Blue Daughter of the Red Sea: A Memoir

1 Light

1 Light (The Origins)· 9 · The Lord preceded them, In the daytime by means of a column of cloud to show them the way, and at night by means of a column of fire to give them light. Exodus 13:21 T  M,   , the young girls who were exempted from going through circumcision. My mother was among them. She spoke in a contented tone whenever she narrated that story to me. For a devoted Catholic as mom was, there was nothing in the world better than being labeled after the Virgin Mary, whichever way the name might have been applied. And so my mother was a chosen Mary, I thought. But why? I asked her. What made you different? You and the other few. I don’t know, she said. They just examine your vaginal area carefully and decide whether you need to be circumcised or not. If you are born already circumcised , then, you are a circumcised Mary and, therefore, you won’t need to be circumcised. Was I a circumcised Mary? I asked. I wouldn’t know.When you were born, circumcision for girls was no longer practiced. Only with boys. I imagined the faces of those girls who were doomed to subject their vagina to the sharp-edged tooth of a knife. If Jesus was sacrificed for the sins of the world, I thought, then, these women must have been sacrificed for the same reason. We had Jesuses running around all over Ethiopia. My mother was an exception. A circumcised Mary she was! So, tell me, mom! What was like to live at a time when such a thing as circumcision for women was practiced? Well, first of all, we didn’t have opportunities like you do. We didn’t go to school. Oh, yeah, my dear! You have an illiterate mother. Back then, we lived 10 Exodus of Bodies
for today’s bread.The future didn’t lie ahead of us.We did not rely on ourselves. God was our everything.We didn’t question our past. Our mothers didn’t keep track of our age. We simply existed in the moment, within the limitations of our small town and small minds. Poverty is venom that slowly saps one’s existence. It is a white noise that quakes the shape of survival. It corrodes the scenery and cuts one’s world asunder. I was born and grew up in the heart of that corrosive acid. Dire Dawa, a small city warmly embraced by a fiery sun and caressed by some magicless dust, was the name of my hometown. Life was not charming in Dire Dawa. Children ran barefoot against a background of feces-embedded roads, spinning around the desert city, puffing on the sand so forming dunes of smaller versions, while the little ones piggybacked on their mother’s back. They had the appearance of several shiny, brown ponies: untamed and wild creatures. Their feet moved like those of a ballerina without her tutu, dancing to the tune of an unheeded song: free. Their laughter rang like a violent rain of diamonds. And they shouted in a language as inarticulate as their age, and yelled in voices as overly used as the sole of the shoe that was guarded at home for special occasions. The boys wandered nearly naked, their genitals covered with raglike shorts like savages from the jungle. The girls wore simple dresses, their undeveloped chests not yet choked by stifling brassieres. Their dust-devoured feet matched the soiled hands, their nasal mucus, the nappy hair that the sandy and adventurous day had transformed into strands of gray hair, and the clothes, previously immersed in mud. There were cuts all over their legs and ulcers noted on their knees, forming rings of pus. Lice walked on their head and tapeworms lived in their stomach. When the boys were big enough for school, they had to subject themselves to circumcision. A noneducated but naturally gifted and self-trained expert did the surgery at home. The boys bawled and screamed as the prepuce was cut off. The best part came afterward, when they had to come out to play, wearing their sisters’ dress, their testicles dangling like bells. We lifted the garments and laughed at the sight of the tiny genitals. Our parents had our backs, evading despair by clinging to survival, making daisies out of faith. Religion was indeed an escape. The conviction of suffering in this world to...