‘It should be a law! All Muslim girls should have their vaginas inspected at school when they turn seven! That way, we will know, we can find out if the circumcision has taken place and we can go after their parents.” The Dutch woman gestured wildly, punctuating every sentence with a glare at the audience and a hand slamming on the desk in front of her. We were on a panel together and the chairperson turned to me, slightly bemused, asking if I would like to respond.
I had been in Amsterdam for a week, with a play, At Her Feet, which was running as a part of a South African arts festival. We had been billed with Veiled Monologues, a work whose poster had already attracted debate. It showed a naked woman, her nipple jutting out in profile, covered with a transparent hijab, her face indecipherable in shadow.
A few hours earlier I had watched the production. The director, once a performer in The Vagina Monologues, had appropriated that production’s conceptual framework and created a piece that articulated immigrant Muslim women’s experiences in The Netherlands. The director was a Dutch Christian (lapsed).
The chairperson looked at me expectantly; I had been sitting in stunned silence. I was unsure of where to begin: with the unapologetic orientalism of the poster, the flagrant paternalism of the director’s politics, or the potential child abuse she was trying to make legal.
I started with the children. I suggested that a state-issued mandatory physical examination of children’s genitals without individual parental guidance or consent raises the possibility of abuse. That if these girls had endured the horrors of circumcision, inspecting them would re-enact trauma, especially if the sexualised wound was used to trap their parents. There would be, I said, inevitable and terrible damage. Surely there must be another way?
The Dutch director leaned forward, her body taut with anger: ”No! No! This is fucking liberalism! You people never do anything! You just fucking talk! Words mean nothing!”
Words mean nothing?
The law was never passed, but it had been talked about in Holland.This woman was not speaking in a vacuum, this was a national discussion. There are about 945 000 Muslims living in the country and about 50 female circumcisions occur there each year. That’s 50 too many, but there are thousands of girls who do not suffer genital mutilation and an understanding is beginning to filter through these communities that this is not an Islamic dictate but a cultural imperative.
The Dutch government decided that it did not have the moral or political authority to insist on mandatory check-ups, so instead implemented educational packages in schools about the health-related dangers of the act.
Later that night, I spent a long time thinking about words, war and wounds.
Another story, another city. This time one that darted in and out of my life, grew over a year to contain its own horror, and left me wondering if words are meaningless after all.
At Her Feet was performed to mark the opening of New York University’s Centre for Political and Social Transformation through the Arts. After the show, a high school teacher from one of the outer boroughs introduced me to an Afghani immigrant student. A shy girl with a sweet smile, she peered at me from behind her teacher, her hair covered with a burkha, her body clothed in a long, shapeless dress. She had been living in the United States with her father and brothers for five years. Her mother, unable to acquire the necessary visa, was stranded in Pakistan. She took my hand, looked a little confused at my bare head and jeans, and leaned in to kiss me on either cheek.
Months later, I had forgotten about having met her. My life crowded around me with its own concerns. And then one day her teacher phoned me, panicked. ”My student — the one you met — is in Pakistan, she is being forced into an arranged marriage. Can you help?” I was walking down a busy street. All around me people moved — men, women and children in the over-populated heat of a New York summer, darting between traffic, grimacing behind designer sunglasses, and cooling themselves with fans from China Town. An arranged marriage. Trapped in Pakistan. I found somewhere quiet to talk. The story came in bits and pieces.
The night we had met the teacher had driven her student home. In the car, a terrible secret that had been lying deep and dormant in the girl rose to her throat and tumbled from her lips. She told her teacher she had been raped as a child by a family friend. The teacher says to me: ”She said she could tell me after watching the play [At Her Feet] — she felt I understood her better through it.” My mouth goes dry. I do not feel a sense of pride, just a fear of being in over my head. The woman is still talking: ”She went to Pakistan a few weeks ago. She told her mother everything.”
The girl had pictured her mother’s response in infinite detail. She had imagined her body melting into the older woman’s embrace and her head covered with a thousand apologetic kisses; that the telling of this dreadful truth would transform the distance between them and years apart, as if by some magic alchemy, into love and wholeness. She did not know her mother would shrink from her story or that the day would end in chaos, with a visit to a brutal gynaecologist and a family meeting in which her rape would be announced as a familial shame that needed to be rectified with a marriage.
I do not know how to help. I have only imagined girls like this. I have dreamed of them and danced them to their deaths on stage and given them words to speak from beyond their graves. I have written about them wrapped in fabric, sitting somewhere in a windswept desert cradling their daughters, renouncing patriarchy.
I try not to dwell too much on the trauma of the gynaecological examination or what kinds of terrible memories will be stirred if this marriage ever takes place. I have a distant cousin in Pakistan, a writer and a participatory member of the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan. I contact her and she offers to speak to the girl’s mother, to explain to her that a forced marriage is against Sharia law, and to let the girl know of places of refuge. The e-mails from the girl are still coming to her teacher. Hurry, hurry … night is coming, darkness is falling … And then suddenly the contact stops, she has been banned from using the phone, the Internet, she is being watched closely by her relatives.
But the teacher persists. She manages to get the family’s contact number and sends it to my cousin, and for 24 hours I carry with me a sense of the serendipitous. I believe my cousin will speak words to the mother that will weave a pattern of sense and understanding, that the familiarity of a shared tongue will draw this woman towards accepting that her child’s needs supersede notions of honour. And then the teacher calls. It is over. The girl has been married. She has been packed off to Islamabad to live with her husband.
Another girl, another story. This tale takes place just outside Baghdad, and its protagonist, barely 14, has been utterly silenced. On March 12, five American soldiers broke into a home near a checkpoint and killed its occupants. The six-year-old child was just shot, but the 14-year-old was raped by two of the soldiers and then killed. She is said to be buried in an unmarked grave because her family cannot bear the shame.
What connects these three stories? What threads together the rant of the Dutch director, the e-mails that flew between New York and Pakistan, and the burnt body of the Iraqi girl? Nothing in particular and everything in general. Young Muslim girls’ bodies are becoming the site of vicious contestation: if you are a self-styled European intellectual radical you declare mass vaginal inspection; if you are a mother retreating into archaic values because you feel threatened by Western influences you marry your child off at the slightest provocation; if you are a soldier in a colonising army you collapse into behaviour as old as war; and if you are the family of a raped child you retreat into humiliated silence. These stories snake themselves around the globe in a vicious embrace and hold women to an impossible ransom.
Everyone can bristle with self-righteous anger in this age of lines being drawn and claims being staked. And everyone can forget in the interim that the fragile worlds spinning inside those girl-bodies are being broken in ways that cannot heal.