Cut (5 page)

I heard voices outside the hut, the muted sounds of women cooking with one another, dogs barking, goats scuffing the ground a few feet away from me, the occasional bleat piercing an otherwise
silent yard. My mind was in turmoil, replaying over and over the events of that morning, trying to make sense of it all. Why would Hoyo have done that? How could she have done that? Why had this
happened to me? What had I done to deserve such a punishment?

She came into the hut after a couple of hours. I just lay there, staring up at the roof, refusing even to turn my face to her. She moved forward a few inches, leant over me and into my line of
vision, but she wasn’t the woman I had known for my whole life. She was a stranger.

‘Hello, Hibo,’ she spoke softly. ‘How are you?’

My only answer to her was the tears that traced a long, slow line down my cheeks to my ears. Hoyo took her scarf and wiped them away, then stroked my face. I didn’t want her to touch me. I
wanted to recoil from her nearness, to retreat from her treacherous hands. Instead, all I could do was cry.

‘You will be fine,’ she said.

I turned my eyes to her then and I thought,
I won’t be fine, not ever, not at all. Not after this.

‘I want to wee,’ I croaked at last, and so she left the hut and returned with my auntie a few moments later. Very carefully, the two women lifted me off the ground and a few inches
to the side while I still lay on my back. I cried out as white-hot bolts of pain coursed the length of my body. They placed me so that my bottom was over a hole they’d dug in the earth next
to me that had been covered by leaves, my legs still tightly bound together in the cloth. ‘Wee,’ my auntie instructed me gently and I looked at her, my heart racing and my eyes
conveying my confusion.

‘How?’ I said.

‘Just let go of the wee and it will come,’ she said.

So I did as she said, but it didn’t come, nothing like it had before. And then when it did, it felt like I was on fire. What I didn’t understand then was that I had been sewn from
top to bottom. The skin that was left after they’d sliced away my vaginal lips had been pulled tight over my urethra and sewn all the way down to my vagina itself, where a tiny hole –
much smaller than the original – was all that was left. Where previously it had flowed quickly and freely, now my urine had to travel down to that hole, slowly trickling its descent like acid
poured over the raw wound until drip . . . drip . . . drip . . . it finally started to leave my body. And I screamed, I screamed like I hadn’t done for hours.

‘It’s OK, it’s OK, it’s OK,’ my auntie reassured me repeatedly. But it was far from OK.

I was shaking again by the time they placed me back down on the mattress. I prayed to God that I would never have to wee again.
I am alive
, I thought,
but I wish I was dead
. I
begged my mother and my aunt to give me something, anything to cool me down, to ease the pain. I begged them to pour cold water on my pelvis to take away the burning, even for a few seconds. But
they refused.

When my aunt came back later with more fizzy orange, I knocked it out of her hand with a feeble swipe. The heat under the canvas must have been over 30 degrees, but I was too terrified of
passing urine again to take another sip of drink.

‘Are you hot, Hibo?’ she asked.

I nodded. Yet I refused to drink, so instead she brought ice cubes and rubbed them over my forehead, across my lips.

On my own again, with the fading daylight came some respite at last from the heat. I took my mind off the stabbing, shrieking, incessant pains by watching soft white smoke from the burning
loovan
snake into the air above me, swirling and curling in patterns, making a silvery trail up to the tiny hole in the roof of the canvas where the sticks met. The woody scent, a little
like pine, was some comfort, and if I closed my eyes I could pretend I was lying in a forest, a long way from this mattress, and these binds that cut into my knees and ankles.

I tried to focus not on the pain, but on getting better. As soon as I was better, I would find out why this had happened to me. In those hot nights I was to spend alone over the following weeks,
a thin piece of cloth covering my body, I vowed that I would ask my mother every day until she told me the truth.

Two days later, I was allowed to eat something for the first time. Just two or three sips of soup, my auntie holding the spoon up to my lips and helping me to sit up a little
so that I could drink it down. I’d existed on the shock of the trauma alone – the last thing I’d thought of was eating, the pain still a heavy knot in my stomach, replacing any
appetite I might have had even if they’d tried to feed me. Which, of course, they didn’t because I was bound from hip to toe: it was impossible to go to the toilet even if I’d
wanted to, and they encouraged me to do the bare minimum.

My mother had wandered in and out of the hut as I drifted in and out of sleep. Each time she spoke to me, I stared straight ahead, up at the gap in the canvas. My body was in that hut, my mind
far away. If she offered me a drink, no matter how thirsty I was, I wouldn’t accept anything from her. She was a fraud and a traitor.

The smell from the hole in the ground beside me where the women lifted me over to wee was awful. They covered it over with leaves, but nothing could disguise the stench of the urine in that
searing heat. The
loovan
masked it slightly, but it couldn’t take it away.

After a few more days, my cousins came into the hut to say hello to me. I didn’t want to speak to them. They went away.

Then, on the fifth day, my auntie brought in some rice and milk on a spoon.

‘Please, Hibo,’ she said. ‘Please eat a little something.’ I refused. She went away and came back a few moments later; this time it was covered with honey to tempt me. I
took one spoonful but I couldn’t so much as chew it; my body was rejecting even a mouthful of food, and as the days went by I grew weaker and weaker. But my mind, my mind was strong.

And then, on the tenth day, the cutter returned. When I looked up and saw her enter the hut – those eyes, those pincer nails – I decided that today would be a good day to die. If I
could have run, I would have, but my legs were still tightly bound by the cloth. She placed her stall in front of me again as my mother hovered behind her, and my tiny heart pounded in terror
inside my chest, as she slowly started to unpeel the dressing.

‘Open your legs,’ she said, after she’d removed the bandages. ‘I won’t hurt you.’

As if I was going to trust this woman, the same one I’d cursed time and again in my head since that morning ten days ago. I’d decided she must be a
sheydan
– a devil.
How could she cause so much pain to a child with such a complete absence of remorse?

After the binding had been unpeeled, try as I might to protect myself, to keep my legs clenched shut, she forced them apart with little real effort. I caught sight of the dull glint of the
razors again and I begged God then please just to take me. Let me die now. I screamed and screamed, deaf to the cutter’s words. ‘I’m not going to touch you. I just need to take
these stitches out.’

The pain as she cut at each knot with the razor, dragging the thread through skin that was still raw, was unbearable. In my head, I cursed her a thousand more times. I called her all the names
that my six-year-old brain could conjure up.
You devil woman
, I thought deep inside, my body weak but my eyes trying to burn my insults into her skin.
You deserve to die for what you
did to me! You’re nasty! You’re evil!

When it was over, she gathered together her wicked tools again and raised herself up from her little seat. Before she left, she gave me a final hard stare with those terrifying eyes. She had a
message for me: ‘You don’t speak of this. You never tell other girls about it.’

I was shaking then. It was difficult to know whether it was through fear or anger.

And then my mother said: ‘If you talk about it you will look like someone who is not brave enough, people will see you as a coward, and you’ve been very brave.’

I didn’t want to speak about it ever again, not what they’d done or how they’d done it. I never wanted to think about the pain ever, or those days spent in that hut alone.

I only wanted to know why.

That day, after those crude stitches had been removed at last, I tried to stand for the first time since the cutting. But ten days with little food and drink had left me weak
and wasted. Just one look at my arms told me how much weight had dropped off me as I’d lain in that hut, under the scorching Somalian sun. I had always been a slight and skinny child, but now
the bones in my hands jutted visibly against my skin, and my wrists had been whittled down to twigs. It needed both my mother and my auntie to grip an arm each and walk me out of the hut and around
the yard. I blinked hard as the full force of the sun’s rays hit me for the first time in almost two weeks.

Later my auntie held me over a tin bath while my mother sponged water over me. She was gentle, but her touch felt a world away from that last bath she’d given me, a mockery of the role she
had once played. My skin bristled at the feel of her hands on my body. I wanted it over with; I wanted to go back to the safety of my hut, the small space that had been my security while I’d
recovered. It hurt to walk; even if my muscles remembered what to do, my joints still stung from where my auntie and the cutter’s assistant had pulled at my legs, and in between my legs . . .
in between my legs . . . I couldn’t bring myself to think about what they’d done there.

My mother brought out one of the new dresses from my party for me and slipped it on over my head as I sat there, scrawny arms aloft. None of the clothes looked as lovely in this new light as
they had when I first received them. Now, they represented a betrayal. Those presents, the congratulations, it had all been a trick. I couldn’t imagine a day when I would ever eat
halwa
again.

My mother and my auntie tried to feed me up again, but I didn’t want to eat. I didn’t want to speak. I decided then I would never call my mother by her name again. I was up on my
feet, but the world looked completely different now.

6

E
ach and every morning that followed after my
gudnin
, I would look my mother square in the eyes and ask, ‘Why? Why did this
happen to me?’ On good days she would tell me to go and play in the yard; on bad days, I would see a flash of irritation in her eyes and she would chase me around the house to get rid of me,
picking up any object she could find along the way to shoo me out. Some days she would simply ignore me, and it was then that I’d feel most angry. I’d wonder how she could dismiss what
had happened to me so easily, but she did. Whichever way my mother responded, she never gave me the answer I sought, and I would vow again to ask the following day, and the one after that, and the
one after that.

I never asked her to do anything for me, I never said hello or goodbye or goodnight. I never even called her Hoyo. The woman who cooked my meals, who saved an extra can of fizzy orange for me in
the fridge, who never told me off if I walked home from school slower than the others, she was not my mother. She was a shadow of the woman whom I once called Hoyo – a shadow of the woman who
had always answered my incessant questions about the world outside of our compound and who’d always laughed at my curiosity. Now I had only one question, and I could see from her face that
she dreaded my asking it.

I could still think back to a time when she had indulged me and my inquisitive nature. I could still remember the day when she told me that there were people in the world who had pale skin, much
paler than ours. She told me they were called ‘white people’.

‘What do they call us?’ I’d asked, my eyes wide.

‘Black,’ she’d said.

And then I argued: ‘I’m not black, why do they call me black? My skin is brown. I’m not black!’ And she’d thrown her head back and laughed.

I remembered going with her to visit a relative in hospital, and how as we walked the corridors one of these white people appeared ahead of us. I saw her legs and gasped and pulled at my
mother’s hand in mine. ‘She’s not white, Hoyo, she’s pink! Why do people say she is white? White is this wall. She is not white.’ And Hoyo had laughed again. I
remember the pink woman had given me a lollipop, and I’d decided these pink people were nice after all, even if they couldn’t get their colours right.

But that was another life. There was no laughter between us anymore, there was no talk. She still tucked me up in bed at night, even when I was almost eight, but when she bent down to kiss my
forehead just like she had always done, I moved my face away or covered myself over with the sheet.

I’d answer to my aunties, I’d smile and talk and even give them hugs, and I’d look over their shoulder as I did and see the hurt in my mother’s eyes. And they’d
say: ‘You can hug your mother too, you know?’

And I’d reply: ‘I know, but I don’t want to.’

‘Why?’ they’d ask. I wouldn’t answer; they knew why. As far as I was concerned, my mother had forfeited the right to be close to me when she chose to look the other way
instead of answer my pleas. I hated her, deep inside, and no passage of time, no wounded expressions or entreaties from my aunties would change that. Nothing could shake my sense that all the
affection, all the love, all the patience she had shown me had been a deception.

Each day took me further away from the horror of that hut, and yet the memory of it was still branded on my mind. It wasn’t just to my mother that I looked for answers in those weeks and
months that followed; it was to the other girls in the school playground, the ones with whom I walked to and from
madrasa
. Sometimes I’d find a group of my friends sitting on the
yellow ground, the earth’s dust streaking their long skirts, and I’d say to them: ‘Why did they do it? Why did they cut us?’ And one by one they’d stand up and walk
away, or they’d stare at the ground as if it offered an escape from my questions. I guessed that they’d been given the same warning as me: never discuss this with anyone. And yet when I
think about it, who really does talk about such intimate things in the open air of the playground? Why did I think anyone would ever tell me why it had happened?