Fatiha (Part3)

When she woke up, she had the lower part of her body bind and couldn’t feel anything. Her eyes were dull and she was tired after a long battle between life and death. Fatiha's mother had circumcised her daughter as she was herself circumcised and as her own mother was. Nobody could blame her since she just followed traditions which were all she knew. She believed that circumcision was the best thing that could happen to her daughter and that without it her daughter would never fully be a woman. At an early age, she had learned to follow tradition and culture, to be submissive and suffer in silence so that she would be happy in this life and the next. She was feeling the pain of her daughter but she thought it was a necessary pain and a step that she had to take towards her life as a future woman.

After that episode, Fatiha never blew kisses to the wind for Mounir. Fatiha matured and grew up from night to day. She entered in the mutilator’s hut as a young innocent child and she exited as a woman. She was a child, with the body of a child and the eyes of a woman. From that day on, Fatiha never smiled. Some people say that when she grew old she would take long walks alone and look at the stars mumbling sentences that only she understood. She would repeat the word 'Mounir' with tears in her eyes. Those who knew her, say that she knew well the art of life and was an artist of nature.

God is without any doubt, the artist par excellence, the only black dot in his master-work was to create men who had the choice between being humans and being subhuman.

The End

Notes:

Sahel: a part of Africa
Touareg: African ethnic group

An estimated 85 million to 110 million women and girls alive today have undergone Female Genital Mutilation

Female Genital Mutilation is the term used for removal of all or just part of the external parts of the female genitalia