Trigger warning / “A Part of Me” campaign:

This story could contain potentially sensitive and/or triggering material, especially for victims of female genital mutilation. Please remember to check in with yourself as you read and to stop reading if it gets too overwhelming.

I was in middle school then.
My little sister, who was three years younger than me, was also in middle school.
I was in 9th grade and she was in 7th grade.
My mother is ignorant and uneducated. She harms others and herself.
She was never loved by her parents or siblings.
Girls to her were mere servants to their brothers, their mothers and their fathers.

This kind of thinking led to my circumcision.
I wasn't old enough to understand what happened.
But when my sister got circumcised, I was older.

One day, my mother took my sister out and said, “We are going on an errand.”
They disappeared all day.
I had to wait until they were back, since there were no phones then.
My mother came back home at night with my sister.
My sister was crying and looked very tired.

I didn't understand what was going on.
I went to my sister to check on her.
“Nothing’s wrong, she just got a bit tired.”
Things started making sense a few seconds later;
“I circumcised her,” she said when my father asked
Turns out that my father was firmly against this.
All this happened in a matter of seconds.
And the discussion as well was over in a matter of seconds.
My sister was violated. She looked broken.
She couldn't stop crying,
Our home turned into a battlefield.

My father is a big man.
He is almost double my mother’s size;
He is a fat, bald large man with wide shoulders.
My mother was small in comparison.
Baba is not the kind of father who beat us,
Nor does he use it as a parenting tool.
He always discussed things with my mother,
Everything was always up for discussion;
They would talk and share viewpoints.

In a matter of seconds, and after my mother said, “I circumcised her,”
My father transformed completely;
He didn’t even wait for them to come into the house.
It was my first time seeing him hit my mother.
He beat her so hard, with such vengefulness,
Nobody was able to stop him, or get him away from her.

He was beating her with revenge. He felt betrayed, violated.
It came as a reaction to my sister’s heart-wrenching tears,
She was stripped for the first time in front of a stranger.
That person violated her, took away a part of her.

Everyone gets shocked when I refer to my mother as a “fucking bitch;”
They think I am being too harsh.
But it is not related to feelings.
That day was the least of what our mother did to us;
Whether to me, my sister, or my brother.