FGM

IMAGE CREDIT- ELLEHELL

On a cold plagued morning, as sunlight spits into your face, mother taps you by the ankle and says, “you’re about to become a fig tree”. Whilst brushing you try to wash off the idea of what it feels like to be tasteless from your mouth but like starch it sticks deep, filling the empty spaces in, so you’re occupied, shuffling between a mouthful of questions and a hand too heavy to carry your fear so like an overfilled glass of water they spill over.

Uncertainty wraps around you like legume, they’re about to make you incomplete, just like the other girls, just like your mother and your grandmother, and the other mothers that came before her.

What fate lies to a seedless orange? For even though it brings out water, it yet lacks the ability to be called ripe, with no seed to cultivate and appreciate.

I enjoy seeds myself, I love to feel them dribble across the fields of my mouth before tossing them away, I’m no judge, just a checker for what is supposed to be that isn’t.

You stand in line, adorned in fear, waiting to be extracted from yourself, banished from yourself like this is the reason the other girls have closed thighs now; smiling stealthily they would spread your legs wide like a map, as if to find the happiness their life’s been missing for years, as if your been whole makes them incomplete, as if you’re the reason they’re no longer palatable.

The bleeding doesn’t pause the pilling, the screaming doesn’t halt the holding.

On a cold plagued morning, as sunlight bleeds in to your eyes through the window, you’ll tap your daughter by the ankle,  inject into her ears the same words her grandmother injected into yours, “you’re about to become a fig tree”, and the cycle continues, no questions, no reviews, if we have all become the dunce, who dares to ask the question, why?