Cut (6 page)

I lost count of the number of nights I woke up screaming from nightmares, my face covered in a film of sweat, and my cousins standing at the foot of my bed, telling me that it was OK, it was
only a dream. I’d wipe my own face and go back to sleep, but whenever I closed my eyes I’d see the images of that day playing out on the inside of my eyelids.

Repeated urine infections were brought on by the fact that my urethra was sealed over, which meant I was constantly being taken to hospital to be treated with antibiotics, as were all the other
girls I knew. And still we never spoke to one another about what had happened. They didn’t seem as keen as me to understand what had been done to us; they didn’t seem to feel as alone
or as burdened by this great, heavy secret. So I learned not to talk to anyone. I never went to another
gudnin
party, though – I couldn’t be part of the lie; I wouldn’t
pretend it was just a little cut.

The years gathered pace and my relationship with my mother continued to deteriorate. It was almost ten years after the cutting when I awoke one night and felt wet between my
legs. I’d got up in the darkness, tiptoeing my way to the bathroom, but I hadn’t wet myself in my sleep. I climbed back into bed and drifted off again. But the following morning when I
pulled down my knickers to go to the toilet, the gusset was dyed scarlet, and terror tore through me. I was bleeding, down there. I had to be dying.

I rushed back to my room and checked my sheets – they, too, were covered in blood. By the time my cousin Fatima found me, I was hysterical.

‘What’s wrong?’ she said, surely seeing the stricken expression on my face.

‘I’m dying,’ I told her. ‘I’m dying!’

She tried to calm me, to stop me from pacing the room, but the panic had claimed every rational thought I had.

‘Shut up and sit down,’ Fatima said, in an attempt to get some sense out of me. ‘Now, why do you think you’re dying?’

I took a deep breath. ‘There’s blood . . . in my knickers,’ I told her. ‘I don’t know what’s happening to me. I don’t want to die!’

Her expression lightened as realisation dawned, and she sat down on the bed next to me. ‘You’re not dying, Hibo,’ she said. ‘You’re becoming a woman.’

‘What do you mean “becoming a woman”? I’m not a boy! I’m nearly sixteen, I
am
a woman.’

‘No, Hibo, you were a
girl
– until now,’ she said.

My face must have shown my confusion, because she sighed in exasperation and then tried again. ‘When you get your period it means you become a woman, and you can get pregnant.’ She
crossed the room and pulled out a piece of cloth from a drawer.

‘This is mine,’ she said. ‘Use this inside your knickers and keep washing it out. If you don’t, the blood will seep through your clothes and everyone will see.’

I took the cloth from her and stared at it. It was clearly from an old dress of hers – I faintly recognised the faded striped pattern that ran through it.

‘Does Hoyo bleed?’ I asked her.

‘Yes, all women do. Now go and wash your bedding.’

I stripped my bed and took the sheets out into the yard, washing them in a tub of cool soapy water. My mother found me out there, and when she saw the blood she started whooping with happiness,
making the sound usually reserved for weddings, a call women make in celebration.

‘Why are you making that noise?’ I asked. ‘It’s not a wedding.’

‘Because you’re a woman now.’

I know she told my aunties because from across the yard I saw them pointing and congratulating my mother, patting her back and throwing their arms around her with joy. I watched them, confused,
the cloth firmly held in my knickers, and wincing with each stomach cramp that came in waves across my belly. What did this mean ‘to be a woman’? And why did it always seem to involve
pain?

‘Why are they so happy?’ I asked Fatima.

‘Because you got your period,’ she sighed, and turned back to sweeping the yard. ‘You really need to stop your brain asking questions, Hibo.’

So this was the next stage – there was clearly a distinction between being a girl and being a woman – and unknowingly and involuntarily I had transitioned through the first two
phases. I had been cut and now I bled. So what was next? And what would it cost?

I got used to the pain that would grip my insides every twenty-eight days. I also came to understand that without a proper hole for the menstrual blood to exit my body, the
flood would build up inside me, and I would be doubled over at times, in agony for ten days, sometimes for two long weeks. I learned to dread my periods just as I had learned to wait patiently for
the slow trickle when I urinated.

And still I didn’t know why I needed to suffer as I did, still my mother refused to answer my daily question. Until one day, a few months after my sixteenth birthday, on a day that seemed
like any other, I got a response that differed from my mother’s usual dismissal. I’d had a shower that day and had styled my hair differently in two tight ponytails. As I came out of
the bathroom, steam rising off my skin, my mother looked up from her sewing.

‘You look pretty, Hibo,’ she said. ‘I like the way you’ve done your hair today.’

I don’t know what it was, perhaps my new hairstyle had softened me around the edges a little, but I felt myself smiling a reply to her. And in response, her face relaxed, the tension eased
for a moment. It was a tiny gesture on both our parts, a truce of sorts in a ten-year struggle. I decided then that this was my chance.

‘Why did you do this to me?’ I asked, as I had on every single day before that. I wasn’t expecting an answer; I was expecting her to fix that same hard look on her face and say
nothing. Instead, she gestured for me to sit down opposite her. I did as she indicated, encouraged by this new and different response from her. I waited for her to speak.

‘You’re sixteen now, so I will tell you,’ she said.

She spoke slowly, as if she too realised the importance of what she was about to share. ‘I was cut, your grandmother was cut, and every mother before her. And your children will be cut
too.’

I listened intently, ready to absorb her every word.

‘We are a family whose girls are known for our virginity. We are clean, and that means we can marry well, and you will stay pure until you get married to your husband.’

I struggled to digest what she’d said, and so I tried to undo all the words before reordering them into some kind of sense, some kind of an explanation. I waited for her to say more, but
instead she turned back to her sewing. That was it?

‘But why was it done?’ I demanded.

She looked down at her work.

‘And why was it so painful? What did that woman take from me?’

‘I’ve told you now,’ she said, without looking up. ‘Never ask me again.’

And with that the conversation was over before it had even begun. That was it – that short exchange of words was all that I had to sate me after all these years. But it served only to make
me hungrier for answers, to leave me with more whys, and each one led to another, and another, and another. I wanted to know why I had been mutilated.

I remember that day so vividly. How I went over and over everything that my mother had told me. How in class, sitting behind my school desk, I’d chewed my pen almost frantically, trying to
work out what it all meant. At breaktime, I didn’t stand and chat with my friends; all I could think about was trying to fill in the missing gaps. I’d gone through so much pain because
the women in my family had done so before me – that wasn’t an explanation. I had gone through all this suffering for marriage, to stay pure for a man. What did she mean
‘
for
a man’? I looked around at the boys in my class, and wondered why I needed to be pure for them, and why what they thought of me mattered so much. Girls had to be
‘preserved’, subjected to all this pain and disfigurement – to the extent that even basic bodily functions like urinating and menstruating became difficult – all for a
man.

But I didn’t care what he would think of me, some nameless, faceless man I’d never laid eyes on. I only cared about the body that had been chopped and cut and mutilated. My body.
I’d heard enough tales about girls who had gone into those huts and never come out. I thought about all those girls who, like me, were showered with gifts and food and parties, but whose own
gudnin
hadn’t gone to plan. ‘It was God’s way,’ is how the women put it, discarding their lives with just a few words. And all that, the blood, the flesh, the loss
of life, that was all for a man?

I thought then of my cousins, and the other girls I’d known who had got married, and I remembered how after their wedding we’d hear whispers that they weren’t sleeping in their
marital bed, but in a hospital one instead. It happened to every single girl without fail. And months later, when they finally returned to visit, they were gaunt and skeletal, all light gone from
their eyes. What had happened to them?

My cousin Fatima was two years older than me, so we always knew she would get married before me. Fatima was excited, but as our other cousins talked about the engagement party I saw fear in her
too. Of course she wanted to marry – she wanted to have her own home, and a family of her own – but she knew, too, that her wedding would probably be followed by a hospital visit, even
if we didn’t understand why.

When her wedding celebrations came around she was taken to visit various relatives, who gave her beautiful-smelling treatments to smooth her hair and lighten her face, and drew delicate henna
designs on her fingers. The day before the ceremony we sat cross-legged in our bedroom for what would be our last night together. As the day had come closer I’d become more worried for
her.

‘Please come back and tell me what happens after the wedding,’ I begged her, taking her hands in mine. ‘No one else will tell me.’

We were both crying.

‘I don’t want you to go to hospital,’ I said, kissing her.

‘I’m scared, Hibo,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to go to hospital either.’

‘Promise me you’ll tell me,’ I pleaded.

She nodded.

‘You have to promise on the Koran.’

I crossed the room and picked up a copy. With shaking hands, she did as I asked.

The wedding day was a huge celebration and I watched along with the rest of my family as the traditional red-and-black headdress – the
shash
– was placed on her head by the
older women, a sign that she was now married. But I didn’t whoop in celebration for Fatima, because I was too terrified for her. Nobody is allowed to visit the bride and groom for the first
seven days after they are married, but it didn’t stop me asking my family if they had any news of my cousin. I just wanted to know if she was OK, but nobody would tell me anything. Nor did I
hear anything on the grapevine; this time there were not even any whispers, at least not any that reached me.

I’d lie in bed at night and look over at her empty bed. ‘Where are you?’ I’d ask the darkness.

Each day, for weeks, I’d ask my aunties when Fatima would come to see us.

‘She’ll come when she’s ready,’ was a stock reply.

‘She’s busy with her husband,’ was another.

I knew in the pit of my stomach that she was sick, of course I knew, the ties that bound us so tightly were stronger than the miles anyone could put between us, but I was helpless; all I could
do was pray that she would come soon. Fatima’s name had just disappeared from everyone’s lips, and when they did speak of her it was in hushed mutterings.

And then finally, after three long months she came home to our villa. But the tall and beautiful girl I’d said goodbye to had gone, and in her place was a woman who had lost so much weight
her cheekbones jutted out at sharp angles from her skull, her eyes sinking into the void that they left. Fatima had always been happy, carefree, forever helping her mother out in the house, nodding
in concentration as her mother taught her how to apply kohl to her eyes in the months before she was ready to be married. Now she was like a ghost flitting between the rooms of our villa where once
she’d darted in and out, laughing. I looked at her and all I could see was misery.

I held on to her hand and pulled her to follow me into our old bedroom. Once we were there I shut the door and we sat down on my bed, just like we always had – except now, everything had
changed. The sun shone in through the window shutter in slices, casting fragmented shadows on her drawn features, her hollowed cheeks. I threw my arms around her, feeling her ribs sticking out
under my hug, both of us swallowing hot tears.

‘What happened?’ I asked her. ‘Why do you look like this?’

She looked down.

‘Remember you promised,’ I said.

‘I was sick, I was in hospital,’ she said.

‘But why? You have a beautiful new house and a good husband, don’t you?’

‘Yes, Hibo,’ she said. ‘I have a nice husband but you have no idea what awaits you.’

I sat back, frightened of what I was about to hear.

‘You know how we go to the toilet and we can’t even wee?’

I nodded, slowly.

‘Imagine you have a rolling pin, and then imagine that going through you . . . down there.’

I looked at her, confused. ‘Why would a rolling pin go in there?’

She swallowed hard.

‘I’m comparing something to a rolling pin,’ she said. ‘You know your husband, he is the rolling pin . . . I don’t know how to tell you this, Hibo, but you have to
sleep with your husband . . . He has a thing, and that thing becomes bigger, like a rolling pin, and that has to go through your tiny hole. That’s what they call sex.’

What did I know about sex or the acts that men and women commit in the name of love? My mother had certainly never told me. Fatima knew this, of course, because she would have been just as naive
on her wedding night as I was now. The women would have taken her aside at some point after the ceremony, once she was wed; they would have told her gently, but with little fuss, that she had
duties to perform for her husband – that was the deal, the bargain for a ring on her finger and a home away from us. That was the price she would need to pay. And still she would not have
understood, not until she was on that bed, with him approaching her. We were pure – as my mother had said, women in our family were known for their purity. She saw me floundering in
possession of this new information and tried to explain it another way.