Coming from a household of two different religions was an interesting experience for a child. My father was very religious and at every call to prayer he would stop what he was doing to kneel on his mat. He also attended the mosque every Friday and, as a family, we marked Ramadan and Eid.
My grandparents – and occasionally my mother – would go to mass, sing hymns and receive a blessing from the priest, and we also celebrated Christmas and Easter, showing respect for all. Then for the Islamic feasts the cook Ali would slaughter a sheep and people would come to our house to help break the fast. My father was always extremely generous to those who had less than us and usually invited six or seven poor families to take away packages of meat, dates and bread – food many of them came to rely on.
One day when we were expecting guests for lunch, I came upon Ali about to carve up my pet goat Orggi, which he’d already caught and slaughtered. When I became hysterical and tried to stop him, he told me that my kid was to be cooked for the feast. I was eventually pulled away from the scene kicking and screaming, but continued to howl until Dad came home. ‘They killed my friend and are going to feed him to the guests!’ I wailed. Goodness alone knows what he thought. In spite of his attempts to comfort me, I couldn’t understand how Dad could allow them do such a thing to my playmate. I never got over it.
Even though my father worked every day and stayed late, people who needed him out of hours would still seek him out, so there was often someone knocking at the door with a problem. No matter if he was hungry and about to put a spoon to his mouth, if someone called he’d put it down, rise from his chair and tend to their needs. My mother hated that. She often claimed that the hospital was his first wife and that he spent more time there than with us. ‘Where are you running off to again? Why even bother to come home?’ she’d say, or ask, ‘Why do you have to do this? Why can’t someone else do it?’ She considered the patients who called at our house trespassers on our privacy and complained bitterly that this was our home, not a hospital. ‘Besides, what if one of them brings disease into our house?’ she’d cry, exasperated.
Dad never argued with her and tried to explain that people couldn’t help it if they got sick at all times of the day and night. He was passionate about his work and he loved to be needed. With an open face and an open heart, smiling and happy, he’d never turn someone away or tell them, ‘I’m too busy, come and see me tomorrow.’ Instead, he’d sit and listen to their problems. My father was just as generous with his money. There were so many people on his list of charitable donations each month that he must surely have lost count. People I thought were relatives often turned out to be the orphans of a school friend or the wife of a football teammate who was on hard times whose bills were being paid for by Dad.
Everyone assumed he was extremely wealthy, which only led to more name calling by some of the kids in my neighborhood, who’d say, ‘Why do you want to play with us, rich girl?’ I remember running home to ask my mother what their insult meant. She explained that we weren’t as poor as many others, adding somewhat bitterly that we’d be even richer if my father wasn’t quite so generous with our money.
In the same magnanimous way, Dad decided to help improve the education of some local boys and our younger male cousins by hiring a teacher to come to our house every afternoon, except Friday. These boys already attended the local school – forbidden for girls – but the teaching there was limited and Dad hoped to expand their horizons. He paid for a blackboard, chalk and textbooks, and set everything up on our verandah where the pupils squatted on the cement floor with their books on their knees. Many of them were the boys I tagged along with, including Hassan Kayd, so whenever they stopped kicking an old tennis ball around in the dust to hurry to lessons at my house, I would follow. I think now that this was my father’s intention all along.
It was for me to choose whether to carry on playing outside or be curious enough to see what the boys were doing. He knew I had an enquiring mind and hoped that this would pull me in the right direction. So, from the age of six or seven I’d sit on the edge of the verandah listening in or writing out my alphabet as I learned English, how to do calculations, and discovered a bit more about the world. The teacher never told me that I couldn’t be there, but if I ever tried to answer a question he’d shush me and tell me not to interfere. I knew my place; I was allowed to stay because it was my father’s house but I couldn’t take part – even if I knew more of the answers than the rest. My mother didn’t mind me joining in either because it meant a couple of hours’ peace, and stopped me from running wild in the streets.
Those lessons were such a revelation to me. In a colonial region where people spoke and wrote in either Arabic, English, Italian or French, we Somalis didn’t yet have a written language of our own, just an oral one. It seemed like magic then that I could put letters from the English alphabet together to make a word, and then words together to make a sentence. Newly inspired, I’d pick up a book from my father’s bookcase and flick through the pages looking for a ‘T’ or an ‘S’ and then – oh my gosh – there they were! Every day brought a new discovery and I remember the moment I spelled out the word for cat, and was so excited because I had one of those. Reading opened up the miracle of forming something meaningful in my head. I’d always spoken a little English, but now I was able to decipher the mysteries of the alphabet and the secret language between my parents.
‘Could you leave me some M-O-N-E-Y before you go?’ Mum would ask my dad, and I could finally understand what she was asking for. Enthused with my newfound knowledge, I began to read my mother’s Illustrated London News, Woman, and Woman’s Own magazines, which had to be read with the greatest care and passed on unspoiled to the next woman whose name was listed on the cover. I loved those 1940s magazines with their Western fashions, hats and colourful clothes. The lives they depicted seemed like a million miles away from my own in hot, dusty Somaliland.
I wanted to read everything I could after that. I still do. My brain was hungry for knowledge and information. I needed to feed that hunger and when my parents saw me staring intently at the pages of a book, they asked what I was doing. ‘Reading, of course,’ I replied.
‘Let’s see what you’re reading,’ my father said, thinking I was just pretending but, to his amazement, he found that I was reading and learning to pronounce new words. There then began an ongoing family discussion about what to do with a girl who was teaching herself to read in a country where there were no schools for girls. Both my parents had been educated and recognized my yearning. After much debate, they decided to send me to a mission school. I think my mother hoped that the discipline would be the making of me, while my father hoped it would open the door to higher education and eventually nursing. Little did he know.
***
Djibouti City was four hundred kilometres away from Hargeisa, but it was the natural choice for my schooling rather than Aden because I could lodge with my Aunt Cecilia. Her businessman husband had been killed several years earlier in a road accident while she was pregnant with her fourth child. When the shipment he was transporting to Ethiopia was looted after the accident, she lost the income from it too. Widowed and penniless, she never remarried and single-handedly raised all her children – Rita, Sonny, Tony and Madeleine who were older than me but familiar from family visits.
The first I knew that I was going to be educated was when my parents asked me if I’d like to go home with my cousins after their summer holiday that year. It must have been 1945, and although the war was still going on elsewhere, our corner of Africa was safe.
‘Really?’ I asked, astonished.
‘Yes, really,’ my father confirmed. ‘Well, you want to go to school, don’t you?’
This momentous event happened in my eighth year, which proved to be the most significant of my entire life. Going to a proper school for the first time felt like such a milestone. I had never been out of Somaliland, so from the moment I left my eyes were like saucers at the wonder of it all. To make ends meet, Aunt Cecilia worked as a dressmaker and a teacher in a domestic science school. For extra income, she took me in and, later, my brother Farah. She also homed my cousins Gracie and her brother Maurice – the motherless children of an uncle whose wife had died in childbirth – all of us sharing one large apartment that was permanently filled with music, chatter and noise. My aunt was a most resourceful woman and another powerful role model. She had the energy of twenty horses and her determination helped shape me.
Cecilia ran our lives like a military operation. Speaking only English and French so that I’d learn my two new languages quickly, she paired me up with the older kids to do chores such as polish our shoes and make our own beds. We sat at the big table in the living room to do our homework after school, and in the evenings we learned how to crochet or knit by the light of Tilley lamps. If we wanted her to make us something to wear then we had to hem it ourselves, sew the buttons on, and fold it neatly for her – or there would be no garment. My mother never taught me things like that, so I didn’t take to everything at first but soon got the hang of it.
My first day at the École de la Nativité run by Franciscan nuns in white habits was overwhelming chiefly because it was full of white kids, and most of them boys. I had only ever seen one or two white people before – men who sometimes worked with Dad – but I don’t think I’d ever seen white children. There must have been over a hundred pupils in the school – French, Somali, American, Italian, Greek, Jewish, Armenian, Ethiopian, and a few Arabs from Yemen. I was the only girl from Somaliland. Boys and girls sat together in the same class, a fact that further inflamed my relatives back in Somaliland who considered this lack of segregation scandalous. My mother Marian, already the target of their criticism, could only sigh and blame my father once more. How she must have longed for a ‘normal’ daughter who’d stay home, learn to cook, marry young and produce a healthy brood of grandchildren.
There was so much to take in at the École and my brain was like a sponge, soaking up everything. My cousin Madeleine, who was four years my senior (and my childhood heroine), attended the same school, so I didn’t have to face it alone. The hardest thing to deal with was that overnight my world suddenly became French and I learned about Napoleon, Jeanne d’Arc, the three Louis’ and Charlemagne in a language that was foreign to me. I studied the geography of France, recited the prayers of the French catechism and learned more about Islam. I was taught respect for all beings, all faiths. After a faltering start, I did well enough to jump up a year in my class and then again.
Life in Djibouti City opened up a whole new world to me. I couldn’t wait to start my day and learn something new; I wanted to experience all that life had to offer. I was forever running around with loads of energy and few, if any, inhibitions. The nuns, each known as Sister (or in French Soeur) were all very different. I met one of them, Marie Thérèse who taught us maths and became Mother Superior, again in 1991 and asked if she remembered me. She grimaced, ‘Of course, Edna – you were toujours turbulente!’
Little did she know just how turbulent I would become.
CHAPTER THREE
Hargeisa, British Somaliland, 1946
The summer of 1946 marked my first visit home after living in French Somaliland for one year. I was still only eight years old and little did I know that this would be the year that my life changed for ever. It felt good to be home as I had missed my grandmothers and my father especially. I couldn’t wait to tell Dad my news and share all that I’d learned in school.
The strangest thing about being back was that I had a new perspective. My time in a French-run co-educational and largely secular environment had shown me that girls could participate in life as fully as boys, so to return to a place that put so many constraints on my gender felt all the more difficult to accept. None of the local girls I’d left behind were ever seen outside their homes and only the boys seemed to have any freedom – or fun. The camels had more freedom than we did.
When I was growing up I’d noticed something else unusual about the girls in our district. There was a mysterious event that made them disappear for a month or so and when they returned they were different – far more subdued and not participating as much as they’d done before. I thought that maybe they’d been ill and slow to recover, or that their mothers had warned them to behave in a more adult manner. Usually I was too busy playing with the boys to worry too much about why any one girl was acting strangely.
Circumcision for boys was an accepted part of our society, although I had little or no understanding of it. We’d often see the boys walk around gingerly afterwards in their lunghis or long overshirts, carefully holding the cloth away from their groins. As I had no knowledge of the human anatomy, periods or anything like that I didn’t associate what had happened to them with their genitals. In any event, it was an unwritten rule in our society that we never discussed such matters. We girls were especially ignorant and blind so, despite being an inquisitive child, I knew nothing of the traditional rites and rituals because all that was one big secret.
One day that summer, I found myself alone in the house with my mother. My brother was in Borama visiting our grandparents and Dad was out of town visiting the nomads for a few days. These were people who’d often never seen a doctor in their lives and managed any health problems as best they could or with the ministrations of traditional herbalists, bone-setters and spiritual healers. The sick often fell prey to quack ‘pharmacists’ who sold them anything from pills to ward off the evil eye or an injection with something that could potentially be fatal. Whenever my father returned from these trips he’d be exhausted.
That particular morning after he’d left I awoke to find our house bustling with unusual commotion. For some reason, several women – cousins, neighbours, and relatives I called ‘aunts’ – had dropped in to talk with my mother and my Grandmother Baada. There was much hushed chatter and conversations clearly not meant for my ears. ‘Why don’t you go play outside?’ Mum said when she caught me trying to listen in, and – although surprised – I was more than happy to oblige.
Early the following morning, one of my mother’s friends turned up at the house with a strange old woman I’d never seen before, and a fattened sheep. These were only ever brought to the house for feast days and, as far as I knew, this wasn’t one of them, so I was even more mystified. Odder still, Mum told me to take a shower, after which I assumed I’d be expected to put on my best clothes. ‘No, no. Wear a clean nightdress,’ she instructed. How peculiar, I thought. Equally strange, my bed was pushed into a corner of my bedroom and a mat laid on the floor. Someone placed a stool in the corridor and when I emerged from the shower room I found a group of women standing around it waiting for me. Smiling shyly at them, I wondered what was happening and then I realized with a pang of hunger that no one had prepared me any breakfast that morning.
No sooner had I sat down on the stool as instructed than mother’s friends grabbed my arms while others yanked up my nightie, grabbed my legs and pulled them apart. One woman gripped my left leg and another my right, while a third held me in a stranglehold, pressing me down firmly by my shoulders. In a well-planned operation that relied on speed and surprise, I spotted a knife glinting in the morning light streaming through the window and screamed as the old woman squatted before me and started cutting between my legs.
I can still remember the pain more than seven decades later, and I live that moment over and over again each time I think about it. I could feel the knife slashing through the sensitive flesh of my private parts and the stickiness of my blood as I screamed and struggled. My mother and grandmother watched my ordeal but neither came to my rescue. They just stood there, ululating joyfully as they witnessed what we now call FGM, female genital mutilation – a barbaric, ritualistic circumcision far more common than vaccination in my country – designed to act as a human chastity belt until the night of my marriage.
I must have passed out because I can remember waking up physically and emotionally exhausted. I had no more fight left in me. There was a horrible wheezing sound coming from my throat. The next thing I knew, the old woman was stitching together my wound with acacia thorns, pulling them together with string like a shoelace. The pain was excruciating. In what felt like a living nightmare, my legs were then bound all the way up to the thighs and hips. The women then lifted me onto the disposable mat that would soak up my blood and had been laid on my bedroom floor for this purpose. It had been so carefully planned. The old woman sprinkled a mixture of herbs, sugar and a raw egg yolk onto my open wound to form some sort of crust.
‘Egg will make you fertile,’ she declared with a toothless smile. ‘And sugar will make you sweet.’ Now that I’m a nurse, I can’t help but think that the mixture was a perfect medium to enable bacteria to grow, plastered onto an open wound by a woman with dirty hands, a dirty knife, using dirty rags. It was so gruesome at the time, and it is still gruesome to recall.
As I lay on the floor bleeding and sobbing in shock and pain, I was astonished that not one person showed me any sympathy at all. There was nobody to cry with or complain to, including my own flesh and blood. On the contrary, they were in a happy, festive mood. The sheep was slaughtered outside and a grand lunch prepared, with many of our neighbours summoned to share the special meal in my honour. The daughter of Adan Ismail had been ‘cleansed’ and all were invited to partake of the purification feast and celebrate the occasion. The women I loved the most in the world and who I’d always thought would protect me had deliberately selected the day for my gudniin or circumcision when they knew my father would be out of town. They then stood by while this horrific ritual was performed on me without any anaesthetic. They saw me kicking. They heard my screams. They paid for my butchery to be performed by someone who was neither medically qualified nor professionally trained.
They never warned me of what was about to happen in what I now understand to be a conspiracy of silence among Somali and other women dating back centuries. Far from being horrified at this brutal thing that had been done to me, they were happy and relieved about it.
As an eight-year old child, I could not comprehend it.
As a woman in her eighties, I still cannot accept it.
***
The next thing I really remember was hearing my father’s voice. It must have been much later that night when he returned from the bush. Unable to move for the pain, I cried out to him. ‘Daddy! My Daddy!’ as he hurried in to see me.
Holding up a Tilley lamp, he took one look at me and fell to his knees, his prone figure casting a huge shadow on the wall. ‘What have they done to you, Shukri? What have they done?’
My grandmother berated him from the doorway, telling him that it was nothing to do with him and that he shouldn’t interfere. The women genuinely believed that if I were seen by a man then it could ‘contaminate’ my purification so that the wound wouldn’t heal, the skin wouldn’t fuse together, and the procedure might have to be done again. Ignoring his own mother, he slumped onto the mat and cradled me in his arms, allowing me to cry and cry until there were no more tears.
‘Aabo wey i qasheen!’ I wept. ‘Father, they slaughtered me! They carved me up!’ I believe I saw tears in my father’s eyes too. For the first time since my cutting I had an ally – somebody who was offering sympathy and seemed to be hurting almost as much as I did.
Then my mother rushed in, shouting. ‘Leave her alone, Adan! Don’t touch her or you’ll infect her. It will undo the stitches!’
I have never seen my father so angry. ‘How could you?’ he raged. ‘Why have you done this?’
From the expression on her face, I think my mother was suddenly very ashamed. My grandmother countered that they had only done what was expected of them. I remember she used the expression ‘the right thing’. There was a terrible argument between the three of them then in the next room; unlike anything I’d witnessed before. I will always associate it with that day. Listening to their row and seeing how upset my father was by what had happened to me gave me a little courage. It made me realize that this wasn’t right. If it had made Father angry then what had been done to me must be wrong.
In silence and with his jaw clenched tightly, he came back into my room with a glass of water, some painkillers, and a few cloths to clean myself with. Grandmother kept telling him not to give me anything to drink, as it would make me urinate before the wound had fused. Tradition prevented him from examining me, sterilizing the cuts or giving me surgical dressings. He remained furious for weeks and continued to support me as best he could from afar, but we both knew it was too late for him to change what had been done.
It was many years before I discovered exactly what the procedure had involved. The old woman, who had the spurious title of ‘traditional birth attendant’, had sliced off my clitoris and labia minora with her knife and then pared the sides of my labia, removing all the skin right down to the perineum until it was raw and bleeding profusely. Without a surgical glove in sight, she attached the folded edges of my vulva or labia majora to the raw flesh, covering my vagina like a hood. This would eventually fuse together to form a hard bridge of scar tissue that would almost completely restrict the opening. The medical term for it is infibulation, and in what these women considered to be a ‘properly infibulated girl’ you should not be able to get anything larger than the head of a matchstick into the vagina from that day on until the night of her wedding. This means that whenever urinating or menstruating, urine and blood has to drip-drip out of a hole approximately 1.5–2 mm wide.
I knew nothing of this as a child, of course. I simply lay trapped and isolated in my room, a prisoner of my mother and grandmother, in agony as the wound began to scab and congeal around the thorns. What hurt the most, though, was the overwhelming sense of betrayal. This changed my relationship with them for ever. Custom dictated that I was to lie on the floor for a week to allow the wound to heal, and hardly drink anything. I was given a little white rice to eat with some sour milk or yoghurt, designed to keep me constipated for several days. But the time came when I needed to empty my bladder, so – although I no longer trusted my mother – I had no choice but to call to her for help. She and my grandmother carried me to the toilet pit and lay me on my side on the floor. ‘Go ahead and urinate,’ they said, as if it was as simple as that.
Can you imagine? My legs were tied to prevent the wound from opening, I was lying on a dirty and cold cement floor, and the urine wouldn’t come. They poured cold water on my feet to make me go, which eventually worked but it stung like crazy. I screamed and tried to halt the flow, but they told me, ‘Don’t stop. You’ve got to keep going.’
I didn’t believe them so, in what felt like a new form of torture, they kept pouring cold water on my feet to make me start again, and then I longed to empty my bladder completely so that I would never have to endure the pain again. At that point, I also wanted to never drink anything again even though I was so thirsty, because I now knew what fresh agonies a full bladder would bring. Little did I know then that the more concentrated the urine is the more it hurts, so drinking more water would have made it less painful, but nobody told me that.