The feelings of sadness in the room were palpable. It was almost as if you could touch it and quantify it for what it was worth. But as I lifted my head to see him, he seemed calm. He didn’t have a smile on, I mean, who would? But his face wasn’t sullen either. He seemed content. By what? I wondered.

“How is she now?” a lady almost whispered from the other corner of the room.

Smiling, “Adorable,” he said.
“See, Taji took her mother’s eyes, bears her nose, and has her unmissed forehead. She has her mother’s face,” he almost exclaimed with a smile. “At least she has my ears,” he added, amid laughter.

The room giggled.

“It’s like she is here so that I can have a constant reminder of the work that needs to be done for the generations ahead,” Dennis said as he headed to his seat.
There were no claps accorded to him afterward, not because his was not a captivating story, but because he left us with so much to ponder on and challenged our thinking in ways some of us felt uncomfortable. But it needed to be done. It needed to be told.

My hands covering my face that night, it all came rushing. Did all the girls feel this way when their fate was signed, futures sealed by the will of others?

For most of them, as soon as the mid-wives declared, that it was a girl, their futures were set in motion.

“I believed in the tradition too. I knew it was a rite of passage for all girls. I mean, I must have been sent to catch and carry back at least a dozen girls when I was younger. They were the ones who had tried to run away from the cutter but they couldn’t,” I recalled Dennis’ voice.

“Little did I know that one day, I would sit next to my wife and have her explain to me what she too went through in the hands of someone whose actions are the reason she is no longer here with us.”

Baby Taji’s mother succumbed due to complications during childbirth that had been caused by the infibulation she underwent when she was six years old.

“As I stood in the hallway after the nurses whisked me out of the delivery room, her screams reminded me of the ones I heard of the girls I roughly carried back to the small mud-house when I was a teenager in the village,” Dennis had narrated.

Some nights the screams that are now tattooed in his mind keep him up but most days, he reaches out to as many people as he possibly can creating awareness of how archaic and horrible female genital mutilation is.

His will is simple, he wants his daughter, Taji, to live life fully on her terms. That was the reason, he looked content after sharing his story with us, that day.