Cut (3 page)

In July 2014, a report released by City University London and Equality Now estimated that there are 137,000 women and girls living in the UK who are affected by FGM. The report went on to
predict that there are 60,000 girls under the age of fifteen in Britain who are at risk of being mutilated.
⁴
That’s tens of thousands of girls who could be exposed to this
barbaric cultural practice, held down and cut against their will. Who could be maimed for life, or even lose their life to a tradition that should long ago have disappeared. These are girls that
your children and mine go to school with, the girls they share a desk or playdates with. These are the babies in cots next to your baby’s on the maternity unit. These are children who listen
to the same pop music as your children. There is no difference between those girls and their classmates, except thankfully most of their classmates will not live in fear of their parents telling
them that it is time for their rite of passage, that it is time to know what it is to be a woman.

In some cultures, to be a woman is to be condemned to a lifetime of pain. To be a woman means subjection to child abuse, to ensure that your ‘virtue’ remains intact, that your
sexuality is controlled and that you are accepted by your community. Unfortunately, by chance, I was born into one of those cultures – just like 60,000 other girls in Britain.

FGM is a British problem. FGM is a global problem. But we can all play our part in making it stop.

2

T
he dust was kicked up from the dry earth in huge swirls, blurring my vision as the particles drifted in front of my eyes. I coughed as
the air, thick with dirt, caught in my throat; when the dust settled back down to the ground where I sat, they were still there, their faces hungry for their pound of flesh, which was my
humiliation.

‘Are you cut?’ the first girl said.

I looked down and started picking at a stray blade of grass that had unfurled from the dry earth. I knew not to lie, so in resisting the temptation I instead said nothing. Then another girl
spoke.

‘Is the
kintir
still on you, Hibo?’

Despite everything that my mother had said, they weren’t going to go away. They knew the answers, but they’d keep on and on until I confessed it. Finally, with the last bits of the
dusty air sticking in my throat, I spoke: ‘No, I’m not cut, my mother says I’m not ready.’

‘Not ready?’

‘I was cut when I was four!’ one boasted.

‘I was three!’

My eyes stayed focused on the earth, desperate to look anywhere but at their taunting expressions, anywhere but around this exposed school playground.

‘You’re not cut!’

‘You still have your
kintir
!’

‘You’re dirty!’

‘I am not dirty!’ I said, leaping to my feet. ‘My mother gives me a bath every day!’

It was pointless, though. The girls laughed and clapped, and jumped around. Another victim plucked from the crowd, another girl with
kintir
caught out.

‘The
kintir
is dirty! Hibo is dirty!’ And then they danced and skipped, great plumes of dust being swept up from the floor by their sandals. They sang and chanted and I
rubbed my eyes, pretending it was the dust that had made them weep.

‘My mum says I’m not ready to be cut,’ I tried again.

‘You’re a coward,’ they sang. ‘Coward! Coward! Coward!’

‘I am not,’ I said, but my voice was barely audible over their collective taunts.

‘Hibo is dirty! Don’t play with Hibo!’ And then other girls looked over from across the yard, and I shuffled back towards the classroom.

Hoyo was wrong – these girls didn’t stop when I ignored them. She’d told me that bullies get tired after a while, that they find a new victim. But that hadn’t been my
experience. Every day they were there; they’d hunt me out from some corner of the playground, intent on resuming their breaktime game. They watched with delight as my face crumpled, as I
tried to defend myself, telling them that it said nothing in the Koran about removing the
kintir
, that it didn’t make you dirty, whatever it actually was. But they just laughed and
jeered and sang some more, my words falling on deaf ears. Life at school was a constant battle.

Between school and
madrasa
we’d go home for a nap in the shade, where we were grateful for the gentle breeze that slowly shifted our curtains back and forth, desperate for any
respite from the 40-degree heat of the Somali sun. The streets were empty between midday and 4pm, the shops shut up while their owners took a break from the thick Mogadishu air; even dogs and cats
searched for a shady spot under a tree, or any other shadow that was cast on the dry ground. By the afternoon it was cooler in the classrooms of the
madrasa
, where we studied the Koran for
hours and hours.

There might have been respite from the heat, but the bullying was relentless. I’d go to pick up my Koran and as soon as my hand reached it the whispers would start.

‘Don’t touch the Koran, you’re not cut,’ they hissed. ‘You can’t touch it, you’re not clean.’

The teacher seemed to be as oblivious to their words as he was to my tears. Had he heard? If he had, he didn’t say anything.

As I trudged home from school that day, their insults ringing in my ears, I knew there was no escape from them. I’d seen the same happen to other girls; I knew now why some of them lied
and said that they’d been cut when they hadn’t. It was too late for me to do the same. Those girls knew now for sure, all their suspicions were confirmed; there was no chance another
playtime would go by, or another lesson at
madrasa
, without them making comments or faces, or singing songs about me.

I wanted to be the same as them; or, if not the same, I wanted them not to even notice I was there. Why couldn’t I disappear into the dust that they kicked up in my face? Why
couldn’t I stay at home instead of going to school? Or why couldn’t I be cut? Was I a coward? Perhaps my mother was wrong and they were right after all?

When I got home that afternoon, Hoyo lifted me on to her lap and asked me what was wrong. It made a change from other days, when I’d come home with my knuckles red and bleeding after
having them rapped with the fat, hard stick the teachers used on us when we couldn’t answer a question in maths. Then I’d long for her to pull me into her arms, to cover the back of my
hand in soft kisses, when instead she’d take off her shoe and chase me around the house until I told her what I’d done to offend the teacher. Any Somalian mother would do the same, such
was the respect that our teachers commanded.

Today, though, it was the children who had hurt me, and so she pulled my skinny legs up into her lap and rocked me gently in her arms. Here I was safe, here I was in a place that I could trust.
In Hoyo’s arms, everything was OK.

‘Tell me what’s wrong, Hibo,’ she whispered in my ear, planting light kisses on my cheeks.

‘They say I’m dirty,’ I cried. ‘They tell the other girls not to play with me because I still have
kintir
.’

My mother was silent for a second, then I felt her warm, soft chest heave with a great big breath.

‘What have I told you, Hibo? Their words can’t hurt you. That’s all they are, just words. Ignore them.’

My mother was my world – like most young children, much of life’s pain and cruelty could be cured by five minutes on her lap, wrapped tight in her embrace. But not this.

‘I can’t ignore them, Hoyo,’ I said, turning to look at her. ‘They won’t play with me – do you hear what they say? They say I’m not cut, that I’m
dirty. That I’m a coward.’

‘Let them talk, Hibo,’ she said. ‘They’ll get bored eventually.’

She had said the same thing to me a thousand times, but today I noticed a tiredness in her voice. A sigh that told me she wanted them to stop, too, that she knew that ignoring them wasn’t
going to make them give up. My mother never grew tired of my questions, but I detected a profound weariness in the way she breathed out, expelling the air from deep in her chest.

As the youngest child of three my days were spent at my mother’s ankles, feeling the waft of her skirt as I played on the floor at her feet, or listening – while pretending to look
busy with a game – as she chattered with my aunties. I knew they didn’t think my mother should allow me to sit beside them as they weaved, or sewed, or prepared food together; I knew
they didn’t want me to listen to their adult conversation. But time and again I heard my mother brush away their concerns, and gently reach down to place a hand on my shoulder instead.
‘She’s no bother there,’ she would tell the other women.

I’d always shared everything with my mother, and from the moment I could remember speaking it seemed that I always had an endless list of questions for her. Mostly they were things like,
‘Why is it women who do all the cooking and cleaning? Why don’t women work? Who says they have to stay at home and look after their husband?’ My mother’s answers were
invariably the same, a mock shock in her voice, a playful reprimand for questioning the role of women, a firm answer that I would do just as she and all women before us had – but always with
a welcome ear to greet my next enquiry.

The conversations between my mother and my aunties were always the same: what to eat, what to clean next, and men. Yet growing up there were never any men around. We shared our villa with them,
but the only time we saw them was at mealtimes, and even then they’d sit and eat together rather than with us. This was the way in Somalia in those days, or at least in our home. I never once
saw my mother and father together alone; my father didn’t play with me; the men went out to work or mosque, and the women stayed at home. The men ate together, talked together, smoked
together, and the women looked after the children. Occasionally I might feel a passing hand ruffle my hair, or the arms of an uncle reach down to pull me up for a brief hug, but that was the extent
of the male influence in our family life. We were brought up by women, we were fed by women, bathed by women, put to bed by women, and it was only at night when the midnight sky was spattered with
stars that I would listen to the voices of my father and his brothers as they sat in our courtyard talking while I drifted off to sleep. My closest relationship had always been with my mother; she
was who I confided in.

As I cried in her lap, I felt the top of my head wet from her own tears. I didn’t want Hoyo to cry. Would it make her feel better if I was cut too? Was that the answer? Was it really my
kintir
that was causing all this sadness? If I didn’t have my
kintir
, would everything be OK? Would Hoyo stop crying?

They said it’s just a little cut.
Gudnin
, they called it. I didn’t understand what it meant; I didn’t really understand what a
kintir
was either, only that it
wasn’t meant to be there. The word in English is clitoris.

It seemed to me that
gudnin
must be a good thing, otherwise why would the girls in the playground boast so much that it had been done to them? I wanted to be just like they were;
that’s why I wanted to have the little cut too, so they would play with me again. I didn’t know why Hoyo had made me wait so long for mine; the other girls in the playground made me
feel like a baby when they said they were cut at three or four. My cousins always teased me that I was a baby – that even at six years old, Hoyo still tucked me up in bed and kissed me
goodnight – but there was a big difference between their gentle leg-pulling and the cruel jibes of the girls at school. I could remember my cousins’
gudnin
, the parties and the
presents. I wanted to have the same.

Finally I looked up and told her, ‘I want to be cut too, Hoyo. Then they’ll let me play again.’

She took a deep breath then, and her hands wiped the tears first from my cheeks and then from her own.

‘Really?’ she said, as she searched my face.

And I nodded, even though I wasn’t sure what I’d asked for. But I knew it must be something good because suddenly her frown turned into a huge smile, and her eyes lit up, bright and
sparkling.

‘OK, then,’ she said, kissing my forehead. ‘Let’s do it.’

Hoyo jumped out of her chair and began talking excitedly about all the plans for
gudnin
. She was naming all my favourite foods, she was wondering about presents, about the friends and
relatives who would come to the house, fiddling with her headscarf at the thought of it all. And I was sure then that
gudnin
must be a good thing, if it had the power to make the girls in
the playground stop being mean to me, if it made Hoyo as happy as she now appeared to be.

I remember going to sleep that night, under a light cotton sheet and a moon that seemed some evenings to blaze as brightly as the sun it had replaced. I heard the gentle hum of my mother and my
aunties planning my party; I heard the rustle of packets of food, of flour, of sugar, and a clang of pots and pans as they pulled them apart from one another.

And as I drifted off I felt happy because soon I would be like the other girls. The preparations for my
gudnin
had begun and the bullying in the playground would end. Soon everything
would be better again.

3

W
hen I woke the following morning, Hoyo was busying herself in the kitchen again with my aunties. In turn they came and cupped my sleepy
head in their hands, each with a broad smile stretched wide across their face. ‘Wow! You are going to be
gudnin
!’ they exclaimed, kissing me on both cheeks. ‘What a big
girl!’

Hoyo seemed to glide that day, a little dance in her feet each time someone turned up at our door, their arms heavy with food and presents. Family members continued to arrive, each auntie or
cousin slipping off their shoes at the door and shuffling into our home in bare feet, their long, colourful dresses trailing as they went. I breathed in hard the smell of all kinds of
oounzi
which the women had perfumed themselves with for this special day,
my
special day, and soon it mingled with all the different scents that wafted around our villa.