.Cutting...It.

Anaya is an eight year old girl from Abuja, Nigeria. She lives with her mother, father, and two sisters. She enjoys playing outside with her friends but has no objections to helping her mother around the house…and she has a story to tell.

  It was a warm day and I wanted to be out playing with my friends. I could hear kids yelling and laughing, but I stood in the kitchen cutting the vegetables as I had been told to do. My sister and I were, for some reason, not to go out today. I wondered why I had been asked to do kitchen work and what Urenna, my older sister, had been ordered to do. As firstborn and my mothers favourite, it was often she who often helped in the kitchen with my mother.
  I did not wonder for long, as I was soon interrupted by my mother bustling into the room. Snapping at me to stop daydreaming and get on with cleaning the worktops, she takes the large kitchen knife I had previously been using and departs somehow managing to give an air of great purpose and determination despite her unhurried gait. I shrugged and began to dampen a cloth to clean as I had been told. The day was hot and dusty, and I, usually a lively and high-spirited child, was obeying with the hope that I would soon be out running with my friends.
  Their yells were getting louder. More piercing. With a jolt I realized that somehow the shouts of enjoyment had transformed into something much more akin to shrieks of fear. Or pain. And they were within my own house.
  Afraid and unsure of what to do, I dropped the rag I was holding and ran to the hallway, only to be confronted by Asabi, one of the older women of the village.
  ‘Do not worry!’ She told me, tightly gripping my struggling shoulders and pushing me back towards the kitchen.
  ‘What is happening?’ I asked frantically. There was definite screaming coming from the front room, and I suspected it to be that of my beloved sisters’. ‘Where is Urenna?’ I demanded.
The woman merely smiled gently, pushing me until I was backed against a kitchen counter. Hoisting me from under my arms, she lifted me and set me on the newly cleaned surface.
  ‘Your sister is fine. She will be even better soon.’
I begged to know what she meant, I pleaded to be allowed out of the kitchen, but she would not allow me. Asabi stood firmly in front of me, grasping my limbs each time I tried to move. And all the time I could hear screams and muffled shouts coming from the room in front. It was a torture for me, never mind whoever was making the noise, and it seemed an eternity of speaking about food and friends and school to that well-built woman before the noise died off.
  ‘Stay here.’ I was ordered, as Asabi went to the front room. She came back and lifted me again. I am an undersized and skinny child of small build, not difficult to lift to her hip and carry. At the time I did not struggle, so overcome with curiosity was I.
  The front door was shutting as we entered the hallway, so I had no opportunity to see what was leaving my home. I was craning my neck to catch a glimpse of those departing, and it was not until I was in the front room that I thought to take in my surroundings. I had been set on the floor, but for some reason it was covered with a blue plastic table cloth. Someone moved behind me. I was able to take in the five local women standing around me and the vegetable knife I had earlier been using, sitting on a table. Monifa, another woman from roundabouts, picked up the knife and grimly wiped it on a towel.
  And then everything went black.

  The first thing I was aware of that although the world had gone dark, I was not unconscious. I had been blindfolded. The second thing I became aware of was the enormous amount of pressure being exerted on my chest, and my legs, which were being wrenched open. Someone was sitting on my chest, holding down my arms.
  I felt hands on my nether regions, and one of the women remarked that I was too lively for my own good, that maybe I would be a little more docile after this.
  ‘Ulu,’ they said to my mother ‘today your daughters become women.’
  What did that mean? Why were they touching me? Then I felt a cold metal surface against my thigh, and understood.
  I screamed, I yelled, I kicked, I flailed. The women holding me simply gripped tighter, short nails biting into my young skin, thighs being spread with a ferocity that meant my knees were almost touching the floor. I felt pain in my muscles and cried out to be released. A woman pressed her hand against my mouth to keep me quiet, but as I felt the knife cut at my skin down there I responded by biting her fingers as hard as I could.
  Immediately the hand was removed and the woman shouted, but I could not hear her above the howls coming out of my own mouth. I was still fighting desperately but there was no way to escape, these women were to strong for me. The pain was more intense than anything I had ever felt in my life, and I tried with all the strength my underdeveloped muscles could muster to close my legs, to get those hands, that knife, away from the most private thing about me.
  ‘Mother! I screamed ‘Why don’t you help me!’
  ‘My, she’s a fighter.’ Came a calm voice from somewhere around my knees. The hands clasped harder and I screamed; no, it was more than a scream, it was a noise made by my young body as a piece of me was sliced off. This piece, although I did not then know the name for it, was my clitoris, and this moment would prevent me from ever feeling being stimulated there again.
  We were not to talk about the vagina, we were not even to think about that sort of thing. It was unclean. I therefore had no idea of the different parts that this knife was mercilessly slashing through and slicing off. All I knew was that this was the most painful thing I could ever imagine, that part of me was being taken away.
  The knife was no longer cold; instead, warm, blood-slicked metal was biting into my skin and tearing pieces of me off. I could feel blood dripping from inside of me, where my skin had been cut away, making an absurd plopping noise as it fell on the plastic I was lying on.
I have no idea how long this ordeal lasted, the excruciation seemed to last for an eternity, but I know it could not have been more than an hour or two later that I heard the distinct sound of the knife being set down. Suddenly there was not the unbearably sharp, jagged pain of being cut, simply the constant stabbing ache that fresh wounds have, a different kind of pain, but pain nonetheless.

  Just as I thought my torment must be nearing an end, something new happened. I felt a prick on the raw flesh of my vagina, something going though my flesh and out again. And out again and in again. I was being sewn up.
  My screams throughout the whole thing had been constant, but now I paused and let out a low, guttural moan. Partly in pain at this new torture, but partly relief. If they were stitching me up, closing me up, surely that meant we were nearly through. The unending struggle I had put up was dying down; I no longer sought to kill each and every woman in the room. I resigned myself to a gasp, a small scream each time the needle entered, and the knowledge that it would soon be over made the wait even longer.
As the stitching holding the raw, newly mutilated flesh of what had once been my vagina was tightened, I let out one last cry and collapsed.

  As consciousness flickered in my mind, it seemed so did light. My blindfold had been taken off and I forced myself to return to reality. I saw the woman between my legs putting away her instruments. Once again, she grimly wiped the knife they had used to mutilate me and set it on the table.
  Cautiously, I put a hand down between my legs. Asabi slapped my arm and told me not to be so disgusting. My legs were released, I felt my muscles twinge in relief as I carefully closed them, wincing  as I did so.
  I was told that I had been stitched up well, and not to worry, I could still pee, and, when the time came, pass blood. I was not convinced, but as my mother said, now I was fit to go out, to marry, to be a woman.
  The pain, they said, would pass.
  The pride, the honour of becoming a woman, they said, would be with me forever.

Anaya found that gradually, eventually, the pain did pass. In that house, when she was eight years old, Anaya had experienced a form of female genital mutilation called infibulation, at the hands of her mother and other women close to her. She was regarded as a woman, pure and clean, and was able to marry at the age of fifteen.
On her wedding night, Anaya’s husband cut open the stitches in her vagina, allowing access. She suffered severe pain, but soon overcame it.
At the age of nineteen, Anaya died of H.I.V contracted from using instruments which had not been sterilised.
Neither her mutilators nor her culture were held to blame.