Underskog

Et stort portrett av mamma

“Oh take me, if I return some day,
As a veil for your eyelashes,
And cover my bones with herbs,
That turned sacred by your ankle,
And tie me,
With a strand of hair,
Or a thread, that dangles from your dress,
For I may turn to a god.”

I planned everything for when I go back to Khartoum, The very first thing that I will do is to walk. I will walk from somewhere to somewhere for an hour or two. And then I will cry. I might even ask God for forgiveness for I have sinned. When I am done with that, I will go to Mom’s place. I will try to lie to her about why I couldn’t bring my daughter with me. I will not tell her about the lady judge who said to my ex, “I understand.”: and then nodded to show that she really did understand.
My ex claimed that she is afraid that I will circumcise my daughter if we travel abroad. She said, “You never know what will happen in Sudan.” And the judge nodded her head and understood. Then she looked at me as if there was something I didn’t understand about Norwegian culture.
I am surprised how good that sentence was. Because it’s so true that one never knows what will happen in Sudan.
One of my biggest idols in life is a man named Taha. He was hanged by some dictator in 1983 because he wrote a book. He was told in court if he just said that he didn’t mean what he wrote, he would not be harmed. Of course, he refused. This man was a rebel who fought against British colonization, a philosopher who wrote in the seventies a book about how to understand Islam in a more peaceful and tolerant way. He had many followers and his Ideas were so intelligent and advanced that he might have had a solution to what Muslims are still struggling with today. But there is a dark spot in his bright history. His very first battle with our English colonizers was when they issued a law to fight female circumcision in Sudan. Mr. Taha led hundreds of angry Sudanese men and women to free a woman who circumcised her daughter and was put in jail. When he managed to free the lady, he was put in jail. He looked at them and thought that there was something they would never understand about our culture.

I learned that when you are circumcised you are never able to have an orgasm. Sex means nothing but pain. And every time you give birth your genitals will be sewed “back” so you can have sex again. It’s like cutting a wound and when it heals, your man will cut his way through your flesh to plant another seed inside you, and when it’s time to give birth, you will be cut again and sewed again. I know that in some parts of Sudan, they sew the genitals and leave two or three matches to form a new opening. The hole opening that one will urinate and bleed through. The opening that will show that you never lost your virginity.

In Sudan now, at this moment, some young girl might be held by her aunts or grand- mother, while some other woman slices her knife through her small genitals. Cutting her while she is bleeding and screaming. Someone did that to Mom half a century ago. And some are still doing it today.
My mom is a tall beautiful Nubian woman and nothing tastes like the food she makes. She is the one who taught me English. I remember sitting in our yard during the warm evenings of the eternal summer of Khartoum next to her while reading pocket books in English. She used to correct my mistakes in her thick Sudanese accent and answer my questions about the meaning of some words.
When my dad fell in love with her, he was a young medical doctor in his twenties and she was nineteen. He, like the rest of his generation, had no one to marry but those beautiful but circumcised women. They had to share their lives and beds with them. And watch them suffer as they were giving us the right to be born. My parents like many other parents who were educated, refused to circumcise their daughters. I know now, that the others looked upon them as if there was something they would never understand about their own culture.

It’s a very long way still. There are thousands of young girls there to save still. There are thousands of them who died bleeding or infected before they reached my daughter’s age. But we will work still. And hope that one day, all this will be gone. Because after all, you never know what will happen in Sudan.

Fadlabi- Oslo- 2011

Utstillingen står fra 16. september til 14. oktober. Mandag-fredag kl. 10.00-16.00.