Cut by Hibo Wardere Read Free Book Online Page B

opposite her. I did as she indicated, encouraged by this new and different response from her. I waited for her to speak.
    ‘You’re sixteen now, so I will tell you,’ she said.
    She spoke slowly, as if she too realised the importance of what she was about to share. ‘I was cut, your grandmother was cut, and every mother before her. And your children will be cut
too.’
    I listened intently, ready to absorb her every word.
    ‘We are a family whose girls are known for our virginity. We are clean, and that means we can marry well, and you will stay pure until you get married to your husband.’
    I struggled to digest what she’d said, and so I tried to undo all the words before reordering them into some kind of sense, some kind of an explanation. I waited for her to say more, but
instead she turned back to her sewing. That was it?
    ‘But why was it done?’ I demanded.
    She looked down at her work.
    ‘And why was it so painful? What did that woman take from me?’
    ‘I’ve told you now,’ she said, without looking up. ‘Never ask me again.’
    And with that the conversation was over before it had even begun. That was it – that short exchange of words was all that I had to sate me after all these years. But it served only to make
me hungrier for answers, to leave me with more whys, and each one led to another, and another, and another. I wanted to know why I had been mutilated.
    I remember that day so vividly. How I went over and over everything that my mother had told me. How in class, sitting behind my school desk, I’d chewed my pen almost frantically, trying to
work out what it all meant. At breaktime, I didn’t stand and chat with my friends; all I could think about was trying to fill in the missing gaps. I’d gone through so much pain because
the women in my family had done so before me – that wasn’t an explanation. I had gone through all this suffering for marriage, to stay pure for a man. What did she mean
‘
for
a man’? I looked around at the boys in my class, and wondered why I needed to be pure for them, and why what they thought of me mattered so much. Girls had to be
‘preserved’, subjected to all this pain and disfigurement – to the extent that even basic bodily functions like urinating and menstruating became difficult – all for a
man.
    But I didn’t care what he would think of me, some nameless, faceless man I’d never laid eyes on. I only cared about the body that had been chopped and cut and mutilated. My body.
I’d heard enough tales about girls who had gone into those huts and never come out. I thought about all those girls who, like me, were showered with gifts and food and parties, but whose own
gudnin
hadn’t gone to plan. ‘It was God’s way,’ is how the women put it, discarding their lives with just a few words. And all that, the blood, the flesh, the loss
of life, that was all for a man?
    I thought then of my cousins, and the other girls I’d known who had got married, and I remembered how after their wedding we’d hear whispers that they weren’t sleeping in their
marital bed, but in a hospital one instead. It happened to every single girl without fail. And months later, when they finally returned to visit, they were gaunt and skeletal, all light gone from
their eyes. What had happened to them?
    My cousin Fatima was two years older than me, so we always knew she would get married before me. Fatima was excited, but as our other cousins talked about the engagement party I saw fear in her
too. Of course she wanted to marry – she wanted to have her own home, and a family of her own – but she knew, too, that her wedding would probably be followed by a hospital visit, even
if we didn’t understand why.
    When her wedding celebrations came around she was taken to visit various relatives, who gave her beautiful-smelling treatments to smooth her hair and lighten her face, and drew delicate henna
designs on her fingers. The day before the ceremony we sat