“My mother doesn’t know either.”
“How old is your daughter?”
“Twenty-four.”
“Twenty-four years old, and your mother still doesn’t know?”
“Nor will she. I had Iftiin when I was a child myself. In Somalia, at thirteen years old you’re considered a woman. From the moment my daughter was born, I swore that she would never endure what I had. And as far as I know, that’s how it’s gone—well, to the extent possible. Iftiin had the childhood I never did. She and I, the two of us out in the wide world. Seriously poor, but still, she grew up happy, healthy, and free. I never allowed her to be mistreated, and today she’s a good young woman, intelligent and beautiful; I’m not shy about saying it, because it’s true. She’s a typical Somalian beauty: tall and thin, toasted skin, a wide forehead, big, bright eyes,voracious teeth, and long, coltish legs; they say she looks like Iman, David Bowie’s Somali wife; it’s a flippant comparison, I know, but Iftiin really does look like Iman. And I’m not saying this to make fun of you, Bos Mutas, nor of your fantasies, but at the university people call her... the Queen of Sheba. It’s common, all attractive Somali or Ethiopian women get called that.”
Zahra Bayda doesn’t want to be like her mother, but tries to understand her.
“For my mother, suffering is part of her very being,” she says. “I decided when I was little that that wouldn’t work for me. Don’t ask me why, but unlike my sisters, I knew I wasn’t born to suffer. Life was hard, yes, but I wasn’t going to surrender to misfortune with my hands tied, as if there were no other choice. Life is suffering, that’s my mother’s only maxim. But for her daughters, maybe deep down she’s always wanted something else. I’ve spent years struggling to make peace with my mother, whose mind is eroded by unimaginable injustice and pain. Now I suspect that there’s a hope of happiness in some corner of her, not for herself, but for her daughters. She left me that as an inheritance, and I’m thankful. I want to return to Somalia before she dies. I want to forgive her and for her to forgive me, I want to see her with new eyes, in a more compassionate, less distant way.”
Gerald Hanley, a British official in Somalia during World War II, perhaps the only Westerner who managed to settle into and grow fond of those hot-winded lands, wrote that he couldn’t recall them without thinking of daggers, spears, fierce eyes framed by curly hair, tribal fanaticism, hysterical aristocrats who enslave southern tribes, mad, stubborn camels, rocks that scald the touch, blood vendettas of forgotten origins that nevertheless still get settled by the blade. He described its inhabitants asthe most difficult, the proudest, the bravest, the vainest, the most merciless, the friendliest... of people.1 Is Zahra Bayda like that too, the proudest, bravest, vainest, most merciless, and most generous? I’d been working with her for several monthsnow and still couldn’t decipher her. She’s a great conversationalist, like all Somalis, a people in love with speech and oral traditions; not for nothing do they call themselves Masters of the Word. She’s like that too, and yet she’s secretive. Within such a talkative polyglot, great silence can hide.
Her large family lived crammed into one of the shacks of an enormous slum, among dirt roads and alleys where ramshackle cars clattered and donkeys carried burdens bigger than themselves. The air was a condensation of salty heat. The house smelled of incense, wood smoke, and stews spiced with cumin, garlic, and onion. Child, close the door, you’re letting in dust! But the dust was already inside, the dust was entering no matter what, and was there to stay.
In the mornings Zahra Bayda went to school, and in the afternoons she took care of four sheep with black heads and white bodies, leading them to the outskirts to find grass. Like all other girls, she wore clothes dyed red with beets by her mother and aunts. In the summers, the temperature rose to 120 degrees, famine bore down, and so many people died that her father, a gravedigger by trade, became sick with exhaustion and couldn’t dig anymore.
“My mother waited on my father as if she were his slave,” Zahra Bayda says. “Every night she’d heat water for his bath, scrub his back, and dry him off. Until my father married again, brought the new wife home, and ordered my mother to heat water for her too. My mother obeyed and filled the tub, but the fourth wife, who was very young, complained to my father, saying the water was too cold for bathing. My father told my mother to reheat it. My mother dared protest, Let her heat it, she said, What is she, crippled? My father punished my mother until his hands swelled up from hitting her. I must have been about seven when this happened, and that very day I decided I’d never marry. I’d never be anyone’s wife. I’d study, I’d get a degree, and I’d go far away to a place where I could work, so I’d never have to carry hot water for any man or take his beatings.”
Some people warn against making wishes, because you run therisk that they might come true. That’s what happened to Zahra Bayda as a girl: She was forced to leave home, much earlier than planned.
Her mother and aunts kept a shrine to Makeda on the patio and worshipped her there. Makeda is the name given to the Queen of Sheba in those lands. Makeda, the immaculate, the inviolate, pure flower among flowers.
“I don’t know whether you’ll want to hear this, Bos Mutas, given the way you idealize her. I don’t think there’s any crueler cult than Makeda’s, nor any more brutal initiation rite.”
Brutal rite and, according to Zahra Bayda, not entirely foreign to Western traditions. She tells me that among her people, the vulva is calledmandorla, almond, a word that, likemacchiatoand 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 beatingcore. 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 asthat.
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 dothat, 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 herdaughter to open her legs and, on realizing that the surgeon tricked her, drags the girl to her grandmother to be cut and sewn.
