had my son. I had no idea at that point what they meant; no one had talked to me about what had happened.

I remembered, too, the look on the face of the first British doctor who had ever examined me down there when I’d just arrived in the country; the horror in her eyes, the colour that left
her cheeks, the way she went to the sink and splashed her face with cold water in an attempt to compose herself. Now I knew why, because I’d read about the cruel practice myself, I’d
seen pictures for the first time of how young girls are mutilated. And I understood in that moment that I was one of them.

I put both books down and sobbed into my hands, taking in the brutal details of everything I’d read. I felt the arms of my husband, Yusuf, around my shoulders. It was of some comfort, but
it did little to take away the pain. Not only of what I lived with day to day – the discomfort, the recurrent infections, the pain of making love with my husband, the horror of childbirth
– but there was something else now, too. The flashbacks that had haunted me my whole life suddenly came thicker and faster to my mind: the eyes of the woman who had cut me; the heat of the
hut where I’d been kept for two weeks, surviving on little food or water; the fact that my mother looked away the whole time I was pinned down and cut without warning.

These are images that I’ve had to learn to live with. These are the pictures that my mind scrambles to avoid each time I close my eyes. But the worst thing about it is that these scenes
are not relegated to history, they are being played out every day for other girls – and this is happening in Britain. A country that has given me refuge, a country I thought was a million
miles from the barbaric practices of my own homeland.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared FGM a global epidemic. Due to migration, there is not one country in the world where girls are not at risk of FGM. Worldwide, it is estimated
that 3 million girls undergo the procedure every single year and 130 million women live with the effects of female circumcision. I am one of them.
¹

Until I read that book, I’d had no idea exactly what had happened to me as a child. All I knew was that I urinated differently after I’d been cut, that instead of rushing to the
bathroom, in and out in less than a minute, chastised by my mother for forgetting to wash my hands, it now took up to fifteen minutes to empty my bladder. All I knew was that I lived in pain and
discomfort every single day. And so I set out to learn more about what had been done to me. The journey has lasted more than twenty years, and continues to this day. It has taken me from that book
on my kitchen table to this one you are holding in your hands now, via schools and police stations and hospitals, where I’ve worked to raise awareness of the situation. Because after
I’d discovered what FGM was and that it was still happening to girls today, it became clear to me that this wasn’t just my problem, that it was a complex and widespread issue everyone
should be made aware of. And this is what inspired me to write and educate.

The WHO has declared a list of twenty-nine countries – across western, eastern and north-eastern Africa, and in parts of the Middle East and Asia – in which FGM is prevalent. It
defines FGM as ‘procedures that intentionally alter or cause injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons’ and lists four different types
²
:

I had Type 3 carried out on me – my clitoris and my inner and outer labia were removed and then the whole area was stitched up, leaving a narrowed hole which partially
covered my vagina. Through this tiny hole I was expected to urinate and menstruate. With no urethra exposed, it meant that my urine had to travel down inside the area that had been covered with my
own skin and slowly trickle out one drop at a time. It was no wonder I was constantly suffering from urinary tract infections. The skin that has been sewn together eventually fuses, and so what
remains of ‘normal’ genitals can only be described as looking like what’s between the legs of a Barbie doll. A complete blank where my sexual organs should be, and just one tiny
hole where once my vagina was. It is, if you see even a sketch of it, a complete denial of womanhood. To this day, I still cannot look at an image of FGM without feeling – and often being
– physically sick.

And this is a procedure carried out every single day on women and girls around the world, often without anaesthetic or painkillers, frequently by untrained villagers with little anatomical
knowledge, and rarely in any kind of sterile environment. Is it any wonder, then, that girls die? From shock, or haemorrhaging, or subsequent infection.

As a child growing up in Somalia, I can remember many girls who were prepared for their
gudnin
– their circumcision – who I never saw again. Their devastated families called
it
inshallah
– God’s will. And yet FGM is not a religious practice; there is nothing about FGM in the Bible or the Koran. It is a nonsensical cultural tradition of maiming
girls that has been practised for generations. It predates Christianity and Islam, its roots stretching as far back as ancient Egypt, and has survived for thousands of years despite the havoc it
can wreak on the female body.

There is not an area of the world that has not, at one time or another, practised some form of female circumcision, including in the West. Until the middle of the last century – and
particularly in Victorian times – clitoridectomies were seen in both Britain and the United States as a cure for excessive masturbation and even epilepsy. Victorian gynaecologist Isaac Baker
Brown claimed that, after clitoridectomy, ‘intractable women became happy wives; rebellious teenage girls settled back into the bosom of their families; and married women formerly averse to
sexual duties became pregnant’.
³
It was thought that removing the clitoris would stem a female’s sexual desire, that it would ‘tame’ her. And this
– to some extent – is why the practice continues, worldwide, to this day.