Save your daughter

Asha Ismail was born in Kenya into a Somali family. Her daughter, Hayat Traspas, was born in Somalia, although she lived there only for a while.

When Asha was five years old, she was circumcised. Two decades later, she saved Hayat from it, who thus became the first girl in the family to be saved from mutilation.

In 2007 in Spain, Asha founded Save a Girl Save a Generation, an NGO, which fights FGM (female genital mutilation) in Kenya and sensitises European doctors, police officers, and officials to this problem. Today she runs the organisation together with Hayat.

They live in Madrid, but they talk to me from Nairobi, where their biggest project in Kenya to date has just started. As part of it, they train local ambassadors for the fight against female circumcision. They look very tired but also happy because the course is going really well.

“Without African women, the fight against FGM will never succeed,” they say.

Hayat, do you remember when and how you found out about what your mother had gone through?

I don’t remember a specific moment when I heard “sit down, let me explain to you what is happening in our family”. It happened gradually, I learned about it, for example, from the interviews she gave. Besides, I didn’t like it very much. “Why are you telling these people about your life?” I asked. It was enough for me to be the only black girl in school, I wanted to be like everyone else, and I didn’t understand why my mother shared such intimate matters with strangers. So the topic of circumcision came naturally to me. People just talked about it at home. It's the same now. When we talk, my little daughters are nearby.

When did you start working together?

Hayat: I've always supported my mother, but I saw it as her own struggle, the aftermath of what she had gone through. When I became a mother to two girls, I felt not only happiness, but also responsibility. Save a girl – I was the saved girl after all. Save a generation – the future belongs to their generation. I believe that if our family has managed to oust a tradition that had lasted for generations, change is possible elsewhere as well. So now we fight together, my mother and I.

Asha: When I founded Save a Girl Save a Generation, Hayat was 18 years old. Launching an organisation – a systemic fight against FGM – has been my dream since she was born. But how was I supposed to know how to establish an organisation? I started with a personal mission: I talked to relatives and other women I knew about FGM, persuading them not to do it to their daughters. When, after several years of living in Spain, I decided to register an organisation, I engaged the women I had at hand, including my sister and Hayat. My sister works in Save a Girl to this day. She was also circumcised and saved her daughter just like me.

One of the moments in your biography that touched me greatly was the first visit to a gynaecologist in Spain, at the beginning of the first decade of the 21st century.

Asha: When the doctor saw my perineum, she didn’t say anything, just called another doctor, then another, and suddenly I had four people staring at me in horror, speechless. I remember leaving the hospital all sweaty. I sat down at the bus stop and burst into tears like a baby. If something like this happened to me, and I consider myself a strong person, then how much did such situations have to cost other women who do not have the courage to speak out about them. It coincided with the time when people from Somalia and Sudan started coming to Spain. I realised that training for employees of local services is inevitable. In Spain alone, today there are 17,000 girls at risk of circumcision and 70,000 women who have experienced it.

I felt terrible that day, I was humiliated and furious. But over time, I realised that the doctors were helpless. They didn’t want to interfere in my life, we were separated by a language barrier. The questions we're asked now during the training are: “How do I ask about that?”, “What should I say?” “Don’t be shy”, I say. “I wanted to hear some questions that day”.

This happened when Asha was five, while visiting the village where her grandparents lived. She mentions that she was excited because all she knew was that there was going to be a special event that would make her a different person. In the morning she was sent for a razor and needle. It all happened in her grandmother’s kitchen, on the floor. Grandma held her from behind, and when Asha started screaming, the woman performing the circumcision put a piece of rag in her mouth. “Somali women don’t scream,” she heard. The woman sewed up the wound and applied a disinfectant. Then her legs were tied, and she was placed in bed for a month to heal the wounds. A few days after the procedure, the woman came back to check for infection. Little Asha was glad to hear that “everything's on the right track”.

She has been subjected to infibulation, the most drastic form of genital mutilation, which involves the removal of the inner and outer labia and the suturing of the vulva. Only a small opening is left for urine and menstrual blood. In addition to mental trauma, mutilation comes with lifelong physical pain – extremely painful periods, sexual intercourse, and childbirth – and a constant risk of infection.

There are a lot of superstitions about FGM. The basic one is that it's a practice related to religion, especially to Islam.

Asha: We don’t know much about the origins of this practice, because it’s not a topic that is of special interest to the world, so there’s no investment in research. While motivations may vary by country, culture, and religion, its first and foremost goal is to control women’s sexuality. In addition, there are other excuses: that it's dictated by religion, that it's about keeping sexual purity until marriage. But the primary goal is simply control. Circumcision of women, according to some documents, already existed two thousand years before Christ. Today it is practised in 29 African countries. Usually it's not about entire countries, but specific ethnicities or regions inhabited by both Muslims and, for example, Christians.

Clitorisectomy was also used in Great Britain to “treat” epilepsy and hysteria. From there, circumcision spread to the United States. I even spoke recently with an American doctor who experienced it. Circumcision is also reported in Colombia, among Aborigines in Australia, and in India. In total, we are talking about some 90 countries where such incidents occurred historically, some were the element of indigenous culture, in others women were circumcised as a result of migration.

The role of men in your story is surprising. Your father and grandfather were against circumcision.

Asha: My grandfather was a religious man, an imam. I remember him saying: “This is not done anymore, this is not allowed”. He was angry when he found out I had been circumcised. But despite this, all his daughters and granddaughters went through it. He never used his authority to influence the family, to prevent mutilations. Nor did my father – he was also against it and he didn’t do anything either. If they had taken advantage of their position, neither of us would have had to suffer.

Is your mother still alive?

Asha: Yes, she lives near Nairobi. She is in good shape, she laughs a lot.

Have you talked to her about circumcision?

Asha: Since Hayat was born, I have given myself the right to talk about it to whoever I want without hesitation or shame. Today my mother admits it was a mistake. But she doesn’t feel guilty. She did what was expected of her. She admits, however, that this should not have happened.

Why would she want to do this to you?

Asha: The social pressure was enormous. If she had made that decision as the first one in her family, she would have been considered crazy. She fulfilled her duty, and – in her understanding – she did it out of love too, because she wanted her daughter, that is me, to get married, not to be pointed fingers at and to be respected. In that era, she didn’t think she was doing wrong.

However, you rebelled already as a teenager.

Asha: I was trying to prevent my youngest sister from getting circumcised. I asked her if she knew what they would do to her, and then I explained it all. She was terrified, she cried a lot. I screamed, begged them not to do it to her, but it was to no avail. My parents locked me in my room with a padlock because I wanted to go to the police. Her circumcision was “gentle”, done in a Catholic hospital in Tanzania. Thousands of women were mutilated there, all you had to do was pay.

As a young girl, Asha was married off to a man much older than her, a Somali man she had never known before. After the wedding, she had to be cut open for intercourse to be possible. It took place just after her arrival from the hospital, when she was sore and bleeding. Today she simply calls her “wedding night” rape. She got pregnant then, and she never allowed her husband to come near her again. After the birth of Hayat, Asha decided to go to Europe. However, her plans were thwarted by the civil war that broke out in Somalia in 1991. She was separated from her daughter, whom she found, along with the girl's father, in the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya. The husband made the following condition: “I’ll give you the child if you help me get out of the camp”. She then moved heaven and earth to reclaim Hayat. She left for Europe only thanks to her second husband, a Spaniard, whom she met while working in an international organisation. In 2001, they settled in Madrid, Asha gave birth to two more sons. She has been living in Spain ever since.

You have transformed your traumas into a drive for action and fighting. Where did you get the strength for this?

Asha: My mother used to say that the cat is small and harmless, but if you chase it into a corner, it can scratch your eyes out. We all have the strength. We just need to decide whether to use it or not.

Hayat: Her energy is contagious. She knows how to involve people in her activities, which is why the organisation could grow so much. We're all in it because of her.

Asha: It's not the pain you feel during or after circumcision that's the worst, it's the pain that accompanies you throughout your life. The worst moment was the birth of Hayat.

How so?

Asha: When I got the baby in my arms and saw that it was a girl, I wanted to die. The last thing I wanted was to bring another woman into the world. But I also thought: since this little one is mine – I know we don’t own our children, but that’s what occurred to me – I swear she won’t have to go through the same thing as me. I held her in my arms and promised to protect her.

30 years later, you have a happy young woman by your side with whom you change reality. You are in Kenya right now, where you start the project “Kuelekea mabadiliko”. What does it mean?

Hayat: In Swahili, it means “Towards Change”. It's part of a larger project called “Training in Gender”. We wanted to start this training last year, but COVID thwarted our plans. However, we realised that we could not wait any longer. Due to school closures in the pandemic, there has been an increase in violence in various forms: female circumcision, premature marriages, and teenage pregnancies. We couldn't watch it idly, counteracting FGM became even more urgent. The project aims to reach out to women and men, girls and boys who come from regions of Kenya where circumcision is widespread. In the first stage, which is currently underway, we try to sow the seeds of activism in them, we want them to return to their communities with it. And then we will work with them in their territory, in their villages and cities. There are both Muslims and Christians, boys and girls, young and old people. We discuss a lot, we argue a lot.

About what?

Hayat: When men lack arguments, they turn to religion saying that God wants man to be a god at home. So we invited an imam to the class, who rejected their theses point by point. “You have confused religion with culture,” he said. When they heard something like that from a clergyman, they could only remain silent. It is different when we say the same thing, we are only two women after all.

What does all this have to do with female circumcision?

Hayat: Our activities in Kenya are run in two ways. We run a home for girls at risk of circumcision here – a direct action to keep them safe and sheltered. But we also see more and more clearly the need for long-term cooperation with communities and institutions. If we don’t change our way of thinking about gender and gender roles, we’ll never put an end to FGM.

Asha: Even if a girl avoids circumcision, she will still suffer the consequences of being a woman. She won’t be able to study where she wants or she won’t study at all, she won’t be able to decide for herself whether she wants to have one, two or three children. Boys – by the mere fact of being boys – are treated differently within the same family. They are sent to school, they are given more food when there is not enough of it, and the best part of meat is reserved for men when a goat is slaughtered. Women eat tripe, brain and all the other leftovers. Prohibiting circumcision is the first step, but it is not enough. The situation at home, the economic situation – these are the things that many anti-FGM organisations do not pay attention to. Therefore, there are no results. The fight against female circumcision has been going on for many years and should be history by now. But it's not.

What works then?

Asha: Work at the grassroots level. Education, empowering women, also economically, bottom-up, not at the conference tables. If you want to make the world aware that FGM is a problem, great, organise a conference, but if you want real effects, you have to go home, meet specific women, and talk to them many times. It's not a one-off training session. No, no, and no.

Men also take part in your training.

Asha: We want them to understand that FGM is pure violence. So that they could support their wives, sisters, cousins and advise their mothers. Of course, decisions about the body are women’s business and men should not interfere. But if they don't understand what this is all about, we shouldn't count on them supporting their wives.

The clergyman we invited showed a video explaining what FGM is all about. Lots of guys cried. Before they had no idea what it was about or what women were experiencing, they never bothered to research it. “It's horrible”, they said. One called his wife right away and said that he would not allow his daughter to be mutilated.

Hayat: We are not in favour of showing such videos, it seems to us that it is a kind of violence. We don’t need to watch a girl’s circumcision video to be aware of the pain and trauma. Most women, however, never share such stories. So for the men it was a wake-up call. One of the participants had so many questions for the imam after our discussions that he had to write them down.

Let’s go back to your main slogan. Without African women, the fight against female circumcision will not succeed, you say.

Hayat: It is very important that it is led by women who themselves come from the affected communities. If you are a white European, no matter how good your intentions may be, your interlocutors will think: it’s none of her business. When you talk about it “from the inside”, it’s different. Because you or your mother experienced it.

Asha: Of course, external support is also important. But if we hadn’t been from here, we wouldn’t have been able to argue or debate like we did this week, we’d hear that it’s none of our business.

Hayat: It is also about making girls and boys see that with little action a bigger and bigger ball begins to form – the famous domino effect. It doesn't matter that I am a migrant and a woman. I have the power. This gives hope that change is really possible.

 

Aleksandra Lipczak interviews Asha Ismail and Hayat Traspas
from Save a Girl Save a Generation

Photo: Tatiana Jachyra

The text was published in „Wysokie Obcasy" on 6 March 2021 

 

 

 

The Kulczyk Foundation supports the activities of Save a Girl Save a Generation both in Kenya and Spain. The Training in Gender programme is financed by the Foundation. During the training, adolescents and adults gain knowledge and tools to oppose female genital mutilation (FGM) and other forms of violence, such as forced marriage.

Dominika Kulczyk’s Foundation also supports the CHAIN project in Spain, co-financed by the EU. It aims to provide awareness-raising activities and training for African women, members of the FGM community as well as police officers and medical professionals providing help in case of FGM.