Cut (11 page)

After that day, I revelled in the changes I could see happening to my body. I rubbed my tummy and wondered: had my mother done the same when I was growing inside her? How would she not have felt
the same love swell inside her with each passing day? Somehow, knowing we’d shared this experience brought me closer to her than I had felt in years. She became human to me again.

Yet, in equal measure, I felt confused; as my own maternal instinct grew, I wondered again how she’d been able to turn away from me when I’d needed her most.

I tried to shake those thoughts right out of my head, though. ‘The future, not the past, Hibo,’ I reminded myself. But it was difficult to keep telling myself that when the past was
always here, a part of my body, and that’s what I dreaded the most, the past coming back to haunt me when medical staff needed to examine me. I’d escaped any kind of examination during
my pregnancy, and my biggest fear was that doctors and midwives would think I was a freak, that they wouldn’t regard me as a human being because of the mutilation that I had undergone. I
couldn’t look at myself, so how could they?

And then finally, after nine long months, came the first pain from deep inside, a sharp pain. Not that I told Yusuf, not even when I felt wet between my legs. Instead, I locked myself in the
bathroom as the pains grew stronger and swept through me in waves, but I was more troubled by the anxious thoughts racing around my head: how is this baby going to come out? How will I deliver him
if I won’t – I can’t – open my legs to anyone? What are they going to do? Am I going to die? Is this baby going to die? But even worse than any of that, the idea of myself
or my baby dying, was the thought of medical staff looking between my legs – that’s how huge my fear was.

But by midnight, my pains were so strong that there was no disguising them anymore, and, as soon as Yusuf realised, he insisted we go straight to the hospital. There, a midwife felt my stomach
and attached a monitor to check the baby’s heart rate.

‘How long have you been having contractions?’

My English wasn’t very good; I spoke only a few words, so Yusuf translated the bits that I didn’t know.

‘Not long,’ I lied.

She studied me for a second.

‘I’d like to examine you down below,’ she said.

‘No.’

She tried again. ‘I need to know how dilated you are.’

‘No.’

‘Please, Hibo,’ Yusuf begged me. ‘Think of our baby.’

But I shook my head.

The midwife left and went to get a doctor. She came back and said it was fine, they would continue checking the baby’s heart rate through the monitor. But she had a warning that Yusuf
tried his best to translate.

‘You have been carrying this baby for nine months; you don’t want anything happening to him because you refuse to be checked.’

But then nature took over. They kept me in overnight and by 5am my contractions were stronger than ever; the baby was coming and I didn’t have a choice in the matter. But even as my baby
started to make his way through my body, as the doctors insisted I had to let my knees fall open to allow him to come out, my fear of their judgement still made me cover my face with a pillow and
burst into tears because the images in my mind were not of the baby that was about to be born, but quick flashes of the cutter, my mother, the bag of rusty razors.

‘We need to cut her,’ the doctor told Yusuf. I needed an episiotomy so that my son could come out, the third time someone had taken a blade to my genitals, the second time it had
been done without anaesthetic. The instant I saw the scalpel I was back there in that hut – only this time it wasn’t my life I was fighting for, but my son’s. I had to dig deep
and push those images out of my head along with my son out of my body, so I took a deep breath but I couldn’t stop the tears because I realised then that everyone in this hospital would know
about me now, they knew what I looked like; that although that doctor had opened me so I could urinate, it was just a few centimetres, not entirely. There was no translator there, but I knew that
the midwives were talking about me, not to me,
about
me. I just wanted to get away.
Please God
, I prayed,
just let it be over
.

Just to make things even more horrifying, Yusuf was looking over my shoulder, between my legs.

‘He’s coming!’ he said. ‘I can see his head! Keep pushing, Hibo!’

Then suddenly, a cry pierced the air. My son. And it is true that in that instant you forget everything. All the pain suddenly evaporated; he was something I could concentrate on instead of the
faces of those around me. In that one second, he became my world, ten little fingers and ten little toes, he was perfect. We called him Abdinasir.

I’d suffered far more than I’d realised I would – having been stitched so tightly by the cutter, and crisscrossed with scar tissue, both of our lives had been endangered.

The stitching that was needed to put me back together took months to heal, and the pain made it impossible for me to sleep. Each time I closed my eyes I was that six-year-old child again,
looking up at the tiny gap in the canvas. But in those dark nights when I couldn’t sleep, I’d look over into Abdinasir’s cot and watch him sleeping, and remind myself again: the
future, not the past, Hibo.

Because there was the future, swaddled in blankets, sleeping peacefully. The pain would eventually go, the memories would fade again, and he’d still be here, the son who had given me life.
My love for him overwhelmed everything else, the joy at holding him to my breast as I fed him overshadowing the past.

It was only after Abdinasir’s birth that three letters appeared on my maternity files: FGM. I had no idea what those letters stood for, no one had explained them to me, yet instinct told
me that everything I wanted to know, everything my mother hadn’t told me, would be explained in those three letters. If I could just find out what they meant.

As soon as I was well enough to go out after the birth of my son, I put Abdinasir into his pram and wrapped him up in thick blankets. Our destination wasn’t far as the
wheels of the pram crunched through the last of the snow on the ground. In the months that I’d spent convalescing since the birth, in between the sleepless nights, the nappy changes and
breastfeeds illuminated only by the moon that shone in through the bedroom curtains, those three letters kept going round in my mind. They had to have something to do with being cut.

I’d asked Yusuf to go to the library for me while I was busy with the baby, but each time he’d returned without any luck. ‘I couldn’t find anything,’ he said,
looking as frustrated as I felt. So I knew I needed to go myself, and luckily the library was just across from the new flat in Leyton we’d moved into in preparation for the birth of our son.
But where to start among the endless rows of shelves? My grasp of the English language still stretched little past a hundred words, nothing like the vocabulary I’d need to skim the titles of
hundreds of books. So I decided to start from the beginning. My son was just six months old, but I’d start teaching him English words as I learned myself. We sat there for hours, surrounded
by the colourful spines of children’s books and bright murals on the walls, as I held a picture book just inches from him in his pram. In this part of the library, it was usual for the
silence to be broken by toddlers clambering up and down from chairs as they thrust another book into their mother’s lap.

‘Banana!’ I’d say, showing Abdinasir a picture of a bright-yellow fruit, and he’d gurgle his appreciation as the letters made more sense to me in turn.

‘Apple,’ I’d turn the page. ‘Orange.’ His legs kicked happily inside his Baby-gro.

And like that, the pair of us learned English from children’s books, until one day I was ready to ask the librarian for a Somali–English dictionary. Then my search really began.
Wheeling Abdinasir’s pram through the towering aisles, I found a section that looked like it covered medicine though the sheer number of books was daunting. Carefully, one hand rocking
Abdinasir as he slept in his pram, the other running a finger along each spine, I found a book that had the words ‘female circumcision’ in the title. I knew what ‘female’
meant, and I tried the next word out loud, my tongue tangling itself around those new syllables. An ‘f’ and a ‘c’ in the title . . . No ‘g’, but instinct told me
this could be what I was looking for.

I took it down from the shelf and checked it out of the library, tucking it into the bag that I had slung over the handles of the buggy. At home, as I fed Abdinasir spoonfuls of puréed
banana while he sat gurgling in his high chair, I flicked through the pages. And there, I found my answer. It was pictures rather than words that did the talking at first. They were just line
drawings, but the shock of them was enough for me to snap the book shut.

So that is what I looked like.

Yusuf looked up from the television, startled by the unexpected sound. ‘Is everything OK, my love?’ he asked.

‘This is what I’ve been looking for,’ I told him, and the tears started flowing, even though I didn’t yet understand a single word. He got up and came over to comfort me,
briefly picking up the book and turning it over in his hands before returning it gently to the table.

For almost a year I kept that book at home, renewing it every few weeks. Each evening, after I’d put Abdinasir down to sleep, my finger traced every word on the page, flipping between the
English word and the Somali translation in my dictionary, rearranging the words in the sentence until each one dropped into place, their meaning sinking in, often accompanied by devastation and
reality. Every so often I’d look up at Yusuf and tell him something that I’d learned. He’d just listen – he knew I didn’t need any comment from him, only an ear as I
tried out these new words.

Then, as I made my way through one section, I came across those three letters. FGM: ‘female genital mutilation’. I quickly scanned through my Somali–English dictionary for the
translation of mutilation, and then I sank back in my chair. Mutilation. That’s
exactly
what had happened to me. I couldn’t think of a better word to describe it.

I closed my eyes and thought of the times my hand had strayed to that area as I’d bent down to wash myself in the bath or the shower. My fingers had felt none of the fleshy female parts
that I’d seen pictures of in the other medical books I’d looked through during my search of the library – none of the normal pieces that make up a woman. Instead, the picture that
my hands had created in my mind matched some of the images in this book. They were labelled in ‘types’, with a description of the extent of mutilation in each case – Type 1, Type
2, Type 3. This last one was the most brutal of all, and that’s what had been done to me.

I put my hand up to my mouth as the simple line drawing settled itself into my brain. What had they done to me? Suddenly I felt curious about how I did look, what that doctor had seen when she
opened me, what all the midwives saw at the hospital.

More than that, every page of this book, however painful each revelation I translated was, told me I wasn’t alone. Each tear that splashed on to the page was being shed by another woman
somewhere else in the world.

I read about girls in Mali, in Nigeria, in Egypt, all of them had gone through this same mutilation. Although it helped in some ways to realise that other women knew my pain, it made me feel
overwhelmingly sad. And again I came back to the question of why.

Over the next few weeks I read further. One eight-year-old Malian girl had told the author how she had been showered in gifts by her family and friends, and had been told by her mother that she
was going to be brave and courageous and that this was a rite of passage that would make her into a real woman. I thought back to my own
gudnin
, the same lies – even the same words
– had been told to me. There were tens of thousands of us girls all around the world who’d been tricked by their parents. Who thought that there was some reward at the end of being
pinned down in a hut and having bits stripped off them, when in reality there was nothing but nightmare flashbacks and a lifetime of infections and pain.

I read on, translating slowly more words that revealed FGM was to blame for my constant urine infections, for the dryness I suffered, the scar tissue, the constant itching, the damaged nerve
endings, and was the reason I felt no sensation of pleasure when Yusuf made love to me.

As I read each woman’s testimony, it was like reading my own. I knew then that I truly wasn’t alone, and nor was I alone in my need for knowledge. Someone had taken the time to ask
more questions than I ever had – they’d asked and had answered so many whys that there was enough information to fill a whole book. That made me feel that what happened to me had some
meaning for other people too. That it shouldn’t have happened. I realised that this thing that has haunted me since I was a child wasn’t a secret at all. You
could
talk about
it, if only someone was willing to listen. I didn’t feel so alone anymore, but at the same time I began to be haunted by the idea that there were girls being cut outside of my community,
outside of Mogadishu, all around the world, maybe even here in Britain – it was that thought which kept me awake at night over the next few months, more than the cries of my teething
baby.

By the time I finished reading the book, I knew I needed to see how I looked. Pictures in books weren’t enough – I wanted to see for myself what that cutter had done to
me
.
I was frightened, more than I can ever write here on these pages. I wasn’t ready to position myself awkwardly over a mirror; I didn’t want to be alone with the shock of what I might
find in my reflection, and I wasn’t ready to share that moment with Yusuf. I wanted a degree of separation, the chance to shut my eyes; the images in the book were real enough without seeing
a living, breathing me held up in front of the mirror. These were the days before smartphones and digital cameras, so the only thing I could think of was a disposable camera from my local pharmacy.
I bought one a few days later, throwing it into Abdinasir’s changing bag like a dirty secret. Then, in the privacy of my bathroom while Yusuf was out at work and Abdinasir slept, I climbed
into an empty bathtub and opened my legs, looking away as I positioned the camera between them. Click. Click. Click. With shaking hands I wound the film between each shot.