Greetings
I don't come from a society where this is practiced but like others here was unexplicably jolted when it was first explained to me by a friend a few years ago, she recommended I read the book
Infidel, by Ayan Hirsi Ali. I did recently and it is quite a thing to analyse, her perspective is of someone living in a series of countries because her father was a political man and in exile and because she grew up when Somalia was being 'unified'. She was originally from Somalia and described how while her mother was away when she was 5 her grandmother, who was more 'faithful' to the traditions of her society preformed FGM on her and her older brother and especially her younger sister. Things ranging from the fact that a person can scrape off a adolescence's crude already flattened clitoris, to the very idea of a teenager or a mature woman boasting that she is 'flat like the palm of one's hand' to the thought of a 'loving' husband aggressively forcing his penis onto that 'palm' until penetration is beyond depressing, geedying.
She is perhaps most famous for her rejection and denoucement of Isalm, a good base for more literature in terms of personal experiences and the highlighting of expressions on the theme.
How luckily unluckily I am to find the mentioned excerpt online, the first search I performed
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KORAN school was a shed down the road. The other pupils were from the neighbourhood. At first I liked it. I learned to mix ink from charcoal, water, and a little milk, and to write the Arabic alphabet on long wooden boards. I began learning the Koran, line by line, by heart. It was uplifting to be engaged in such an adult task.
But the kids at madrassah (Islamic religious school) were tough. They fought. One girl, who was about eight years old, they called kintirleey, "she with the clitoris".
I had no idea what a clitoris was, but the kids didn't even want to be seen with this girl. They spat on her and pinched her; they rubbed sand in her eyes, and once they caught her and tried to bury her in the sand behind the school.
The madrassah teacher didn't help. Once in a while he called her dammin, dunce, and kintirleey, too. My teenage cousin Sanyar used to pick me up after madrassah. One day she arrived just as a girl hit me in the face. Sanyar took me home and told the story. "Ayaan didn't even defend herself," she said in horror. "Coward!" my family jeered.
The next day Sanyar waited for me outside the madrassah with another teenager, the older sister of the girl who had hit me the day before. They caught hold of the two of us and tugged us over to an open space, then ordered us to fight. "Scratch her eyes out. Bite her," Sanyar hissed at me. "Come on, coward, think of your honour."
The other girl got the same encouragement. We flew at each other, fists tight, hitting, wrestling, pulling each other's hair, biting. "Ayaan, never cry!" Sanyar called out. The other children cheered us on. When they let us stop, our dresses were torn and my lip was bleeding, but Sanyar was delighted. "I don't want you to ever let another child hit you or make you cry," she said. "Fight. If you don't fight for your honour, you're a slave."
Then, as we walked away, the other girl shouted after me, "Kintirleey!" Sanyar winced. I looked at her, horror dawning on me. I was like that other girl? I, too, had that filthy thing, a kintir? In Somalia, like many countries across Africa and the Middle East, little girls are made "pure" by having their genitals cut out. There is no other way to describe this procedure, which typically occurs around the age of five.
After the child's clitoris and labia are carved out, scraped off, or, in more compassionate areas, merely cut or pricked, the whole area is often sewn up, so that a thick band of tissue forms a chastity belt made of the girl's own scarred flesh. A small hole is situated to permit a thin flow of pee. Only great force can tear the scar tissue wider, for sex.
Female genital mutilation predates Islam. Not all Muslims do this, and a few of the peoples who do are not Islamic. But in Somalia, where virtually every girl is excised, the practice is always justified in the name of Islam. Uncircumcised girls will be possessed by devils, fall into vice and perdition, and become whores. Imams never discourage the practice: it keeps girls pure.
Many girls die during or after their excision, from infection. Other complications cause enormous, more or less lifelong pain. My father Abeh was a modern man and considered the practice barbaric. He had always insisted that his daughters be left uncut. In this he was quite extraordinarily forward-thinking. Though I don't think it was for the same reason, Mahad, who was six, had also not yet been circumcised.
Not long after that first fight of mine at the madrassah, Grandma decided that the time was right for us to undergo the necessary and proper dignity of purification. My father was in jail and my mother was away for long periods, but Grandma would ensure that the old traditions would be respected in the old ways.
After she made the arrangements, Grandma was cheerful and friendly all week long. A special table was prepared in her bedroom, and various aunts, known and unknown, gathered in the house. When the day itself came I was not frightened, just curious. I had no idea what was going to happen, except that there was a festive atmosphere in the house and we - all three of us - were going to be cleansed. I wouldn't be called kintirleey any more.
Mahad went first. I was driven out of the room, but after a while I stole back to the door and watched. Mahad was on the floor, with his head and arms on Grandma's lap. Two women were holding down his spread-eagled legs, and a strange man was bending down between them. The room was warm and I could smell a mixture of sweat and frankincense.
Grandma was whispering in Mahad's ears, "Don't cry, don't stain your mother's honour. These women will talk about what they have seen. Grit your teeth." Mahad wasn't making a sound, but tears rolled down his face as he bit into Grandma's shawl. His face was clenched and twisted in pain.
I couldn't see what the stranger was doing, but I could see blood. This frightened me. I was next. Grandma swung her hand from side to side and said, "Once this long kintir is removed you and your sister will be pure."
From Grandma's words and gestures I gathered that this hideous kintir, my clitoris, would one day grow so long that it would swing sideways between my legs. She caught hold of me and gripped my upper body in the same position as she had put Mahad. Two other women held my legs apart. The man, who was probably an itinerant traditional circumciser from the blacksmith clan, picked up a pair of scissors. With the other hand, he caught hold of the place between my legs and started tweaking it, like Grandma milking a goat. "There it is, there is the kintir," one of the women said.
Then the scissors went down between my legs and the man cut off my inner labia and clitoris. I heard it, like a butcher snipping the fat off a piece of meat. A piercing pain shot up between my legs, indescribable, and I howled. Then came the sewing: the long, blunt needle clumsily pushed into my bleeding outer labia, my loud and anguished protests, Grandma's words of comfort and encouragement. "It's just this once in your life, Ayaan. Be brave, he's almost finished." When the sewing was finished, the man cut the thread off with his teeth. That is all I can recall of it. But I do remember Haweya's bloodcurdling howls. Though she was the youngest - she was four, I five, Mahad six - Haweya must have struggled much more than Mahad and I did, or perhaps the women were exhausted after fighting us, and slipped, because the man made some bad cuts on Haweya's thighs. She carried the scars of them her whole life.
I must have fallen asleep, for it wasn't until much later that day that I realised that my legs had been tied together, to prevent me from moving to facilitate the formation of a scar. It was dark and my bladder was bursting, but it hurt too much to pee. The sharp pain was still there, and my legs were covered in blood. I was sweating and shivering. It wasn't until the next day that my Grandma could persuade me to pee even a little.
By then everything hurt. When I just lay still the pain throbbed miserably, but when I urinated the flash of pain was as sharp as when I had been cut.
It took about two weeks for us to recover. Grandma tended to us constantly, suddenly gentle and affectionate. She responded to each anguished howl or whimper, even in the night. After every tortured urination she washed our wounds carefully with warm water and dabbed them with purple liquid. Then she tied our legs again and reminded us to stay completely still or we would tear, and then the man would have to be called again to sew us back up.
After a week the man came and inspected us. He thought that Mahad and I were doing well, but said Haweya needed to be resewn. She had torn her wound while urinating and struggling with Grandma. We heard it happening; it was agony for her. The entire procedure was torture for all of us, but undoubtedly the one who suffered the most was Haweya.
Mahad was already up and about, quite healed, when the man returned to remove the thread he had used to sew me shut. This was again very painful. He used a pair of tweezers to dig out the threads, tugging on them sharply. Again, Grandma and two other women held me down. But after that, even though I had a thick, bumpy scar between my legs that hurt if I moved, at least my legs didn't have to be tied together any more, and I no longer had to lie down without moving all day.
It took Haweya another week to reach the stage of thread removal, and four women had to hold her down. I was in the room when this happened. I will never forget the panic in her face and voice as she screamed with everything in her and struggled to keep her legs closed. Haweya was never the same afterward. She became ill with a fever for several weeks and lost a lot of weight. She had horrible nightmares, and during the day began stomping off to be alone. My once cheerful, playful little sister changed. Sometimes she just stared vacantly at nothing for hours. We all started wetting our beds after the circumcision. In Mahad's case, it lasted a long time.
When Ma came back from her trip this time, she was furious. "Who asked you to circumcise them?" she yelled, more angry with her mother than I had ever seen her. "You know their father doesn't want it done! Allah knows, I have never in my life been so betrayed as by you. What possessed you?"
Grandma turned on my mother in fury. She yelled that she had done Ma a huge favour. Everyone was cut.
ONE Friday afternoon at the end of January 1992, my father Abeh came straight from the mosque to our flat. He never did that - never paid us a visit these days - and when he arrived he was completely excited. "Ayaan, my daughter, I have good news for you - the best news - my prayers are answered!" he crowed. "Today in the mosque a blessed man came to me with a proposal of marriage, and I offered him your hand!"
I remember letting him talk while I felt my heels sinking into the ground. I cleared my throat and said no, but he didn't hear me. I said, "I'm not going to marry a stranger!" and my father, bubbling with enthusiasm, answered, "But he's not a stranger! He's not a stranger at all! He's your cousin! He's an Osman Mahamud!" He began chanting back all of this man's names.
I said, "Not a stranger in that sense, Abeh," and he answered, "In what sense, then?" "But I haven't even met him!" I wailed. My father told me, "That's fine - you will meet him tomorrow."
My father had given me away to a man called Osman Moussa, a fine young Somali man who had grown up in Canada. He had come to Nairobi to find and rescue family members who had been stranded by the civil war, and also to find a bride. He thought the Somali girls in Canada were too Westernised, by which he meant that they dressed indecently, disobeyed their husbands, and mixed freely with men; they were not baarri, which made them unworthy of marriage. And the civil war meant that daughters of the best families in Somalia were available for practically nothing.
My father had met this young man in the mosque barely two hours before. He was tall, he told me, with strong bones and white teeth, well fed on milk and meat in North America. Osman Moussa must have approached him. I can imagine the scene, the respectful recitation of lineage, finally the request: "You are the father of daughters, and I seek a bride." My father must have felt so very happy.
There was no bride price. Because of the civil war, it would have been indecent to ask for one. But this was a strategic marriage; Osman Moussa could boast that he was married to a Magan, and we would now have relatives in Canada. There were all kinds of reasons for my father to be happy about this match.
I summoned the strength to say to my father "Abeh, what if I am already with some other person?" but he wasn't even listening. He said, "Allah has sent us the answer." He was overcome with his own cleverness. The next day, my father came to the house with Osman Moussa.
The living room was clean, and everyone was excited except me. I just wore normal clothes, a loose dress and headscarf. I wasn't going to dress up for this.
This man came in. He wanted to shake my hand. He was very tall, and wore enormously long blue jeans; he looked like a basketball player, with a shaved head and a baseball cap. I was polite. I said, "Hello, come in. I am Ayaan," without looking him in the eye, and fetched my mother.
My father and mother both remained in the room with us - Ma and I sat on the bed - and this man talked about Canada, where he had lived since he was a small boy, and about the refugees and the war. We didn't make eye contact. Osman Moussa was talking with my mother, trying to pass muster. When I could look up, I scrutinised him - the way he talked, his face - thinking, "Will I like this man?" I was supposed to make a home and a life with him; cook, bear his kids, respond to his whims. And what did I know of him? His Somali was poor, half-learned. He seemed earnest.
He neither repelled nor attracted me. I felt indifferent, completely without feeling. I didn't detect that he had any special interest in me, either. The marriage was set for Saturday, six days away.
Our second meeting was more intimate. Osman Moussa and his sister came, and I asked Haweya and Mahad to be with me, to help me evaluate this man. Ma left us five young people alone. I asked about prayer; I wanted to find out how religious this Osman Moussa was. I felt I had to make some sort of decision fast, even though there seemed to be no way I could stop the arrangement from proceeding.
I asked, "What do you expect of a wife?" Osman's sister was mortified, and said, "Maybe we shouldn't be here if you're going to discuss such things!" But Osman Moussa belly-laughed and said, "You're going to give me six sons. We will be a home for all the Osman Mahamud."
We grilled him subtly in the Somali epics we had learned from our mother, some of them composed by the Abdihalin brothers' greatgrandfather, to our eternal wonder. He knew none of them. Worse still, instead of admitting his ignorance he pretended he knew what we were talking about, which made him seem small. We asked him Grandma's old riddles; he failed them.
We switched to English - we assumed this man's English must be better than his limping Somali - and Haweya asked him what kind of books he read. He said, "Hmya. I read, you know, stuff." I realised his English was half-learned, too, and he clearly read nothing at all.
I summoned enough courage to ask him to take off his baseball cap, which he did. I thought perhaps I might fall in love with his head of hair or something. But though Osman was only 27 years old, his head was already as bald as the bottom of baby Abbas. Baldness is associated with wisdom among Somalis, but this man had nothing to show for losing so much hair at such an early age.
He thought the Osman Mahamud were the chosen people; he was dull, trite, and a bigot, a dyed-in-the-wool Brotherhood type. I remember thinking, "No, surely Abeh could not do this to me?"
When Osman Moussa finally left I tried to pull together the courage to take matters into my own hands. I put on my coat and went to Buruburu, where my father was living. When he opened the door I said, "Osman Moussa came to our house today and Haweya and Mahad and I tested him. We think he's a pea-brain. He's not eloquent, he's not brave enough to admit his shortcomings, and he's a bigot."
Just like that. That way my father couldn't ignore what I was saying, as he mostly did. He had me come and sit down and said, "Now tell me."
"I don't think this man and I are compatible," I said.
He said, smiling broadly, "On the basis of one afternoon?" I told my father, "You thought on the basis of one minute that we would be compatible, so I may think on the basis of one afternoon that we are not."
But Abeh said, "No, I know more than that. He is the son of the son of the son of" - he quoted the lineage. "He has a good job in Canada, he doesn't chew qat, he is clean and a conscientious worker, he is strong. I am giving you to him to ensure your safety."
He went on, "The ceremony will be Saturday, at Farah Goure's house. The sheep have been bought, the qali has been hired. Your saying you don't want this - it's not a question. We are living in bad times. Surely you won't reject my choice of a husband for you just because he doesn't read novels." He reduced it to the smallest thing. Imagine how trivial my opposition would sound to Abeh if I added: but he has no hair!
Still, I sat up straight and told him, "I am not going to do it." My father said, "I can't accept a no from you for something you haven't even tried."
I asked, "You mean I can't say no before I get married?"
He answered, "Of course not. Everything is all arranged." Nobody tied me up. I was not shackled. I was not forced at gunpoint. But I had no realistic way out.
Edited extract from Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to be published next week by Free Press (an imprint of Simon & Schuster), $34.95.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21160254-28737,00.html- M -
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