‘It is our way.’
Those words echo in my soul and run shivers down my spine.
It was what Mother told me as we walked down the darkened hallway two decades ago. What she told herself years after. To find meaning. To find closure.
She whispered them with reverence with every step we took closer to the Room.

She let me go then they grabbed me. Each woman found a limb to restrain. Pinning and parting me to the mouth of the blade.
It is our way. It was in their eyes, glistening with unwavering loyalty.
I was cut and scarred.
Now, I remove our way from the lives of every woman and child.

Mother was also cut. She fought before she was cut. Ran from the village for another life. The yam merchant who offered her a ride to the park circled back and took her home. He was her father’s loyalist. She was tied to a tree for days for insulting the ways of her fathers. A month later, she was cut at fifteen.
Isolation to the farthest part of her father’s compound came with the agony of fistula. She was ‘lucky’ as her mother sneered, to get married to the merchant who gave her up.
He became my father who left when I was six. Left us for an uncut woman who could have sex without howling in pain. Whose child didn’t burden him with merciless hospital bills.
He left us yams, and money so we started a pounded yam restaurant. Mother never looked me in the eye after the night of the blade so when I left for Harvard at sixteen, she bowed her head and said, ‘Goodbye Anike’
I saw her ten years later with her head still bowed but with shoulders raised. She started a Home for females cut by the blade. Each had faced agony with the pains and leaks, with fistula like my mother or the finality of infertility. Like me.
Story after story, woman after woman, child after child. We uncovered an evil unleashed by the ways of the fathers.
I still see their eyes shivering with fear. Their tear-laden faces tell more pain than a heart could ever bear.

I will speak today. I see Mother last before I walk on stage. With my hands in hers and fire in her eyes, she says, ‘It will never be our way.’