FGM

FGM.

There will be no heroes here
No gods, though the stench of sweat
And the drip of blood
Will hint at creation

How long
O flesh
O knife
O muffled screams
How long will you taint the air of our lands
With your echoes?

There will be no transgressions here
Only girls
Trapped forever at the cusp of womanhood
Sliced up and stitched back together
To cut the sins out and keep the virtue in

Where are the heroes
While our daughters are being circumcised
And I will judge, though
Circumstance gave birth to me in the audience and not onstage
Though I have never seen the tip of the knife
The eclipse of a neighbor’s face blocking the sun

But how long
O sky
O land
O grim-faced mothers
How long can you watch without seeing

The battered virgins decorated in tattered skins
Scabs and stitches to keep out the sins
When even a mother’s embrace is not tighter
Than the embroidery on her
Pretty
Pure
Painless daughter
When does this go too far?

There will be no heroes here
With their t-shirts and their picket signs
This will be no fashionable cause
Because these are the wars that lie hidden under skirts

No poverty pornography
Of big-eyed babies posing beneath their coating of flies
These are the scars of a society
That the documentary crews
Do not have the stomach for;
There are no gods here

Though every outsider’s view is judgement day
I’m going to judge today though I
Have no bruises on my thighs
No suspicious mother listening at the bathroom door
Because the volume of her daughter’s urine
Was testament to her innocence:
If she could only manage a quiet trickle
She was still stitched up tightly

And if she wasn’t,
If she wasn’t, o honor
O stones
O broken face
If she wasn’t, her father would find
The power to crush her life to liquid
Encased in a bruised sack of skin

The newscasters
Will call it an honor killing,
Disdain for “those people” crumpling their features
As the cameras pan with a zoologist’s fascination
Speaking as one would of another species
About those barbarians and their bloodlust

Or was it an act of love by father and brother
When stones smashed into tainted skin to
Release the soul from its dirtied casing
Gazing tearlessly at the husk of what was once their baby girl

Before her thighs were taught to mash so tightly together
That bruises bloomed on the insides
Before scarlet letters spilled monthly from a joyless womb
A loveless girl
Soaked crimson in her own sin
Punished preemptively for the hips and breasts
Soon to come
Of which her twelve-year-old frame already hints
For the way she will soon make monsters of men
Revenge will paint itself
As ritual
Carving the joy out of creation
Into a tradition of loveless wombs
Of mothers who find no pleasure
In the creation of their child

And so,
There will be no lovemaking
No making of children born from joyful unions
Only manufacturing
Of loveless generations
No creation
So, no-
There are no gods
Here
-Safia

This poetry was recited (and gave me chills) at an event I attended not long ago on refugee health. This touches a topic many know little about or  chose to ignore.

An estimated 100 to 140 million girls and women worldwide are currently living with the consequences of female genital cutting, also called female circumcision. Female genital cutting includes several different forms of cutting practiced for hundreds of years. Infibulation, the most severe, involves cutting some or all of the external genitalia, leaving only a very small opening for urination and menstruation.

The procedure can also cause serious health and social problems that follow a woman her whole life. The health complications from infibulation can include chronic and severe pain, infection, prolonged and difficult labor and difficulties with menstruation. Psychologically, cutting can cause tension between couples due to painful or difficult sexual relations. Socially, cutting makes it harder for girls to go to school or earn income by making them more likely to marry early.

Every year, in communities around the world, as many as 3 million girls are at risk of this painful procedure despite its many risks. We must do all we can to encourage the governments in the communities where female genital cutting most often occurs to put a stop to it.

The practice of female genital cutting is hard to talk about. It is part of deeply-held religious and cultural beliefs in communities that practice it. But it also is recognized internationally as a violation of the human rights of girls and women. But ignoring it only guarantees more suffering, and leadership from the United States would go a long way in urging the countries where FGC occurs to end this human rights abuse.