Desert Flower (28 page)

When I was eight months pregnant, an African photographer heard I was having a baby and said

he wanted to photograph me. He asked me to come to Spain where he was working. By this point I felt great, so I wasn’t afraid to travel. I knew I wasn’t supposed to fly after six months, but I wore a loose sweater and sneaked on board the flight. He did some brilliant shots for Marie Claire.

But I had to fly pregnant one more time. Twenty days before I gave birth, I flew to Nebraska to be with Dana’s family so they could help me with the baby after he was born. I stayed with Dana’s parents in Omaha. He had gigs scheduled playing in the clubs, and planned to fly out the following week. Shortly after I arrived, I got up one morning and noted my stomach felt funny; I kept wondering what I’d eaten the night before that would cause such indigestion. This continued for that day, but I didn’t mention it. By the next morning I had a really bad stomachache. Then it occurred to me that maybe this wasn’t a stomachache. Maybe I was having the baby.

I called Dana’s morn at work and said, “Look, I’ve got this weird pain and it comes and goes. It was happening all day yesterday and last night. But it’s getting worse. I don’t know what I could have eaten, but it feels strange.”

“Waris, for God’s sake. You’re having contractions!”

Oh! Then I was really happy, because I was so ready to have the baby. I called Dana in New York and told him, “I think I’m having the baby!”

“No, no, no! You can’t have it till I get there. HOLD THAT BABY! I’m coming, I’m getting on a plane.”

“You fucking come and hold it! How am I supposed to do that? Hold the baby!” God, silly men! But I did want Dana to be there for the delivery of our first baby, and I was going to be disappointed if he didn’t see it. After I had talked to his mother earlier, she called the hospital, and the nurse called to check on me. She said if I wanted to have the baby, I should walk around. I figured if I didn’t want to have the baby, that meant I should do the reverse, so I lay absolutely still.

Dana didn’t arrive until the following evening. By this time I’d been having contractions for three days. When his father went to pick him up at the airport, I was panting hard. “Oh, oh, oh, EEEI

AH! SHIT! OH GOD!”

“Count, Waris, count!” Dana’s mom yelled. We decided it was time to go to the hospital, but we couldn’t go because Dana’s father had the car. When he drove up, they didn’t even make it into the house before we started yelling, “Get back to the car, we’re going to the hospital!”

We arrived at the hospital at ten o’clock; at ten o’clock the next morning, I was still in labor. “I want to swing upside down from the tree!” I kept screaming. This I knew was pure animal instinct, like a monkey’s instinct, because that’s how animals do it. They move around, they sit, they squat, they run and swing until they give birth. They don’t just lie there. And since that day, Dana still calls me Monkey. In a falsetto voice he’ll cry, “Ahhh, I want to swing upside down from the tree!”

While we were in the delivery room, the expectant father would coach, “Breathe, baby, just breathe.”

“FUCK! Get the luck away from me. I’ll fucking kill you, you motherfucker!” Oh, my God, I wanted to shoot him. I wanted to die, and before I died, I wanted to make sure I killed him.

Finally, at noon, the moment came. I was so grateful to that doctor in London who operated on me, because I couldn’t even imagine trying to go through that delivery when I was still sewn up. And then, after waiting nine months and suffering for three days, magically there he was. Ooooh! After all this time, I was so glad to see him this little, little thing. He was so beautiful, with silky black hair, a tiny, tiny mouth, and the longest of

feet and fingers. He stretched over twenty inches but weighed only six pounds and thirteen ounces. Immediately my son said, “Ah,” and began looking around the room, very curious. This is what it’s all about, then? This is it? This is the light? Must have felt good after being in the dark for nine months.

I had told the staff that as soon as the baby was born, I wanted them to lay him on my chest, with all that goo and everything. They did, and in that instant I first held him, I realized that the old cliche that every mother told me was true: When you hold that baby, suddenly you forget the pain. In that moment, there is no pain. There is only joy.

I named the baby Aleeke, which in Somali means strong lion. But right now, with his tiny bow mouth, chubby cheeks, and halo of curls, he looks more like a little black Cupid than a lion. His big, smooth forehead looks exactly like mine. When I talk to him, he puckers his mouth like a tweety bird preparing to sing. Since the moment he was born, he’s been eternally curious, quietly looking at everything and exploring his new world.

When I was a little girl, I so much looked forward to coming home at

night after tending my animals, and lying in Mama’s lap. She would stroke my head, giving me such a feeling of peace and security. Now I do this to Aleeke, and just as I did, he loves it too. I’ll massage his head and he immediately falls asleep in my arms.

From the day he was born, my life changed. The happiness I get from him is everything to me now. I pushed aside all the stupid little things that I used to complain and worry about. I realized that none of that matters at all. Life the gift of life is what matters, and that’s what giving birth to my son made me remember.

In my culture, a woman earns a badge of respect when she becomes a mother. She has brought another human being into this world, contributed to the gift of life. When Aleeke was born, I, too, was a mama, a woman who had come of age. After going through the cycle of womanhood that began prematurely with my circumcision at age five, and came full circle with my baby’s birth when I was about thirty, I had even more respect for my own mother. I understood what incredible strength the women in Somalia possess to bear the burden they carry simply because they’re born female. As a woman living in the West, I struggled

to do what I had to do, and some days didn’t think I’d make it: trying to work scrubbing floors at McDonald’s when my periods were so painful I thought I’d pass out. Having surgery to open the crude scars of my genitals so that I could urinate properly. Waddling around nine months pregnant, taking the subway uptown to Harlem, climbing the stairs, and shopping for food at the market. Spending three days in labor and thinking I would surely die right there in the delivery room in front of the doctors.

The reality is that I’m the lucky one. What about the girl back in the bush, walking miles and miles to water her goats, while she’s in such pain from her period that she can barely stand up straight? Or the wife who will be sewn back up with a needle and thread like a piece of cloth as soon as she gives birth, so her vagina will remain tight for her husband? Or the woman nine months pregnant hunting for food in the desert to feed her other eleven starving children? Or what happens to the new wife who’s still sewn up tight, and it’s time for her first baby to be born? What happens when she goes out into the desert alone, as my mother did, and tries to deliver it by herself?. Unfortunately, I know the answer to that question. Many bleed to death out there alone,

and if they’re lucky, their husbands will find them before the vultures and hyenas do.

As I grew older and more educated, I learned that I was not alone. The health problems I’ve coped with since my circumcision also plague millions of girls and women throughout the world. Because of a ritual of ignorance, most of the women on the continent of Africa live their lives in pain. Who is going to help the woman in the desert like my mother with no money and no power? Somebody must speak out for the little girl with no voice. And since I began as a nomad just like them, I felt it was my destiny to help them.

I could never explain why so many things happened in my life by pure chance. But I don’t really believe in the concept of pure chance; there has to be more to our lives than that. God saved me from a lion in the desert when I ran away from home, and from that moment on, I felt he had a plan for me, some reason to keep me alive. But if it was for a reason, what was that reason?

Some time back, a writer for the fashion magazine Marie Claire made an appointment to interview me. Before our meeting, I gave a lot of thought to

what I wanted to say in the article. When I met the writer, Laura Ziv, for lunch, I took one look at her face and liked her right away. I said, “You know, I don’t know what kind of story you wanted from me but all of that fashion model stuff’s been done a million times. If you promise to publish it, I’ll give you a real story.”

She said, “Oh? Well, I’ll do my best,” and switched on her tape recorder. I began telling her the story of my circumcision when I was a child. Suddenly, halfway through the interview, she started crying and turned off the tape.

“Oh, what’s the matter with you?”

“I mean, it’s horrible..” it’s disgusting. I never dreamed such things still happen today.”

“Now there you go. That’s the whole point, people in the West don’t know. Do you think you can put that in your magazine your fabulously glossy, gorgeous magazine, which nobody reads but women?”

“I promise I’ll do the best I can. But the decision will be up to my boss.”

The next day after the interview, I felt stunned and embarrassed at what I’d done. Everybody would know my business now. My most personal secret. Even my closest friends didn’t know what had happened to me as a little girl. Being from a

very private culture in Somalia, it simply wasn’t the type of thing I could ever talk about. Now here I was talking about it to millions of strangers. But finally I decided: Let it be. Lose your dignity if that’s what it takes. So I did. I removed my dignity, as if I were taking off my clothes. I put it to the side and walked around without it. But I was also worried about the response of other Somalis; I could imagine them saying, “How dare you criticize our ancient traditions!” I could imagine them echoing my family when I saw them in Ethiopia: “You think because you moved to the West, you know everything?”

After much thought, I realized I needed to talk about my circumcision for two reasons. First of all, it’s something that bothers me deeply. Besides the health problems that I still struggle with, I will never know the pleasures of sex that have been denied me. I feel incomplete, crippled, and knowing that there’s nothing I can do to change that is the most hopeless feeling of all. When I met Dana, I finally fell in love and wanted to experience the joys of sex with a man. But if you ask me today, “Do you enjoy sex?” I would say not in the traditional way. I simply enjoy being physically close to Dana because I love him.

All my life I’ve tried to think of a reason for my circumcision. Maybe if I could have thought of a good reason, I could accept what they’d done to me. But I could think of none. The longer I tried to think of a reason without finding one, the angrier I became. I needed to talk about my secret, because I kept it bottled up inside me all my life. Since [ didn’t have any family around me, no mother or sisters, there was no one I could share my grief with. I hate the term ‘victim’ because it sounds so helpless. But when the gypsy woman butchered me, that’s exactly what I was. However, as a grown woman, I was no longer a victim, and I could take action. By doing the Marie Claire article, I wanted the people who promote this torture to hear what it feels like from at least one woman, because all the females in my country are silenced.

It occurred to me that after people learned my secret, they were going to look at me oddly when they saw me on the street. I decided I didn’t care. Because the second reason for doing the article was the hope of making people aware that this practice still occurs today. I’ve got to do it not only for me but for all the little girls in the world who are going through it now. Not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of girls are living with it and dying from it. It’s too late to change my own

circumstances, the damage has already been done; but maybe I can help save somebody else.

When my interview “The Tragedy of Female Circumcision’ came out, the response was dramatic. Laura did a great job, and publishing it was a courageous act on the part of Marie Claire. The magazine and Equality Now, an organization that fights for women’s rights, were swamped with letters of support. Like Laura the day I told her, the readers were obviously horrified:

One month ago today I read with horror the story in the March issue of Marie Claire on female ‘circumcision,” and have not been able to get it off my mind. I would find it difficult to believe that anyone, male or female, could forget or pass off something as cold and inhuman as this treatment of the gender which God created as man’s friend and companion, his ‘helpmate.” The Bible says men are to ‘love their wives.” Even if living in a culture where God is not known to exist, people cannot help but realize that by the pain, trauma, and even death this inflicts on their women that it is SO WRONG! How

can they continue to allow this to happen to their wives, daughters, and sisters? Surely they must know they are destroying their women in so many ways!

God help us, we have to DO SOMETHING. I wake up thinking about it, I go to bed thinking about it, and throughout the day I cry about it! Surely with World Vision or another such organization these people can be educated and taught how their marriages and intimacy could be so much better for the men as well as for the women, as it was meant to be, and that women were born with certain body parts for good reason, just as men were!

And another:

I just finished reading your article on Waris Dirie, and am sick to my soul that such torture and mutilation is still endured by little girls. I can hardly believe that something this sadistic is being practiced today. The problems these women face their whole lives resulting from this are incredible. Tradition or not, these outrages against females worldwide need to end. Let me slice open one man’ genitals and sew them back up and I