Barbara studied Adaku’s face. What she saw was infinite and abiding sorrow. Grief seemed to be deep in her bones, no transitory thing but something that was part of the fabric of who she was.
Adaku was African in many ways, but she was English in many ways as well. Perhaps that was part of what made her compelling. She told her story with marked dignity.
The worst that could be done to a female child had been done to her, she explained. “It’s called infibulation. But those who do this to girls—and those who did it to me—don’t call it that. They call it a rite of passage or female circumcision or making you a woman or cleansing you of the nasty bits or preparing you for eventual marriage or increasing your value to a man or increasing that man’s pleasure when he takes you, which is your duty as a woman. But it’s all the same at the end of the day. It’s being mutilated.”
Infibulation, she explained, consisted of the clitoris being removed, the vaginal opening narrowed, a covering seal created for that opening, the labia cut and repositioned. Everything then was either sewn up or sewn together, leaving a single small opening through which urine and menstrual blood were supposed to pass.
“Christ.” Barbara felt her palms begin to sweat.
Narissa said, “Should I stop the recording?”
“No,” Barbara said fiercely. She would not say she had heard enough. She owed it to the dead woman to hear it all.
Adaku was saying that, before she knew the facts of what had happened to her and because she’d never seen what uncut genitals looked like, she’d not realised what had been done to her. It was only when her period hadn’t begun by the time she was fifteen that her adoptive mum took her to the family’s GP for a check-up. It was during that check-up that she’d learned the truth. There was little to be done at that point, so many years after the fact.
She had reckoned this practise was something that went on only in the land of her birth. But then she’d learned that this vile procedure sometimes went on here, in the UK. So she did what she could do to stop it and she would continue to do so.
She said, “I’m Nigerian. We’re a very proud people. But there are times when—out of ignorance—we do to our girls what was done to me when I was so young, what was also done to my mother and to her mother. It once was merely the way of things amongst our people, and since my mum had also been cut, she knew no different than to pass along what she saw as a ‘tradition.’ But then she died in childbirth when I was seven, and I was sent to live with my aunt, my father’s sister. The baby that my mum died giving birth to went with me. Our father did not believe he could care for us, and as it turned out neither could our aunt. She had seven children already, so she delivered us to a Catholic orphanage. We were lucky. A husband and wife adopted us and brought us to the UK. Because I was eight years old at the time I arrived here to my new home, and because I was healthy, no one had any reason to inspect my genitals. Why would they? So no one knew, and it was only later when I was a teenager that the truth about me came to light. I don’t know who cut me. I only know that in places where FGM still occurs, it is something done almost always by women. Let me say this again: It is done by women to women. To ensure we’re chaste. To rid our bodies of the parts that were put on our bodies so we might know sexual pleasure. We are not meant to have that pleasure because, in the minds of many tribal men, a woman’s ability to have sexual pleasure increases the possibility that she will stray. But what I want you to know is this: much of my life has been made unbearable by what was done to me, and I often feel like half the person I ought to be.”
Narissa stopped the recording and the picture froze on Adaku’s face, Teo Bontempi’s face. Barbara found she couldn’t move her gaze as she tried to sort out what the woman must have felt at the time she was describing for the listening girls what had happened to her. Superficially, she seemed to feel nothing. When it came to anger, rage, despair, or whatever, she looked like a woman who’d worn out those passions long ago. If this was the case, then, perhaps what remained within her was only her willingness to speak to those who were also damaged, to those who ran the risk of damage, and to those who still insisted this mutilation had to be done because if it wasn’t, the child the girl the woman in question might actually have a life beyond whatever role her husband-to-be decreed she was to play.
“What happens to the girls who come here, then?” Barbara asked.
“If the girl is in danger, Zawadi puts her into hiding.”