Tears of the Desert (17 page)

One night I awoke to the terrifying sensation of a big, hairy hand resting on my face. For a horrible instant I thought it must be one of the male students. But then I realized what it was, and if anything it was even more terrifying. It was a
karaba—
a giant, flesh-pink spider, with long hairy legs. It is called a “camel spider” in English, and it secretes an acid that burns the skin. Normally, I wasn’t afraid of insects. At home we’d even catch scorpions, remove their stinger, and play with them. But we didn’t have any
karaba
in our village.

They were the most revolting creatures that I’d ever seen. They had an unearthly, alien look about them. They were the size of a person’s hand, with a horrible, flesh-pink abdomen full of an ink-black liquid. From the head end projected two long, clawlike pincers that I imagined they used to hold their victims while squirting acid onto them. But most frightening of all was the fact that these spiders could run and jump at lightning speed. We’d all seen them chasing after students as if to pounce and attack them.

And now I had one on my face. If it squirted out its fluid, the acid would be in my eyes. In an instant my hand shot up and I smashed it away. But a moment later I heard a terrified cry. The
karaba
had landed on one of the girls, and she had started screaming hysterically. Luckily, it didn’t have the chance to squirt its poison onto her before it was bashed aside once more. But no matter how hot the weather became, that poor girl refused ever to sleep outside again.

We also had chameleons on campus—a large, tree-dwelling lizard that catches insects with a sticky tongue. Chameleons can change their color to blend in with their background. I used to delight in picking one up from a tree and placing it on the ground, and watching it change from a green leafy color to the sandy red of the soil. I especially liked doing so whenever the Arab city girls were around. They’d be making yucky faces at the chameleons, and crying for their mothers—as if they were dangerous dinosaurs or something. They couldn’t believe that I could pick one up and handle it so easily.

In fact, the city girls were even terrified of frogs. This was a problem, as we had to dissect frogs in our biology classes. As we had to provide our own frogs for dissection, Rania and I would go out and catch them in the nearby streams and rivers. We’d grab them with our hands and pop them into a plastic bag. But the city girls refused to do so. Instead, they used to pay street boys to go and capture the frogs on their behalf.

Even then frogs had to be readied for the dissecting table. The city girls used to beg us to do this for them. We’d laugh and tease them mercilessly, but usually we would help. First, you had to give the frog some chewing tobacco to eat, which would render it unconscious. Then you’d slice it open and pin it out flat on the dissecting board. The male students were forever stealing the chewing tobacco, and it reached the stage were the professor refused to provide us with any more until they stopped doing so.

The Arab city girls couldn’t believe what our lives had been like prior to university. They couldn’t accept that we’d played in the mud, made toys from soil, and caught and eaten insects—for if so how had we possibly ended up studying medicine at university? It was quite impossible. In comparison to Rania and me, they had led privileged childhoods—with electric lighting, running water, food to buy in the shops, and servants to tend to their every need. Plus they’d had many more years of education that we had: From the age of two onward they had been to nursery, followed by junior school.

I guessed that there had to be things that the city girls knew which we didn’t, but I couldn’t for the life of me see what they were. The only department in which they seemed to be more knowledgeable was boys. Prior to going to university I had never had a boyfriend. We village girls believed that your husband should be your one and only partner. Since the very earliest years this was what Rania and I had had drummed into us.

But the city girls found this very old-fashioned. They would lounge around on the grass with the male students, chatting and laughing. Sometimes, they’d try to get Rania and me to join them, but I was always very shy. Occasionally, late in the evening, one of the Arab girls would quietly slip away with one of the male students. Rania and I would exchange glances. Their families had sent them here to study, but look what they were doing!

There was a funny, crazy Arab girl called Dahlia who was forever teasing me. She accused me of having no heart because I didn’t seem interested in boys. Whenever a boy tried to make advances I would tell him to go away. But with her, a few nice words and she’d fall head over heels in love. It wasn’t fair, Dahlia declared. While she had to go and hunt for a man, my family would do it for me. Her parents were useless. And with an ugly face like hers what chance did she ever stand of getting her man?

For those parents who really did worry about their daughters, there were always the Islamic universities. They offered the same courses, but the lectures were segregated by sex. Our university wasn’t at all like that—only the boarding houses were segregated. My father could have sent me to an Islamic university, but his priority was to find a good place of study. People in the village used to say that “you can’t put the firewood next to the fire”—meaning that boys and girls were best kept apart. But my father trusted me, and he had his own progressive ideas.

Back in the village people were convinced that I’d been left behind by the marriage train. Who would want to marry me now, they argued, when I was so overeducated? I didn’t need all this learning to have children and look after the home. But my father disagreed. He argued that a woman should be able to depend on herself in life, not solely on a man. People wondered from where he had got such radical ideas. But I was happy with his views, of course, and I felt that I was different from the other Zaghawa girls.

There was one big advantage that the city girls had over us country girls—and it came as a complete shock to me. One night in the dorm Rania and I were telling the others about our circumcision time. They were both horrified and fascinated. They told us that this had never happened to them. At first I didn’t believe it: I had just presumed that all girls went through their cutting time. So Dahlia offered to show me. Sure enough, her womanhood was intact.

I was amazed. Hadn’t the other girls at school laughed at her, I asked? Wasn’t it unclean to be left like that? And how would she ever find a husband? Dahlia laughed. Many of the girls at her school were like her, she said. It was how God had made us, so what could be so wrong with it? And which of the boys at the university would turn her down, just because she had her full womanhood?

In fact, it was a great advantage, she said. We girls who had been circumcised—we didn’t know what we were missing. What we had been born with was a gift from God. How could it possibly be right to go through all the pain and bloodshed of circumcision, risking infection or death, and knowing that childbirth might present us with a real problem in the future?

The more I thought about what Dahlia had said the more I suspected that she was right. It was inexcusable. My circumcision was inexcusable. To put a small child through the hell of that life-threatening pain and injury was simply inexcusable.

The more I studied human anatomy at university, the more I realized the horrible long-term effects of what had been done to me as a child. All parts of the body are designed with a specific function in mind. To replace soft, pliable flesh with a tight ring of scar tissue could only cause problems in adult life, in particular with childbirth. I may have been different from most Zaghawa women, in my education and in my independence, but for sure I wanted to have a family. Yet the chance of my child—or even me—dying during childbirth was massively increased due to my circumcision.

And then there was the pleasure issue. Dahlia hadn’t been totally explicit about it, but she had said enough to make me understand. Rania and I had lost more than just a physical attribute—we had lost a sensual one also. And our life would be forever the poorer for it.

The more I thought about this, the more I felt angry and cheated somehow. My family and my tribe had taken advantage of my girlhood innocence and stolen something precious from me. I had been an unsuspecting child, and they had convinced me that what they were doing was right, that it was a wonderful part of my growing into womanhood. In fact, they had been stealing my very womanhood away from me.

But there was no way back now. What had been done could not be undone. The one thing I vowed to myself was that if I ever had a daughter, I would never let anyone steal her womanhood. She would go through her life blessed by what God had given her, and as nature certainly intended her to.

Dahlia was quite open with me about what she wanted from a future husband. She wanted to marry for love, and to share the responsibilities with her husband on a fifty-fifty basis. She wouldn’t start a family until her career was properly established. She would have her law degree, and so she would be quite capable of earning half the family income. The more I listened to her, the more a lot of what she said made sense. I was no longer a blinkered village girl, and at least some of the city girl ways were rubbing off on me.

Dahlia loved trying to shock me with stories of her teenage years. I was scandalized—yet also secretly thrilled—to hear how she had chased after the boys and kissed them. How she had tried drinking alcohol, and several times had ended up quite drunk. How she’d lied to her parents so she could go out to discos and nightclubs, dancing wildly, and partying long into the night. But the worst was when she tried to tell me about some of her adventures with the city bad boys.

“No, no, no—don’t tell me any more,” I said, pretending to block my ears. “I don’t want to hear!”

“You see what a different life we live!” she exclaimed. “Come and stay in the city with us. Your father could pay your living expenses, at least until you’re earning enough as a doctor. Do it—and then you’ll truly be free.”

I shook my head. “My family would never accept being so separated from me. And I could never force them to live in the city. Just three or four days and they’d be more than ready to leave. They say it’s overcrowded, with unfriendly people and bad air.”

“You don’t need your family,” Dahlia countered. “You can live here on your own.”

“Let me tell you a story,” I replied. “One time my whole family had been staying in Hashma, with my Uncle Ahmed. A thief came in the night. We woke up and ran after him, but none of the neighbors did anything to help. In the village, if you heard someone chasing a thief you’d rush to their aid, no matter which house he had tried to rob . . .”

Dahlia shrugged. “So?”

“The story’s not finished yet. The next day the neighbors came and asked why we had been screaming in the night. My mum got really upset with them. ‘We had a thief in the house, and you didn’t help! Shame on you,’ she told them. ‘Why didn’t you come to our aid, like you would have done in the village?’ They didn’t know what to say.”

“So? So it’s a nice, quaint story. What’s it got to do with you coming to live in the city?”

“If I came to live in the city, I’d not be with the people—the village, the community—that I grew up in. And I can’t move the village to the city in one lump, can I?”

Dahlia laughed and shook her head. “Sounds like you’ll always be a country girl!”

My first three months at university were a challenge, a revelation, and a joy to me. I was among my academic peers, and I was tested and stimulated by being so. I had made good friends, and I even found myself enjoying the company of the male students. I was looking forward to the years of study that lay ahead, eager to learn and to advance myself. There was little sign here of the dark powers that had seized control of our country, little sense that my father’s fears might come to pass.

It couldn’t last.

One morning toward the end of our first term, I awoke to a sense of a strange electric tension in the air. A buzz of whispered conversation was going around the dorm. It turned out that the dreaded secret police had arrived on campus. There were scores of them in plainclothes, plus their regular colleagues in khaki green uniforms. As of yet none of us had any idea why they were here—but we all felt in our hearts that it couldn’t be for any positive reasons. We dreaded whatever was coming.

We headed down to the lecture hall under the dark gaze of these men. The dean of the university was there to address us, which in itself was highly unusual. He was looking drawn and haggard. He gave a short address in which he explained that a
nephirh—
a state of national emergency—had been declared across the country. He was sorry to tell us that the university was to be closed immediately, and until further notice.

The dean left the podium and one of the plainclothes officers took his place. In a strident, badgering tone he proceeded to inform us that the country was in crisis. The National Islamic Front needed volunteers to join the jihad in the south, otherwise the infidels would overrun the country. All people of the right age must volunteer to fight. Women were not allowed to take up arms, but they could join the jihad in an auxiliary role. As for the young men, jihad was no longer voluntary. It was their obligation to fight.

Those who agreed to fight for a year would be treated well. Their studies would be fast-tracked, and they would graduate early with good results. Jihad was superior to academic study, and so it was only right that the jihadists should be rewarded. All universities were being closed until further notice, so there was no possibility to continue studying. The only option was to join the jihad on behalf of the country and for Islam. Any who refused would lose their place at university, the security officer declared in a menacing tone.

As he finished speaking a video started playing. It showed bloodthirsty scenes from the
Fisah hart el fidah
TV program, accompanied by patriotic and religious music. The faces of the martyrs were paraded on the screen as the music swelled to a heroic intensity. Mothers spoke of how proud they were that their sons had been martyred for the cause. The final minutes of the video urged all men to join the jihad, and the women to support them.