Faduma Ali, 86, still remembers the pain of being circumcised
at eight. Horrific as it was, she allowed her own daughters to go
through the same ordeal. But when it came to her granddaughters, she
decided to step in and stop it
By Homa Khaleeli
“As
a little girl I would go looking for the cutters and ask them when it
was my turn,” Faduma Ali says. “I thought it was exciting. I wish I had
known then what I know now.”
It’s almost eight decades since Faduma underwent
female genital mutilation (FGM), sometimes known as female circumcision, in
Somalia.
Today, sitting in her daughter’s lounge in north London, she says it
has left her with a lifetime of pain and medical problems. Yet despite
her own agony she felt powerless to resist the societal pressure driving
the tradition, and insisted her own daughters have it done too.
But
when her granddaughters faced the same fate, she knew something had to
change. And as an older woman, her voice carried more weight. Faduma
told her daughter not to let her granddaughters be cut. “Women can
eradicate this,” she says. “Mothers are responsible for refusing the
practice.”
Campaigners say that a tangled mix of
family pressure,
cultural traditions and religious motivations make FGM – illegal for
almost 30 years in the UK – hard to eradicate. It has been documented in
28 countries in Africa and in a few countries in Asia and the Middle
East.
The practice involves removing all or part of the external female
genitalia (including the clitoris, labia minora and labia majora – and
in some cases the narrowing of the vagina), and is usually carried out
before the age of 15. As well as the risk of bleeding to death or
infection, a terrifying array of physical and psychological problems can
follow.
Today 30,000 girls in the UK are said to be at risk of
this form of mutilation, while 66,000 live with the consequences of it.
Yet no one has ever been prosecuted for carrying out or abetting the
practice (which carries a maximum prison sentence of 14 years).
This,
say campaigners, is because children are unwilling to speak out against
their families and communities and that is why Faduma, along with her
daughter, Lul Musse, and granddaughter, Samira Hashi, have agreed to
explain how – even in a loving and close-knit family such as theirs –
such a custom can be perpetuated.
Samira, 22, is translating for
her grandmother, who explains that growing up in the suburbs of Galkayo,
a city in south Somalia, being “cut” was not just something she looked
forward to, but insisted upon. “Everyone had it done,” says Faduma, 86.
“If you didn’t, you were shunned. I saw it as something exciting.”
She
was under no illusions about how painful it could be, however. “I saw
it being carried out – most girls would try and run away. But it was
part of our way of life. My grandmother and mother had had it done, so
it seemed natural.”
Faduma’s father, who was in the Somali
military, was not convinced. “He had a city attitude because of his
travels,” says Faduma. He told her grandmother, with whom Faduma lived,
that she was not to be cut. But Faduma convinced her grandmother to take
her while he was away.
The cutter had no medical qualifications
and performed the operation in the open air, without sterilisation or
pain relief. Faduma was eight.
“There were four of us,” Faduma recalls. “But because I was the bravest I was told to go first.
“My
grandmother and the other girls’ mothers held me down and the woman cut
me with a knife. It’s like someone is cutting your finger off without
pain relief. My blood was shooting into her face and eyes.”
Next,
the wound and her vagina were sewn up, leaving her a hole the size of a
match head through which to pass urine and menstrual blood. With no
medical equipment, three thorns were used in place of stitches. Yet her
ordeal was far from over.
“They
gave you milk and waited to see if you could urinate,” she recalls. “If
not, they cut you open a little more. For two weeks it is agony.”
Afterwards,
she says, she boasted to her friends she had been cut, but never
realised it would have such severe complications. “The minute you have
it done you have problems,” she says. “When you have your period, it is
very painful and when you have children it is very painful.”
Female
genital mutilation, says Faduma, was intended to guarantee virginity
before marriage by ensuring sex would be frightening and painful for
girls. Giving birth, however, was nothing short of torture. Faduma had
10 children, but her first labour lasted five days with midwives forced
to “cut me everywhere” to get the baby out.
Yet when her daughters
turned seven, Faduma could not shun the custom. “Without it, my
daughters would not have been allowed to marry,” she says. “There was
not a girl in sight who hadn’t had it done.”
Now 52, Lul agrees:
“You couldn’t go to school without it, or people would laugh at you,”
she recalls. Her operation was in a hospital under anaesthetic, aged
seven. “I tried to run from the operating table, but my mum and her
friend held me down.”
The operation, she says, had a devastating
effect on her life and affected her marriage. “When you have sex it is
very painful and you don’t feel any pleasure. You will never enjoy sex.”
Giving
birth was excruciating and complicated for Lul. Yet, amazingly, this
did not affect her decision to have her own daughters cut. But her
mother stepped in. “I was sick of it,” Faduma says, firmly. “Times had
changed. Women were freer and had more power.”
She told her
daughter not to do it. Yet Lul says she would have rebelled had they
stayed in Somalia. “I would have done it even though my mother said no.
All men wanted circumcision. If your daughters weren’t cut they would
say they are like hookers.”
She believes it is up to men to take a
stand. “This has to be a man’s campaign. Until men say stop, that this
is not part of our religion and not part of our culture, it will still
go on.”
For Samira, the very idea of this kind of mutilation is
incomprehensible. Brought up in London, she was working as a model when
she was approached by BBC3 to present a
documentary about Somalia.
Visiting the war-torn country, she met women who planned to have their
daughters cut and saw a six-year-old girl who had been recently
subjected to FGM. “I just didn’t understand how a mother who had gone
through this pain could have it done to her children. I don’t blame the
women, I blame the society that doesn’t stop it.”
Since the film came out last year, Samira has been touring schools with
Save the Children to
highlight issues facing Somalia. “One thing I have learned is that
while people may say we are moving on, it still continues.”
Although
Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities carry out FGM, mainstream
spiritual leaders from all three religions have denied that the practice
stems from religion. Samira believes the desire to control women’s
sexuality lies behind it.
“I think women here are scared their
daughters will become too westernised and not get married – that they
will have boyfriends and go out, and this is why they have it done.”
Yet
the subject, she says, is rarely discussed. “I go into schools with a
high number of Somali girls, and they always seem shocked that it is
part of our history and culture. We need women to talk about their
experiences, men to talk about their marital experiences, clerics to
explain it is not linked to religion and doctors to talk about the
problems it causes. Then things will change – when we discuss what FGM
is really doing.”
Source: The Guardian
