Burning Red Moon #2
Brutal rite and, according to Zahra Bayda, not entirely foreign to Western traditions.
She tells me that among her people, the vulva is called mandorla, almond, a word that, like macchiato and so many others, was left as a souvenir by Italian occupation troops, who brought to Somalia the cult of the Madonna of Almonds, patron of the pious in Bergamo, a small feminine figure framed in an almond-shaped oval symbolizing her virginity.
The Somali women took to this Italian deity, but started calling her Makeda.
And they called the vulva a mandorla. The cultural intersection wasn’t random, when it came down to it; both traditions exalt purity and virginity as primary female attributes.
Except that, unlike the Madonna’s rites, Makeda’s rite is violent, a tribute paid in blood.
The almond, the vulva, the cunt: the nodal point of everything I want to tell here.
The almond, star in the winds of tragedy through this region.
The almond, infinitely kind and suffering, hidden under the long skirts of abayas and hidden also in the language, which only mentions it with household euphemisms that hide its true name.
Gérard de Nerval says it’s enough to fix your gaze on any point to immediately find a tragic apparition. One might add that it’s enough to fix attention on Makeda, the Madonna of Almonds, to immediately find a secret history of brutality and aggression.
According to tradition, Makeda, the first sovereign of Sheba, swore to remain pure until death, believing that virginity would allow her to reign without anyone’s influence.
To achieve this, she fought the awakening of her senses as if they were wild beasts, and, not trusting her own willpower, she took a knife and removed her clitoris, labia majora, and labia minora from her own vulva and later closed the wound with hemp thread, leaving an orifice so small that urine and menstrual blood could only leak out drop by drop.
Jakoub Mar, an early twentieth century Ethiopian historian, assembled a different version, in which Makeda’s genitals were intact when she visited Jerusalem to meet King Solomon, and when he wished to make her his wife, the Jewish priests required that the mutilation be performed on her first.
“Barbaric customs from times long past?” Zahra Bayda says in irritation. “No! Barbaric customs that live on to this day, affecting the vast majority of the female population in Somalia, Ethiopia, southern Yemen, and other countries in the region.”
The almond: target of both hatred and appetite.
Venerated and reviled, fervently desired and viciously destroyed.
Open and closed, profaned and sewn, forbidden and penetrated.
Epicenter of all love and war. From her dark corner, Makeda shines, both a sovereign and a prisoner.
Pleasure and terror from these peoples who are amazed by her, obsessed.
The vulva is myth and secret, a sacrificial victim and a crowned goddess.
So primordial that it’s considered the origin of the world, the title of that oil painting by Courbet that for the first time portrays it unreservedly, with a wide-angle lens.
And yet it’s so hidden and unexplored that many women consider it something alien to their bodies.
“You’re looking for the Queen of Sheba?” Zahra Bayda asks me. “What do you want me to say, Bos Mutas. Mandorla is the true Queen of Sheba, deep down, there is none other. You’re not wrong when you say the vulva is an undercover protagonist, that her ordeals form a secret history.”
The inside of the inside, the diamond’s heart, the hidden beating core. Maybe Zahra Bayda has it right: Mandorla could well be what underlies this entire deranged epic.
A girl, her small body, and, between her legs, that delicate triangle of shadows never reached by the sun.
A grandmother with a kitchen knife, any old table, a centuries-long tradition.
That’s all that’s required for female genital mutilation, a homemade procedure given no more mystery or hygiene than preparing a bowl of lentils.
Zahra Bayda says that when her sisters turned about ten or eleven, a day arrived for each of them on which they showed up swollen, in pain, unable to walk or even sit.
But nobody would speak of what had happened.
The affected girl would be quiet too, suffering in silence.
The only explanation explained nothing; it was simply said that she was sick and the questions died there. She’s sick. That was all.
Genital mutilation had no name, it was referred to as that.
That: a secret practice within feminine traditions.
Zahra Bayda tells me about the childhood of her sister Alfarah, two years older than her.
Alfarah was twelve, had the same name as her aunt, and was her aunt’s favorite.
Alfarah the aunt would take care of Alfarah the niece, and protect her.
When the niece’s hour of the knife arrives, the aunt tries to stop history from repeating itself, persuading her sister—the girl’s mother—that there’s no reason to do that, that it’s barbaric.
“They did it to us, but there’s no reason to do it to her,” she says, but the mother does not cede.
After much insistence, Alfarah the aunt gets the mother to agree to taking young Alfarah to the hospital, so it can at least happen in the most painless, hygienic way.
At the hospital, a female surgeon takes the girl and pricks her between her legs with a pin so that just a few drops of blood are shed, then returns her to the mother.
“All done,” she lies, “your daughter has had the operation.” Young Alfarah returns home and is completely calm.
She’s not despondent like the other girls.
She doesn’t cry or stay still; she plays and goes to work as if nothing had happened.
The mother gets suspicious, and demands: Show me.
She forces her daughter to open her legs and, on realizing that the surgeon tricked her, drags the girl to her grandmother to be cut and sewn.
“When I saw my sister Alfarah screaming in pain, unable to pee, and with terrible swelling,” Zahra Bayda says, “I wanted to know why. And I started to suspect something. I started to investigate. I knew our grandmother had done that to her. I also knew that one of my married sisters had become barren because of that, and that another had died because of sepsis caused by that. At that time, I was ten, and I understood the cruel myths of feminine blood: Menstrual blood was disgusting and a source of shame, while the blood of lost virginity was precious, more valuable than rubies. I also understood another thing. I knew well that I’d be next. ”
From that day on, Zahra Bayda stays as far away from her mother as she can.
She has a good pretext, namely, her duty to take the four black-headed sheep out to graze in nearby valleys.
She’s home less and less, only for the essentials, grabbing something to eat and running back out; in such a large family, her absence goes almost unnoticed.
She takes the precaution of showing up only when her brothers are present, as they protect her; they are against that, they believe it’s bad, they don’t want to marry mutilated women because they’re cold and indifferent in bed.
They’re more modern: They want warm, passionate wives.
“At that time I was so thin that one day, at school, no one recognized me. I was eating so little, I’d become my own shadow. I stayed hidden, and that’s how I saved myself from that,” Zahra Bayda says, “but that doesn’t mean I was completely saved.”
“What happened? The rape, what happened?” I sensed the moment had arrived to ask the question.
“I rarely think about it. I carry it inside, but don’t often think of it,” she says.
“I’ve tried to separate it from me. I’ve also tried to see it through those men’s eyes.
It was brutal, what they did to me, and yet there was so much camaraderie among them, or, better put, complicity.
A group of adults playing adolescents’ dirty games, as if the sexual urge were more of a matter between them than with me.
I’m telling you all this after years of reconstructing, deciphering, daring to remember, though all I retain is blurry pieces.
The details escape me, or maybe I never fully registered them, not even in the moment.
There are things I’m definitely clear on, for example, that my annihilation was their victory.
A dirty ceremony, you understand? An act of war, or revenge.
But I’m giving you my old burden of pain!
Can you bear it? Then I’ll go on. After that happened, all that was left of me was a blur of agony, a semiconsciousness between helplessness and rage, and then only weariness, an infinite weariness, and a river of fog that carried me, carried me.
A river that was my own death. I don’t know how long I spent lying on the ground, which was soft and damp, wet with my blood.
Light left the sky and filled it again, one or two more times, and I remained there, still and far away, surrendered to darkness like the dead.