Sudan: A Novel by Ninie Hammon

Author:Ninie Hammon
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780979903526
Publisher: Ninie Hammon
Published: 2014-06-06T23:00:00+00:00

For three days, the girls endured the heat of the desert sun under their tarpaulin, helping Mbarka swat away the flies attracted to the dried blood on her lower body. Every morning, one of the servants brought out a single bowl of dura for the whole group to share. With each trip, she also brought a small dish of foul-smelling black goo, the consistency of well-cooked oatmeal, for Mbarka to put on her incisions. When Mbarka refused to do it the first time, the woman returned with two other women and the three of them held her down and forcibly smeared it on her. After that, Mbarka complied to avoid further humiliation. Thankfully, the mixture provided some measure of relief. The stench from the goo, potent and rank, was heightened by the heat under the tarp. At least it masked the smell of the latrines and helped keep the flies away.

Mbarka was still in excruciating pain. Every night, the girls suffered through the dark hours with her, awakened by her moans, groans and bouts of uncontrollable sobbing. They couldn’t help her; she wouldn’t let them touch her. So each passed the scorching days and cold nights imprisoned by her own fears.

At breakfast on the third day, Mbarka was able to move around a little. She sat by the bowl of dura with the others and dug her hand with them into the communal dish of tasteless gruel. They all looked at her, their eyes asking questions their lips dared not form and waited for whatever explanation she chose to give about what the Arabs had done to her.

Mbarka ate in silence, weighed what she would and wouldn’t tell the other girls, and finally resigned herself to the reality that the same fate was likely awaiting all of them, too. They had a right to know what was coming.

“They took me to the riverbank, to the flat rocks where Pasha sits when we wash clothes in the river,” she began.

And she told them everything. How the women had grabbed her and pinned her down so she couldn’t move. How they had ripped her clothes off. How Pasha had come at her with the shiny knife—smiling, always smiling.

“She cut off...she took away my...” Mbarka couldn’t continue.

She didn’t know the word for that part of her anatomy. Finally, she simply pulled up her dress and showed them her wounds.

“Here,” she said, deeply shamed and humiliated. “She cut me here. See! She cut out...took...”

Mbarka burst out sobbing, surprised that she still had tears left to cry. Barely able to speak, her words came out in strangled gasps. “I have dreamed about going home. About getting away from these evil people. About having a life again.”

The full horror of reality sank in again with sickening finality, and she stopped crying. Her voice was as hollow and dead as the look in her eyes. “But now I can’t. I can never have a life. I can never marry any man. I’m not a woman anymore.”

Mbarka turned

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