Authors: Hibo Wardere
‘Remember how they mutilate girls in Somalia?’ I said. ‘How they sew us together?’
I saw the recognition flash across his face, and his expression became more serious as he listened.
‘Well, I went to the doctor and got opened . . .’
And that’s where I left it. It felt like I’d dropped a bomb between us, that I’d laid down on that table something so personal, so painful, that it could blow us apart. But I
had to know how Yusuf felt because I could never let any girls of my own go through the same.
I scoured his face for some clue to his reaction and the only thing I could detect there was relief.
‘My sisters went through
gudnin
,’ he said, dipping his eyes to the floor. ‘I saw how they suffered. Even on her wedding night, one of them nearly died.’
Just like me, he’d never been told this directly, but he’d heard the whispers about how she’d spent three months in hospital after her wedding night. That was enough to put him
off cutting girls for life.
‘I expected this from you, and if you hadn’t already been opened, I would have taken you to the doctor’s myself before we got married.’
The relief on my face must have mirrored his one hundredfold. This man, who surprised me from the moment I realised he made cups of tea and chopped onions, was also against girls being cut in
the name of men. He had witnessed the results of the brutality his own sisters had been subjected to, and he knew it was wrong. It was as simple as that. But I had one more thing I needed to be
sure of.
‘If we have children, my girls will not be touched,’ I told him. ‘I can handle my family. Can you take the pressure from yours?’
He took my hand across the table and, as people passed by the windows outside, he looked into my eyes and told me very slowly.
‘They will be my children,’ he said. ‘And no one is going to tell me what to do with them. Any girls who come along won’t be touched. I promise you.’
And there in that cafe, as life and traffic rushed by, I took a further step towards freedom. After all the physical pain I had suffered, the emotional trauma I’d borne, the cultural
stigmatism I had had to fight against, I had met a man with whom I could create a future, one that would be safe for my unborn daughters. Even though they didn’t exist yet, it was the
greatest gift of freedom I could give them.
Yusuf and I married a few days later.
9
O
ur wedding was not traditional in the way that you might imagine; there were no intricate patterns of henna painted on my hands, no
shash
placed upon my head by my mother. There were no elders to take me aside and explain to me what my new husband might expect from our marriage, or in the bedroom. But it didn’t
stop my mind taking me there and that dark thought made me shudder. Instead, our marriage was carried out in secret, a simple ceremony at a friend’s house in Whitechapel; a sheikh came and
made an engagement between us, the Koran bearing witness to our promise to one another rather than family and friends. The bride wore blue jeans and a blue jumper, because winter was biting at the
single-glazed windows, as well as a slightly sad expression because this wasn’t the seven-day festival I’d grown up with, not what I’d imagined for myself as a little girl. The
groom also wore jeans and a blue shirt, and Yusuf’s two friends took us for an Indian meal after the sheikh had sealed our promise to one another.
I didn’t go home to my sister’s house that night, although I gave her no explanation why; I hadn’t told her that Yusuf and I were getting married because I knew she’d try
to stop me. Instead, for the first time, I went home with my new husband. As I opened the door to his room my hands felt clammy, but my heart melted at the sight of the new peach bedsheets and the
flowers that he’d put out for me.
‘I wanted to make it special for you,’ Yusuf said.
He sat me down on the bed and from a tiny box produced a thin silver band; it was simple yet beautiful, and it meant so much – an unbroken circle of our never-ending love. Gently, he
slipped it on to my wedding-ring finger.
‘One day you will have a proper wedding. I promise you,’ he said, kissing me. I hugged my husband tight and, out of the corner of my eye, studied the new sheets that he’d taken
such care to make up for me. For us. Because this bed that we were sitting on was to become the place that we would lie together, and that thought alone took me back to my childhood bedroom, to
Fatima telling me the only thing I’d ever heard about what it was to be married – that your husband is the rolling pin. I let go of Yusuf then for fear that he might feel the thudding
inside my chest. I loved him, I wanted so desperately to be married to him, to be his wife in every sense of the word, but ever since we’d decided to make our union official nightmares about
making love had crept into my sleep.
‘Let’s have some tea,’ I said.
And that was the start of our married life. Not, like most couples, hours lost entwined within each other’s arms and legs. Instead, I avoided that intimacy, jumping each time he came near
me, or rubbed my arm, or kissed me, in case he wanted me to lie down next to him. And then I’d close my eyes and my breathing became that bit harder because, as much as I wanted to be
everything to my new husband, I just couldn’t stand even the thought of sex with him.
Yusuf must have sensed my fear.
‘We don’t have to do anything,’ he said. ‘We can just lie down next to each other; we don’t even need to touch.’
So that’s what we did the first night we spent together, me lying awake in the darkness, feeling the heat of him beside me, listening to the slow, steady sound of his breathing.
Then, in the morning, Yusuf’s phone rang. It was Hadsan. He answered it, his face betraying none of the fear that was undoubtedly etched across mine.
‘Hibo’s right here with me . . .
‘. . . We’re not living in sin . . .
‘. . . We’re married.’
I didn’t speak to Hadsan, but I could hear the fury in her voice from the other side of the room. She must have called my mother because when the phone rang again, it was Hadsan insisting
I call Hoyo in Kenya. But I didn’t, not then, not for days. I may not have been ready to experience everything marriage had to offer me, but for now it was a cocoon, a safe place for me.
That’s where I stayed for days before speaking to my mother, protected by my husband’s arms – nothing more, nothing intimate, and Yusuf never asked more from me. Each morning
I’d jump out of bed to shower, ready for a new day of being his wife, but as the sky started to darken from afternoon into evening, the fear would seep into my bones; the terrifying thought
that he might want to attempt to make love to me that night. Often it would turn me from a loving wife into one who was cold and aloof.
‘What’s wrong, Hibo?’ he might ask, trying to pull me into a hug as I watched the TV.
‘Nothing,’ I’d say, shaking him off, my eyes pinned to the screen.
I tried to ignore the disappointment I’d spot in his eyes because it made me feel guilty that I wasn’t prepared to make my husband happy in the traditional way that other wives do.
But I knew I couldn’t keep avoiding my husband forever.
Four days after our wedding, I finally spoke to my mother. The conversation went as I predicted it would.
‘How could you?’ she yelled down the phone. ‘How could you do this without discussing it with anyone?’
‘I did discuss it with someone,’ I said, after I’d finished holding the receiver away from my ear. ‘I discussed it with my husband.’
Yusuf winced on my behalf from the other side of the room as she ranted down the line. Eventually, when I realised she wouldn’t let me speak, I hung up, and Yusuf held me in a big, strong
hug.
My husband couldn’t have been more gentle and supportive in those first few days and weeks of marriage, and I wanted desperately to be the wife to him that he deserved, and so very
carefully, I let him inch closer to me in bed, to hold my hand under the covers, to let his hand stray further over to my body.
There were many false starts when my heart would tell me that I was ready to make love to Yusuf, and then as he loomed over me, all I would see in my mind’s eye was the cutter, and all I
would feel was the pain, and panic would creep up my throat and strangle me from the inside. I’d cover my face and cry ‘no’.
‘Stop!’ I’d say and he’d back off immediately, scooping me up in his arms.
‘We don’t have to do anything,’ he’d say. ‘I don’t mind if we never make love.’
I wished that would make me feel better, that it would ease the pressure as he obviously hoped it might, but it didn’t, it only left me riddled with guilt. So the next night we tried
again, and the next, and the next. The nights turned into weeks and the weeks turned into months; and then finally, I allowed Yusuf into me, we consummated our marriage, and the pain was everything
I thought it would be. I forced myself to bat away the images that flooded my mind. I closed my eyes and squeezed away the tears, and I tried instead to focus only on my husband’s pleasure.
But how could that be satisfying for either of us?
‘Are you OK?’ Yusuf asked me afterwards.
And a nod was all I could muster because even his gentle nature, his care and attention, were a reminder to me that I wasn’t a whole woman, that I couldn’t satisfy him or be
satisfied in the same way as a woman who hadn’t been cut. I’d heard gossip in our community about Somalian men leaving wives who couldn’t satisfy them, and so in those
disappointing early days I was plagued by such thoughts as I lay there with my husband in what should have been post-coital bliss.
Making love served only as a painful reminder that there was something missing from me that even Yusuf’s love couldn’t replace.
10
T
he smile that stretched across Yusuf’s face seemed to include far more teeth than it usually did, or perhaps I’d just never
seen him smile quite so much. Yet at the same time, my own face was lined with worry. The source of our conflicting emotions lay buried deep inside my belly, a tiny bean of a thing that was busy
growing arms and legs and a little nose while I went about my day. Our first child. Not that I wasn’t happy about it, far from it. Since the first feelings of nausea and the early signs of my
swelling stomach, I’d been delighted at the thought of this tiny person we’d created growing in there, safe and sound. Delighted and worried. Because it meant I was going from wife to
mother and I didn’t know if I could do it.
I hadn’t told Yusuf straight away, I hadn’t told anyone. For weeks I disguised the sickness that took hold of me every day, stripping pounds of weight off me. I ignored the fact that
I hadn’t had a period for months, and refused to go to the doctor even when Yusuf guessed what was wrong.
‘How will I know how to be a mother?’ I’d ask in the darkness, as we lay in bed alongside each other.
‘You will know,’ Yusuf would answer, taking my hand under the sheets. ‘You will be wonderful.’
I would wish then that I could be as sure. What kind of role model did I have to learn from, after all? What happy memories of my own childhood could I draw from that would tell me how to love
my own child, given the betrayal I had suffered at the hands of my mother, and the distance that had existed between us ever since? Her kind of parenting was not the sort I wanted the new life
growing inside me to have.
This evening, as if reading my mind, Yusuf gave my hand a squeeze and told me again: ‘You will be fine, and we will look after our baby together – boy or girl. As long as it is
healthy, that’s all that matters.’ And I prayed again in the darkness to keep our child safe until it was in my arms.
As I heard Yusuf’s breathing descend into a heavy rumble, I lay there blinking out at the black and wondering how on earth I’d be a mum. And not any mum, a good mum. How would I know
if my baby was happy? Would I know how to comfort it when it cried? Could I do this, could I love this child as much as I wanted to when the love that my mother had shown me had also known its
limits? And when it came to the birth, how would I ever let a doctor look at me down there to deliver my baby? Yusuf and I had been married for three months by the time I had allowed him to
penetrate me. After that the trust had built up and I’d allowed him to look at me between my legs.
‘You look normal to me,’ he’d insisted.
I’d uncovered my face from my hands and looked into his eyes for the reassurance I so desperately needed, and there it was, I could see it, but even that wasn’t enough to convince
me. So how would I let a stranger look, even if they were going to deliver my baby?
The child inside my belly was undeterred by my fears, though – it was determined to let me know it was coming whether I was ready or not. The following day, as I took a bath, it gave me a
kick that sent ripples through the soapy water.
‘Yusuf!’ I cried, wide-eyed and curious about this little person growing within.
He burst into the bathroom thinking I’d fallen over, and when instead he’d found me safe and sound and I’d taken his hand and placed it on my warm skin, he beamed.
‘That’s our baby,’ he said.
We were still living in the house Yusuf shared with two friends, but we knew that, with the baby coming, we’d need to get a place of our own. But one thing at a time; first we needed to
have the scan.
A few days later we went to the hospital, and the first scan revealed I was a lot further along in my pregnancy than we had first thought. In fact, I was eighteen weeks, that’s why
I’d felt that little kick. The sonographer squirted cold jelly on to my belly and showed me arms and legs, ears, nose and eyes. She was even able to tell us that we were expecting a boy.
As Yusuf chatted away to her, I stared at the image and felt hot, fat tears rolling down my cheeks, because right there, on that screen, everything became real to me. The life inside me already
needed me to be a mum, and in that instant I saw the future, rather than the past, and I knew that to move forward into it I needed to forgive my own mother. I needed to be filled with love, not
anger; with tenderness, not bitterness. I needed to put down this sack of resentment that I’d carried around with me since I was cut, the one that weighed so heavily on my shoulders, and I
needed to embrace this new start.