CUT IN THE HEART “A true woman is known by courage and endurance to pain” Mama told me the night before. As though I was having a bad dream, my eyes opened but my sight was too blurry to recognize anything. There was a pool of wetness under my body and I could smell the hard stench of blood. A wave of constant piercing-pain stung through my veins, the pain escalated with every flow of blood in my body. Every drop of blood from my body exerted a deep pain on my privates as though I was in labor and about to deliver a baby at a pre-mature time. “Na the woman hand no good for cutting”, the other women gossiped in the corner of the room. I could feel those words pass through my ears as a woman feels her monthly periods. But periods have never been this extremely painful. “Even the person she cut last week self blood comot too much, she never still wake up self” The woman continued. All of a sudden the woman who cut me returned to the room with a medical doctor from the hospital in our community. My sight was still blurry but I could see her warning the older woman, whose hands still had my blood freshly dripping from her finger tips. “Thank God” I managed to breathe a breath of relief, hoping she was here to take me to the hospital to treat my wounds. Rather, the four women held me down strongly even though my body had yielded, and I had no strength left to struggle. “Spread her legs well well” The doctor instructed the women and they obliged immediately. I could feel my thighs tearing up a streak of my blood spilled on the doctor’s white lab-coat as I squeezed myself, wriggling in pain in my attempt to break free from the women’s grip. I saw my butchered skin resting in my blood on a plate. The women once again pinned me to the wooden table as the older lady passed the doctor a needle and thread. I could feel every stitch as she gently pierced and firmly dragged with the thread and needle. She stitched my vagina lips together only leaving space for urine. In this moment, I vowed never to bring a daughter into this wicked world.
