     QOSLAAYE | Wednesday, September 13, 2000 - 06:09 pm
Dear Reader: I am not demafing the somali women, but as a somali gentelman, I am discussed by her remarks about her siiiiiiiiil, who needs to know about that. It should be a sacret to all woman. After she is nothing more than a Pussssy seller.
If you think I am just insult her, continue reading, then cast your vote.
More than 20 years ago, when she was a child, Dirie's sex was stolen from her in an ancient African ritual.
"It's like being crippled," she says .
Much has been written about female circumcision, a revered rite of passage in parts of Africa, the Middle east and Southeast Asia. Women have fled their countries to escape it; human rights activists have decried it.
But there remain as many as 120 million who have suffered the mutilation. Most do not speak out, accepting circumcision as something their grandmothers and mothers endured, something their daughters and granddaughters will endure.
Dirie is different. She left Somalia behind long ago. She has travelled the world, lived in Paris, moved to New York, graced numerous ads and magazines. And she is in a position to fight the tradition of genital cutting.
"Why am I here talking to you, from herding my camels in the desert?" says Dirie, clad simply in a white blouse and black slacks, her face devoid of makeup. "I know what that reason is ...Its... to do something about it, to speak for those who can't."
In some ways, Dirie has never left Somalia. She wears no watch, telling time by the length of shadows. She sniffs the air to check if it will rain. She thinks she is 28. She comes from a small nomadic clan that survived by pursuing rain across the desert to support its camels. Men were the leaders, and women existed to please them.
She remembers when she was about four or five. Her sister had been circumcised a year or two earlier, and Dirie was envious.
"She used to tell me, Oh, I'm a woman now. I'm not a girl anymore," she recalls.
"I said, Mama, when are you going to do to me what you did to her? I want to be a woman."
"Of course, my time came and it wasn't the greatest like I thought it was going to be," she pauses.
"It was nothing but torture."
The night before, Dirie got a full glass of camel's milk a dinner - an unheard-of treat in a clan where an entire family usually shares a single glass. Her mother said, "tomorrow morning, you're going to be a woman." Dirie was so excited she could hardly sleep.
Dirie's mother woke her before dawn. The two met an old gypsy woman and walked into the desert to a large, flat rock.
"My mother looked at me and said, I haven't got the strength to hold you down. Don't fight me," recalls Dirie, her low voice dragging.
She stuck a piece of root between my teeth. She said, "Just hold onto your pain there." The gypsy woman took out a small, dull blade. Suddenly, Dirie felt a searing pain, followed by seemingly endless agony.
"I didn't move," Dirie murmurs. "I just shivered. There was no painkiller, no anesthesia, nothing. I don't really know when it was over. I passed out."
There are many forms of female circumcisions. In some cases, the women's clitoris - the primary organ of sexual pleasure - is nicked or its foreskin is cut off. More often, it is amputated. The most severe form known as infibulation, and performed about 15 per cent of the time is what happened to Derie.
All of the external sexual organs are scraped away, and the wound is sewn closed with acacia thorns, catgut, silk or a homemade glue, with a matchstick-sized hole created to pass urine.
Survivors endure a lifetime of after-effects - difficulty in urinating and menstruating, painful intercourse, repeated infections, sometime infertility. Women are cut or forced open on their wedding night, cut open more to give birth, then sewed up again.
In a way, Derie was lucky she survived. One of her sisters and a cousin didn't. Many girls die from haemorrhaging, shock, infection of tetanus. In the aftermath, Derie was severely depressed.
Her legs were tied together from hip to ankle for weeks to keep her ripping open the wound. Urination was excruciating, and she became infected. She couldn't eat for a month.
As she grew older, Derie refused to accept her fate as a Somali woman.
When her father arranged for her to marry an elderly man in exchange for five camels, she ran away from home. Just 13 years old, the skinny girl walked 300 miles across Somalia to the capital Mogadishu, drinking from camels in the desert to survive.
Once, she collapsed under a tree, exhausted, and awoke to find a lion staring into her eyes. She lay immobile, frozen with terror, until the great animal ambled away.
Dirie found a home with her mother's sister, Halima. Then an uncle who was Somalia's Ambassador to Britain came looking for a domestic servant for his London household. Derie won the job.
In England, the first thing she noticed was that the people all looked pale and very ill. I never saw White People before," she says, laughing.
Then she discovered that her cousins weren't circumcised. "I figured out that what happened to me wasn't right," she says. She said nothing, but embraced western culture, learning English from television.
When her uncle and his family returned to Somalia three years later, Derie buried her passport in the yard a week before their departure and claimed she lost it so she wouldn't have to go.
Suddenly she was 16, alone and home-less in London. But she met a Somali woman who invited her to share her YMCA room, and got a job cleaning the grill at McDonald's.
A photographer saw her and suggested she try modelling.
Dirie eventually dropped into a modelling agency and was immediately sent out to audition for the prestigious Pirelli calendar.
When the photographer asked out, thinking he wanted to sleep with her. But the agency explained the earning potential of modeling compared to McDonald's, so she returned and landed the cover.
That was almost 10 years ago. For all those years, Derie who embodied sex hid her own sexual amputation.
She finally broke her silence in 1996, telling her story to Britain's Narie Claire magazine. The many supportive letters and phone calls she has received from readers have strengthened her resolve to act.
Derie lives every day with the consequences of her own cutting. A doctor in England surgically opened her scar when she started menstruating, but painful periods still her to bed for days.
She says she has "been chaste all my life," believing sex belongs in marriage, and is engaged to jazz drummer Dana Murry.
Many cut women, with encouragement from loving partners, are still able to enjoy sex because the scar area and other parts of the body can be quite sensitive, says Hanna Lightfoot-Klein, a sexologist who interviewed 400 infibulated women in Sudan in the early 1980s.
"There's nothing I can do but live with it, heal myself," Derie says after climbing a spiral staircase to her modelling agency's rooftop for a photo session.
She pauses, lost in thought, and looks out over the city streets. It seems her gaze reaches across an entire ocean.
(Asian Age, Bombay) |
