The Girls in the Wild Fig Tree by Nice Leng'ete

Author:Nice Leng'ete
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2021-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

Hiding

I had escaped the cut, but I knew it was only temporary. I knew we could not run to my aunt again. My uncle had kept the men from beating her, but if she took us in again, nothing would stop them, and the community would turn against her as well.

Maybe I should just go ahead with it, I thought. In my community, the cut was universal; I had to get it sometime. If I agreed to go through with it, maybe my family would let me go back to school and finish my education.

After the break, I returned to boarding school. I told Miss Caroline that I had run. I asked her if I had done the right thing.

“Nice, have you thought about what we talked about before, about what you want to do with your life?”

“Maybe go to college,” I said.

“If you get the cut,” she said, “do you think that will happen?”

It would not. The cut does not take just a piece of a woman’s body. It makes her eligible for marriage and for a lifetime of childbearing and servitude. It takes a woman’s hopes and dreams. If I got the cut, marriage would follow.

I wanted my freedom. Being so close to losing my education made that clear.

But Maasai women tell girls that if they do not get the cut, they will never be real women. They will never get married or have children. They told me insects would grow inside my womb and eat me from the inside out. That my clitoris would keep growing until it was down past my knees.

Miss Caroline told me that those were just old wives’ tales. “I didn’t get the cut or get married,” she said, “and do you see anything wrong with me? You’ve seen my children. I had them without getting the cut.”

I still was not sure. She was not Maasai. Maybe the rules were different for us. I trusted Miss Caroline, but I was still very young, and what might seem silly to a grown-up was a real fear to a small girl.

“Look at the Bible, Nice. Does it say anything about the cut?”

“I do not know,” I said. I had never heard a Bible story about the cut, but maybe it was in a part I had never seen.

“It does not. Not for girls. Wouldn’t God have given us that rule if he wanted girls to get the cut?”

I knew she was telling the truth. The Bible did not mention the cut. And the world was not full of women with clitorises hanging down past their knees or wombs full of insects.

But knowing she was right and really believing it were different matters. I had been told the stories since I was a toddler. And my mother, my grandmother…every woman in my family for as far back as anyone could remember had had the cut. Who was I to break our tradition?

I wanted to belong.

I avoided going home. Generally, the Maasai perform the cut in April or December, during the rainy seasons.

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