Authors: Hibo Wardere
The women cooked all day while I played outside with my cousins, an endless supply of tantalising treats streaming from the stove. ‘Eat whatever you want,’ Hoyo told me, her arms
resting on my bony shoulders. ‘No one will stop you today.’
‘Anything?’ I said, my eyes lighting up on behalf of my belly.
Hoyo nodded and laughed.
The benches were laden with plates of sugary
halwa
, all kinds of pasta and rice, sweet pieces of goat, camel and sheep –
odka
– and my favourite soft biscuits,
icun
. No table in Somalia is complete without banana, but today there was papaya and coconut, and fresh-squeezed glasses of passion fruit. The men came and went, leaving the women to their
business, tapping the top of my head and mumbling ‘
mashallah
’ – ‘God has willed it’ – between mouthfuls, on their way back to work or to prayer. I kept
expecting to hear my older sister Hadsan chastising me each time I took something from the kitchen. Ten years older than me, she shared a room with my older cousins. Hadsan lived in another part of
the house and now she was a teenager my mother had taught her to apply make-up. She was beautiful; her skin was much paler than mine and everyone who came to the house would comment on how pretty
she was. My cousins and I were the little rascals, and Hadsan spent her days checking up on us, telling our mothers if she caught us stealing food from the kitchen, or leaving it uncovered for the
flies to tiptoe across with their dirty feet. I wasn’t close to my sister because of the age gap; in fact, I only really heard her voice when she was telling me off about something, but not
on that day. For my
gudnin
, I could do nothing wrong. My older brother, Abdi, was eight then, and like my sister slept in another part of the house and sat with the men in the evening. We
never mixed with the boys, not even our own brothers, although sometimes we ate alongside them as they gobbled hungry mouthfuls, shovelling the food in with their fingers, eager to get back to
their game of football. That day, though, the boys were in their element as they ran into the villa to refuel on all the sweet treats laid out on the tables. Like the men, they didn’t say
anything about my
gudnin
, they just took the food. Mealtimes were when I would have the opportunity to see my father, not every day but on special occasions, and especially at Eid. I would
sit alongside him, mesmerised by his long beard and particularly fascinated by the food that got stuck on to each wiry black part of it. He always looked like a kind man to me; he’d pat my
head and say ‘hello’. He wore a bright white
imama
turban and every time he sat beside me I’d stare at the dazzling whiteness of it, wondering how my mother kept it
clean. That day he came in and out of the house with the other men, but unlike the women, none of them told me I was brave, or that I was about to become a big girl. They weren’t wearing
bright, happy smiles like the women; they just came for the food.
And there were presents that day, so many presents! Beautifully embroidered dresses, a red-and-yellow one with matching shoes, others in bright blues and greens and pinks. And they were all for
me. And for Hoyo there were congratulations, which lit up her face as each new arrival rushed to say well done to her. More than a few commented that it was ‘about time’, to which she
would dip her eyes to the floor and say that I was still so skinny for my age, and that she had needed time to fatten me up.
Today I was the star of the show. It was my head that everyone wanted to pat, my cheeks that everyone wanted to kiss, me who was going to be a big girl – me they told to be brave, as I
rushed past their legs on the way back out to play in the yard. It was the happiest of days.
The following morning I was allowed to stay home with Hoyo while my cousins went off to school. Today she wanted me at her side. The food that we’d enjoyed the day before
still sat heavy in my tummy, and yet Hoyo cooked up an enormous lunch for the remaining guests. ‘Eat,’ she insisted, spooning more on to my plate, which I ate with my fingers.
The house was quieter now; a calmness had descended after the exhilaration of the previous day’s party. All we did was eat and pray, and then eat some more. I’d kneel beside my
mother on the
sali
and copy her as she reached forward to the ground, whispering the
salat
. And I noticed an extra prayer was added that day: ‘Hopefully, Allah, things will
go right for Hibo.’ I whispered the same words myself, not knowing what they might mean.
As the sun beat down hot rays on the terracotta tiles of our roof, we sat together indoors, the windows wide open and the curtains whispering at them. There we dozed until the sound of my
cousins coming home from school woke us from our slumber, and then the celebrations continued. Hoyo was happy and my tummy was full to bursting, and I felt more loved than I ever had in my whole
life.
4
T
error ripped through my body in a shattering wave, as my lungs struggled under the weight of the arms that crushed them; as my legs were
forced into excruciating angles; as the cutter gripped her dirty razor and flicked the skin between my legs as she muttered ‘In the name of God almighty’ through her tight thin lips; as
my mother turned her face away from me.
And that was more frightening than anything else – the fact that this person, who had bathed me so gently just moments ago, was abandoning me now, when I needed her the most.
‘Hoyo!’ I screamed again. ‘Hoyo, Hoyo, HOYO!’
But even if she had moved now, opened her mouth to speak, to save me, to tell them to stop, it was already too late by then. Everything was underway.
‘Open her legs wider,’ the cutter ordered the women who were holding my legs. Then, with those long pincer nails, she dug between my legs and grasped my clitoris, my
kintir
.
She pulled on it until it burned and for a second, as my eyes widened in horror, I thought she was going to pull it clean from my body with her fingers, or at least that those sharp nails might rip
their way through my delicate skin.
But she had something far worse planned.
She lifted up that dirty razor, the one that still had the dried brown residue of others’ blood clinging to it, like filthy reminders of her previous work, and she cut straight through my
flesh.
The pain shot through me like a bullet. I felt as if someone had taken me and dropped me into bright-orange molten lava. From head to toe the pain burned, searing the backs of my eyes and
exploding in my brain.
I screamed then. An almost inhuman scream, a sound I hadn’t known I was capable of making.
‘Hoyo!’ I cried, as I tried to shake her, wake her, make her hear my pleas. She didn’t flinch; instead, she reached for her scarf and gathered more of it up under her chin, as
if to protect herself from the horror. Her ears, beneath that
hijab
, deaf to my screams.
It was the cutter’s cold voice I heard in reply.
‘There’s still some left,’ she said.
And she cut again, and again, and again.
With each slice of her razor she took more and more of my flesh. There was no time for my brain to process what was happening between my legs. I was a piece of meat on a butcher’s board
that the cutter was trimming bits of fat off. I was not a child, not a soul, not a six-year-old begging for help.
She picked up a cloth and dabbed it between my legs; each time she took it away, I saw that more and more of it was soaked in red. I could smell my blood by now, the sickly metal tang of it
filling the small hut that we were crammed into. The pain continued, each hack into my flesh seeming to hit a new place and every nerve ending screaming in agony.
I knew in that moment that this wasn’t humane, to make me suffer like this; we would never have let one of our animals suffer in this way, we would put even a goat or a sheep out of its
misery sooner than let it experience this pain. On and on it went, and then further, as she parted my vaginal lips and hacked away at more flesh inside. Everything was on fire, and all I could do
was scream.
Finally, the cutter snapped. ‘I can’t concentrate!’ she barked at my mother. ‘She is making too much noise. I’ve done many, many girls, none of them screamed like
her. What’s wrong with her? Get her to be quiet!’
It was then, for the first time since we entered the hut, that Hoyo spoke. Not in response to her daughter’s pitiful cries, but in collusion with the cutter who was torturing her youngest
child.
‘Hibo, stop screaming!’ she said quickly. ‘The girls will hear you, you will be called a coward. Stop screaming.’
Her words hurt more than anything this cutter was doing to me. Her betrayal was absolute.
I was drowning in a raging river of pain and I couldn’t swim free. I didn’t want to drown, I wouldn’t drown! I would stay afloat, and the only way I could do that was to allow
it to take me. And so I surrendered to the cutter, I surrendered to the pain.
After she finished slicing at my inner labia, she then moved on to my outer ones. The sounds that were coming from me now were involuntary, subconscious, a whimpering, a keening that I had no
control over.
The cutter hacked away, my mother watched on, my auntie held me down.
By the time the cutter put down her razor my body had taken over. I was shaking so much with shock, my teeth chattering – shivering even in 36-degree heat. I opened my eyes for a moment,
thinking at last the attack had come to an end. Instead the cutter said, ‘Hold her tight, this is the important bit.’
Through eyes blurred with tears I saw an acacia thorn in her hand, and into it she was weaving a thick thread. This thorn was not fine like the needles I saw my mother making our clothes with;
it was thick. And feeling the pressure return to my chest and legs, the cutter started to push the thorn through the raw flesh that remained of me, to sew together what was left. With each
agonising stitch she sat back and admired her work before finally putting the thorn down and congratulating herself. ‘Good, I’ve sealed it properly.’
I was exhausted, dizzy despite the fact I was lying down. Now the four women wrapped me from hip to toe in bandages, mummifying me from the waist down, and tying threads tightly at my hips, my
knees and my ankles. I must have had the look of a blood-soaked mermaid. Slowly they lifted me just a few inches, flat on my back, from the crinkly mat on to a mattress beside it. As they did, my
head fell to my left and my eyes caught sight of the cloth, dyed scarlet by my blood. There was something else beside it: a gooey, pinky pile of flesh. I closed my eyes; I couldn’t look at
what they’d taken from me.
My body leapt and bounced its protest, the shock finally sinking into every nerve and making its objection in jerky, uncontrollable movements.
‘If you don’t hold her down, the thread will come out and I will have to do it again,’ I heard the far-off voice of the cutter say.
The fear would normally have kept me stock still, but my body was out of my control.
‘Hold it Hibo, be brave,’ my auntie said.
That word again – brave. The implication that I’d had some choice, that my mind might have been able to control itself, that I could have reacted differently to their butchering of
me, that I might not have screamed as I was hacked at – if only I’d been brave enough.
All the women left the hut then, and I lay there alone, my body racked with pain. I heard them on the other side of the canvas, paying the cutter, saying goodbye.
Thanking
her.
Back inside the hut, I stared up at a tiny glint of sky that peeked through the thick canvas, a light blue now. My neighbours, my cousins would be waking up to a new day, going about their lives
as normal. The children would be going to school, the men to work; the women would be busying themselves in the kitchen. But my life had changed forever. Something else had been severed along with
the skin from my body, intangible but nevertheless real. This woman who claimed to be my mother was a fake and a fraud – she looked like my mother, she smelt like her, she sounded like her,
but she wasn’t my mother anymore. When she abandoned me in this hut, she abandoned me in this world. She was to become the object of my hate.
My brain was shattered, my screams all used up; even my eyes were too exhausted for tears to flow. They knew there was no point in trying to wash away the hurt and so instead they closed and I
fell into sleep, desperate to escape this living nightmare.
5
I
don’t know how long I slept, only that the sun was high in the sky when I woke and the hut offered me some shade from it out in
the back of the yard, among the trees. The air was sticky with the scent of stale blood, and I heard flies buzzing above the canvas, the
loovan
that burned on the dish of charcoal keeping
them away from me as I lay paralysed with pain. Instinctively, I pulled my arms up across my chest, linking my fingers and clasping them tightly over my breastbone, a sad little gesture; perhaps I
was trying to protect myself, perhaps to comfort myself. The first thing that entered my fragmented mind was, of course, the pain. Everything from the waist down still burned like it was on fire,
engulfing me, spreading out to my arms, my chest and finally banging at my temples.
The women must have been checking on me regularly, because I hadn’t been awake for more than ten minutes before the canvas door opened and my aunt came in with a bottle of fizzy orange and
a straw. She lifted my head just slightly from the mattress, and I winced even to be touched, even for my body to be moved a few millimetres.
‘Just take two sips,’ my auntie said.
I did as I was told and she left without saying another word. I was glad – I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I didn’t so much as try. My voice had been snatched by the horror of
that morning, and even if I had wanted to speak, I’m not sure what I would have said. I didn’t want to see anyone. Who would be there for me now anyway, when the women I trusted more
than anyone else in the world had been party to such cruelty towards me? As I lay there under the canvas, the tears started. They kept on coming, I couldn’t stop them, and I was in too much
agony even to lift my hands to wipe them away. Who would wipe them away for me now? I had no one.