Survivor Archives: 003

Badriya (pseudonym) shares the pain and loss she felt when she learned that FGC was performed on her. She goes through what many survivors have when they seek for answers. They keep the hurt they feel for their parents and their communities, and nurture that rage into doing and being better not only for themselves, but the future generations of girls and women.

You know how people like to say 'he/she was robbed of an Oscar', or something along those lines? I wonder how our most cherished actors actually felt when they got 'robbed' of an award.

Because that's probably how I felt too when I realised I was circumcised - robbed, taken away, stolen from.

The revelation was of a dreadful kind, far from pleasant. Like discovering a corpse had been buried underneath your house all along. And by 'all along', I don't mean from a few weeks or a few months ago, I mean a solid 16 years of not knowing.

All my young life I lived without what I considered to be a gift, a prized possession shaped like a pearl, an 'Oscar' if you will.

At that time, I was cultivating a keen interest in learning about my sexual body, and I began to appreciate what I was blessed with. An oasis of pleasure, filled with thousands of nerve endings, snipped off of me when I haven't even developed the voice to say 'no'.

Why? Why take away my right to feel pleasure? Are we women not allowed to feel that way? How could my own mother do that to me? I kept vacillating between fury and sadness.

Till I realised that I can't even put the finger on my mother. It's not her fault. Her generation was never taught to question, to read that quote and the Hadith once more, twice more.

I suppose then that we are left with the breaking of cycles and unwarranted traditions. And I'm down for that. Because the older I get, the more I can't shake off the feeling of being robbed.