Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks Read Free Book Online Page A

Voice and Vision of the Islamic Republic. Whenever I asked Iranians about this, they would simply laugh or shrug. “Women are supposed to leave the room if their husbands want to watch football,” onefriend said. “Even this government knows there’s a limit. You can ask a country to make many sacrifices, but expecting men to give up watching football would be pushing things too far.”
    The answer, of course, went much deeper. In Muslim societies men’s bodies just weren’t seen as posing the same kind of threat to social stability as women’s. Getting to the truth about hijab was a bit like wearing it: a matter of layers to be stripped away, a piece at a time. In the end, under all the concealing devices—the chador, jalabiya or abaya, the magneh, roosarie or shayla—was the body. And under all the talk about hijab freeing women from commercial or sexual exploitation, all the discussion of hijab’s potency as a political and revolutionary symbol of selfhood, was the body: the dangerous female body that somehow, in Muslim society, had been made to carry the heavy burden of male honor.

Chapter 2
W HOM N O M AN S HALL H AVE
D EFLOWERED B EFORE T HEM
“The whore, and the whoremonger, shall ye scourge with an hundred stripes. And let not compassion towards them prevent you from executing the judgement of God.”
THE KORAN
THE CHAPTER OF THE LIGHT
    T he operating theater was a whitewashed cavern gouged out of an African hillside. In its bleaching light, the patient’s flesh looked like a slab of putty. Reaching wrist-deep into an abdominal incision, the surgeon grasped the woman’s slippery, glistening uterus as if it were the enemy.
    The patient, at forty, was an old woman by the harsh reckoning of this Ethiopian province. She was a survivor of famine, war and the routine violence waged against women by the country’s ancient customs. At the age of eight, she had been held down while her clitoris was scraped away with an unclean knife and the raw flesh sealed with inch-long acacia thorns. On her wedding night, her husband had to use his dagger to slice his way into the jagged cicatrix that had become her genitals. That pain had been the prelude to recurring agonies as she delivered four children through a birth canal choking on its own scar tissue. Here, one in five births ends in the mother’s death.
    That risk, at least, would soon be over. Wrapping her gloved fingers around the woman’s diseased uterus, the surgeon hacked with unexpected force at the last shreds of tissue holding it in place, bracing her foot against the operating table as she tugged the organ free.The smell in the small, rock-walled room was a pungent medley of ether, disinfectant and freshly butchered meat.
    Wielding clamps the wrong shape for pelvic surgery and aged, bent suturing needles, the doctor paused from time to time to wring blood from the swabs packing the patient’s abdomen. “We have a shortage of gauze.” she explained.
    Abrehet Gebrekidan was used to shortages of almost everything, except patients. In 1977 she left her job at Syracuse Medical Center in New York to join a ragtag secessionist movement waging Africa’s longest war. As an obstetrician and gynecologist, she knew her skills would be needed in the mountain hideouts from which her people, the Eritreans, fought Ethiopian annexation from 1962 until the central government fell in 1991.
    When I met her, late in 1989, Dr. Abrehet worked in a hospital whose “wards”—thatched shelters with saline drips hanging from tree branches—rambled for almost three miles through a steep-walled mountain valley. Much of her work had nothing to do with the war. Instead, it involved saving women from the worst consequences of genital mutilation. In Eritrea, girls were subjected to both clito-ridectomy—the excision of the clitoris—and infibulation—the cutting away of the labia and the sealing of the wound to leave only a tiny opening for urination and menstruation. If the