Free Cut by Hibo Wardere

sight of my mother beside me, my auntie pulling at my leg, the cutter’s strange eyes, my fear. My hands
shook violently. My knees stayed clamped together as I tried to breathe, slowly in, slowly out. I had wanted so much to be here, to get help, and now I wondered how that might happen when I
couldn’t bring myself to open my legs and allow the doctor to examine me.
    The doctor saw my distress.
    ‘It’s OK,’ she said gently, touching my knee. ‘Can you open?’ and she gestured with her hands, as if miming opening a book.
    I tried, really I did, but the images were coming harder and faster.
    ‘It’s OK, it’s OK,’ she said again.
    But all I could see was the cutter, slowly adjusting her scarf, dipping her hands in the kettle of water, those two long pincer nails . . .
    I took another deep breath, and then another.
You’re here now, Hibo
, I told myself. Let her help you – this is your chance. So somehow, ever so slowly, I allowed my legs to
fall apart, just a few millimetres at first, her hands gently guiding them. And then finally, I was exposed and she saw for herself what I’d never yet dared to see with my own eyes. Skin
snipped away, a hole just the size of a matchstick where my vagina should be. All other evidence of my femininity deleted and stitched over.
    I burst into tears, just at the thought of what she saw before her, and feeling so ashamed of the way I looked, of the way they’d left me. I didn’t want this doctor to think I was a
freak, because that’s how I thought of myself. She handed me a tissue, and then she went over to the small sink in her room, splashed water on to her face and dried it with a paper towel,
before turning back to me. Noticing that she was so moved by what she’d seen somehow made me feel like I had an ally, that at last someone could see what they’d done to me back in
Somalia. For the first time since I was six years old, someone was sympathising with me. Just her look told me that, and suddenly I wasn’t frightened anymore.
    She nodded and gestured to me to get dressed, and handed me an appointment card for 3:30pm the following day.
    ‘Are you OK?’ she asked, taking my arm before I left her office. And I nodded. ‘OK,’ I repeated, because I trusted her.
    I didn’t go straight back to the hostel after I left the surgery – I needed to gather myself together before I went home, because I knew that if anyone there found out what I was
planning there would be repercussions. As I sat in a nearby park, watching the male pigeons dance around the females in an attempt to woo them, I understood that something now separated me from
those other girls at the hostel. In sharing this secret with that doctor and showing her what had been done to me, I had taken the first step towards speaking out. For the second time in my life, I
knew it was about to change irrevocably.
    I couldn’t sleep that night. I lay there in my bed, watching the beams of vehicle lights flicker across the walls of my room and listening to the sounds of the street. Perhaps it was the
excitement that was keeping me awake, and perhaps it was the fear of what might happen the next day, when I returned to the surgery. It was probably a combination of both.
    The following afternoon, back in the GP’s waiting room, I sat across from another more official-looking Somalian woman. I guessed she was my translator. We smiled and said hello, but
nothing more, although I could tell from the way her eyes crinkled when she smiled that she was a kind woman. She must have been in her thirties, and was dressed in a very Western way, smart with
long trousers, and she had a wide smile underneath a red
hijab
.
    A few moments later we were both called into the doctor’s office and I felt relief, not fear, to see this kind doctor again. She spoke and in turn the translator said to me in Somali:
‘The doctor wants to know what you want her to do.’
    So I told her: ‘I want her to open me.’ And I