A Woman of Firsts - Edna Adan Ismail

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rebellious kid had gone for ever. In her place was a frightened little girl who was instructed not to talk about what had happened, which only made me more aloof. While my friends of both genders were playing and singing, laughing and joking, I felt so different. Every time I walked, sneezed or coughed, I remembered the warning that filled me with dread: ‘We will have to do it again.’

      My grandmother Clara had always been such a comfort and an ally to me, so I longed to see her and have her hold and reassure me, but she was in Borama. By the time she came to visit, my wound had healed and I was already indoctrinated into never speaking about what had happened to me. Later I came to understand that Clara too would have considered my mutilation to be completely normal. From that day on, I regarded all the women in my family with something akin to suspicion, even contempt. They had conspired against me, lied, and disfigured me permanently. How could I ever forgive them?

       ***

      I have never written or spoken about my own experience with female circumcision in any detail before. It isn’t easy, but it is time because this mutilating trauma has to stop. Every Somali woman has to live with the memory and then with the physical consequences. It remains with you for life.

      Of course the wound heals and gradually you learn to behave normally again. Eventually even the fear that something might happen to undo it subsides. But it takes years to trust people again, or to grow accustomed to the new way of living and urinating. Many teenagers suffer frequent infections and pain. Some even need surgery while menstruating because of blockages, and this has to be done in a certain way and then be certified to prove that the girl’s virginity is still intact or she and her family will be dishonoured.

      I knew what had been done to me was wrong, but I had no idea what to do about it. Almost every female I knew had gone through the same experience, and virtually everyone younger than me was going to have it done. It took me decades to pluck up the courage to ask questions about the practice, and many more years before I decided to speak out against it.

      I wanted to know where and how it started and was astonished to discover that this paganistic ritual pre-dates Islam and Christianity, going back to the fifth century BC and the time of the Pharaohs. In some countries, it is still referred to as ‘Pharaonic circumcision’.

      The River Nile is the lifeblood of Egypt and the story goes that the god of the river was considered to be the most powerful, and had to be appeased. The most beautiful virgins were chosen for sacrifice and thrown into the river to drown. It was considered an honour to the family of a girl to be so favoured by the Pharaoh in order to ensure the survival of her people and the punishment for refusal was severe. If the river ever dried out or flooded the fields then it was presumed that the girl chosen hadn’t been a true virgin, which had somehow angered the god. To ensure that all future ‘gifts’ would be appropriate, girls were circumcised and sutured and taken to the temples to be guarded by eunuchs until it was time for them to be killed. In time, the practice was adopted as an initiation ceremony by most of the people who lived along the Blue Nile, which rises in Ethiopia and flows north to Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea, joining the White Nile from Burundi. The custom travelled across the equatorial belt through the Nubian tribe to the Ethiopians, the Sudanese, the Somalis, and sixteen other countries in Africa as well as a few in Asia. Female circumcision is largely an accident of geography.

      Later, slave traders adopted its use to keep their female ‘goods’ from getting pregnant (they also earned more money for virgins), and nomadic herders also accepted the tradition for population control or to ‘protect’ their women from rape. It is still widely practised by African Muslims, as well as non-Muslims, west of the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea, as far south as parts of Kenya and Tanzania. In some instances it is the local blacksmith who performs the cutting rather than a birth attendant. Nations on the other side of those two seas don’t do it at all, or only so that it sheds a symbolic drop of blood. In truth, it is not a religious obligation required by any faith, but primarily a cultural tradition from a time when people believed in river gods.

      Thanks to ignorance and fear, female circumcision is now a widespread practice that is still carried out on an estimated three million girls between the age of five and ten every year. In my country it is estimated that the most severe form, as practised on me, affects 76 per cent of the female population, a trend that is down from the 100 per cent of my youth and the 98 per cent prevalence we found two decades ago. Because of migration, the practice is also emerging among the refugee communities of Europe and North America, and British hospitals currently treat around 9,000 cases every year.

      For now I want to send comforting thoughts to the terrified eight-year-old me who was so bewildered and confused by the heinous thing that was done to her that she still weeps at the cruelty of it.

       ***

      When I returned to Djibouti City at the end of that summer I could tell from the look in my Aunt Cecilia’s eyes that she knew what had been done to me. Not that she said anything – not even ‘sorry’. As I was fast learning, to say nothing about FGM is the considered wisdom among my people.

      It was years before I realized that my mother and aunt, as Somali girls from a highly respected family, were also cut but would have been spared the most radical infibulation like mine, and that in French Somaliland Cecilia was free of the social and cultural pressure to have her own daughters ‘cleansed’. Rita, Madeleine and Gracie were all untouched, so I was the first daughter of my generation affected. My sister Asha was born in 1948 while I was away at school, and I hoped she would be spared. No such luck.

      I now know that families are very often shamed into it, with friends and relatives warning them that their daughters will be spinsters because ‘Any husband would expect it.’ This is what happened to my mother, who had married young and moved to an environment very different to her childhood. She desperately wanted to fit in and be seen as a good Muslim wife who’d done the right thing for me. As the eldest child of Adan Doctor I had to be of impeccable moral standing.

      The pressure to conform doesn’t only come from adults. Children pick up on the language and often tell an ‘uncut’ girl, ‘Keep away from me. Mummy says you still have your shame. You’re not halal.’ Without even knowing what the procedure involves, girls beg to be ‘cleansed’ so that they can be just like their friends. It is a mystery to them but a natural response from innocents who also want to fit in. And as in every country where female circumcision is practised, religion plays no part because it happens to all girls, be they Christian, Muslim or from a pagan background. There is little chance of escape.

       Djibouti City, French Somaliland, 1947

      Settling back into my parallel life in a place far from home was all part of the healing process and I embraced my schooling with new fervour. I was there from 1946–1952 and I loved every minute, even though I had the bittersweet knowledge that when I returned to Somaliland my education couldn’t be continued.

      My brother Farah, who I hardly knew but who joined me at my Aunt Cecilia’s when he was eight years old, became my daily companion as we held hands each morning waiting for the school bus. He also embraced our new life in French Somaliland and, in time, we became very close.

      We still went back home each summer, spending time with my parents and then holidaying with my grandparents in the country. As soon as school broke up, Farah and I would be driven from Djibouti City to wherever Dad was working, a journey of three or four days. He was usually too busy to pick us up himself, so would send a relative who might also collect other children. For us the journey was the greatest excitement of all, as we passed trees festooned with goats nibbling at the branches, as well as camel herds and donkey caravans in every kind of landscape. One trip home took nine days because of heavy rains. A distant aunt had secured us seats in a truck heavily laden with commercial goods that then became stuck in the mud. There were no phones or other cars on the road to ask for help, so everyone had to help dig it out. Our family knew we were en route but when we didn’t show up as expected they were very worried.

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