One morning, I woke to hear my sister crying in front of the closed bathroom door, making a sorrowful appeal to my father, who was on the other side. When I came over to her she told me, in between sobs, “There are two women in the sitting room with Mama. They’ve come to circumcise us.”
I still didn’t understand what circumcision was, but my small mind realized it was something connected to weeping and wailing. I started to cry alongside my sister, and as my father emerged from the bathroom, we grabbed his long, loose robe and hung on in a state of utter hysteria. Abouya dragged us to the sitting room, where Mama sat with two dark-skinned women. They were swathed in black and smelled strongly of aloewood. They had deep long scars on their cheeks and liquid kohl painted around their eyes. A black case sat before them. I wondered to myself if circumcision was what had caused their sunken facial scars. My father asked them quietly to leave the house, and despite my mother’s objections, they did so. But the idea did not leave with them. Instead, it returned, in the guise of a man.
I was eight years old. It was a normal morning during the first days of the summer vacation, and I remember I was wearing a long, yellow jalabiya with embroidered red roses and green leaves, which Aunt Zein had given to me. I had taken out my stories and my coloring books and was sitting on the floor in front of the television screen. In the fall, I would be starting third grade.
We heard the doorbell ring, and my brother and I raced to answer it. Two men and a woman stood outside. I knew the first of the men, Abdulaleem, an Egyptian barber and a friend of my father; the second man was his son. I had never seen the woman before.
I remember what happened next as if it were yesterday: it was painful and degrading and left deformities that serve as a constant reminder.
The actual event was over quickly. My sister disappeared, hiding herself in a place where she believed no one could find her. Mama took my brother into the other room, while I stayed with my father, the two men, and the woman. It didn’t take me long to grasp what was going on: my circumcision, after all this time, was about to become real. Sitting in that room, I recalled everything I knew about circumcision thus far: my sister’s wailing; my cousins’ threats; the sunken scars on the faces of the women swathed in black.
In one swift motion, the barber’s son grabbed me by my shoulders, the woman opened my legs, and I began to cry and scream hysterically. My father brought the water hose from the bathroom, the same hose that he used to beat us when he could not find his bamboo cane. He stood in front of me, threatening to whip me if I didn’t stop resisting. I stopped struggling.
The “operation” was performed in a few snips with a single pair of scissors and no anesthetic. The blood flowed red and wet down my legs. In that moment—and forever after—I wished with all my heart that I had kept on screaming and struggling, because the sting of the water hose was infinitely less than the agony I experienced that morning.
When my circumcision was completed, they found my sister. Because the scissors used during my procedure were blunt and a bit dull, they had managed to cut only the upper part of the clitoris. On my sister, they used a sharp razor blade. They removed everything.
Soaked in sweat and salty tears, and overcome with humiliation and searing pain, I hid my face under the covers and slept as if I had been knocked unconscious. At one point I felt a hand under the duvet. It reached toward my wound, and I sprang out of bed in fear. The hand belonged to the barber, who was clutching an ointment to smear on the wound. I ran, feeling nothing except the warm blood gushing from between my thighs. Very soon after, I lost consciousness.
I bled for three days; my sister told me afterward that my face turned yellow. They couldn’t take me to the doctor: although there is no official rule banning female circumcision, female circumcision can still be treated as a crime in many Saudi hospitals. If my circumcision had been reported, the barber could have been charged.
After the three days of heavy bleeding, an end of sorts came to the trauma. My parents were out, and the old lady was there once again, but this time she was sitting by my head. The barber asked my sister to bring him a needle and thread from my mother’s sewing machine. (My sister told me afterward that she hid all the needles once she realized his intention and brought only the thread.) He used the thread to tie five knots in various places on my most private areas. I don’t recall if it was painful or not, since I was almost delirious; my sister later told me what had happened. Either the knots or simply time or perhaps some combination of the two stopped the bleeding, and slowly I began to regain my health. But no one removed the thread afterward. The knots the barber tied that day caused lifelong deformities on the most intimate part of my body. Beyond the physical pain, I also could not forgive my parents, nor has my sister to this day. Almost none of my friends were circumcised. Mama and Abouya had made Muna and me unlike all the other girls.
Sometimes, I wonder how things would have been if the dark-skinned women that my mother brought to the house had succeeded in their task. Then my sister and I would have been subject to pharaonic circumcision, which is far worse than the agony of what we endured. Pharaonic circumcision has been practiced since the time of the pharaohs in Egypt and is common in twenty-seven different African countries, as well as Yemen and parts of Iraqi Kurdistan. It completely removes both the girl’s clitoris and her labia. Then the vaginal opening is stitched shut to leave only a small opening for the exit of menstrual blood. Most activists call the procedure female genital mutilation. That is the far more accurate description.
Some years later, I asked Amal whether Aunt Hasaneyya had circumcised her and her sisters. She said no, and I was shocked. Why, then, had Aunt Hasaneyya been present at their home at all? I wondered. Why had the girls of my uncle’s family called me “dirty”? I felt deceived. But perhaps they had in fact been circumcised, and it was shame, anger, or pain that prevented them from talking about it.