Ululations ring around her.  Dancers dressed in colourful khanga dance to the msondo ngoma.  It is a nostalgic moment for her as a proud, scared and confused mother.  She didn’t want to go through with this, but the society expects her to.  Her mother did it and so did her mother before her and her daughters are expected to – if they want their daughters to make good wives one day.  She knows her mother would turn in her grave if she doesn’t do it.  Forcing a smile to onlookers, she sighs heavily.

She tightens her smile as the other mothers dance merrily around her, their khanga and beads cladded hips gyrating to the drum beats and ululations as they offered her – the proud mother – with presents.  A wax kitenge is flung on her shoulders as a woman bends over to hug her, her sweaty face and hot breath on her face.  She smiles as she stiffly return the hug.

She throws a quick glance at the newly built thatch hut.  There are fresh flowers outside the hut where a group of women dressed in their Sunday best stand chatting excitedly outside it.  It is the aunts, probably talking about what to do next.  Always talking and plotting.  Plotting and talking.  Even this was from their plotting and talking.

“You know, grandson is ready to marry,” an older woman whispers to her as she crouches next to her pushing folded notes in her loosely clenched hand.  “Fauzia would make a wonderful wife!”

“Yes,” she murmurs expressionlessly stretching her smile further, “yes mama.”

Again she glances at the new thatched roof.  Her heart beats angrily and nervously to the rhythm of the msondo ngoma.  Nervously she toys with her fingers, staring at the low door way that is now covered with khangas.  When will she come out, she thinks fretfully, hoping it won’t be Fauzia with screaming women coming out.

“You must be so proud!”  someone interrupts her thoughts, “you are now sure she won’t be ruined on her wedding day.”

Smiling stiffly she shifts her gaze back to the doorway.  She remembers her first born Sauda, how she avoided looking at her straight in the eyes after she got back.  Until today, she could hear her piercing, blood curdling screams and that strong metallic smell that always surrounded her.  As they slowly creep in her head, she shakes the screams off.

She turns her head towards the new thatched hut again – her brothers and other men in the village constructed it last week.  The women did the last touches of weaving the make-shift mattress made of a straw mat and old clothes.  It stands proudly a few feet from were Sauda’s hut was.  Sauda.  Her screams ring in her head again, awakening every sense in her head.  Quickly she closes her eyes and covers her ears with both hands, shaking her head vigorously.

With her eyes still tightly shut, the pictures flash back.  Sauda was dressed in a new red floral dress which was bought by her grandmother.  Red – her favourite colour, how ironic.  Happily Sauda had walked between her grandmother and aunts.

“Are we there yet?” Sauda kept on asking excitedly as she bounced ion the forest.

“Young woman!  Don’t you have patience?”  Her grandmother had laughed at her granddaughter’s eagerness.

“You haven’t even told me where we are going, bibi.  You only said there will be a big party for me afterwards.”  Sauda had giggled happily – probably at the thought of a big feast.
Sauda – she was tall, dark, big-boned, with large brooding eyes and a wide mouth.  For her big bones, Sauda was quite thin.  She was always the first one to offer to help with the odd jobs men would do.

“He should have been a boy,” her grandfather used to tease as she watched her leaping around, “look at her, she has the energy and strength of a man!”

Sauda wasn’t as strong and brave when they finally got there.  Her fourteen years-old little girl screamed in panic and fear of the unknown initially.  She couldn’t understand why she was suddenly being pinned down with legs being pulled apart.   An older woman crouched infront of her holding an old rusty razor blade and a thick threaded make-shift needle made of a thorn.  As she laid on the floor of a dirty hut in the forest, her body contorted with pain as she screamed and thrashed around madly unable to bear the pain she was experiencing.  Sauda’s screams were as blood-curdling as they were heart-wrenching. Finally she laid there whimpering, her new, red floral dress soaked in blood.

“You have now become a woman – a decent woman.”  Her proud grandmother had told whimpering Sauda as her legs are tied together with a rope.

In her new thatched hut, her grandmother would pour a concoction of herbs into her wounds, again Sauda screamed excruciatingly.

“You won’t heal, young woman,” her grand mother scolded her sternly.

For thirty nine days as Sauda had laid with her legs tied together so as to allow the wound to heal, her body went from glowing and fattening to paling and thinning.  Sauda would wake up screaming, her body sweat drenched and shaking.  Then she would vomit – the vomiting interrupts the screaming and the screaming interrupts the vomiting.

“It is the bad spirits,” an aunt had had told her on the fortieth day as they walked out with her covered body.  “It is the bad spirits that had taken her.”

“Clearly she wasn’t clean,” another one added,” she was already ruined, that’s why they took her.”

“She always behaved like a boy, that one,” another one commented emotionlessly.

“You didn’t take good care of her,” another aunt said, “you let her wonder of wherever like a motherless child.”

That same day her brothers burnt down Sauda’s hut wading off the bad spirits.  Staring at the new thatched hut, she quietly she prayed the bad spirits wouldn’t take her little Fauzia.

© Sandra Mushi 2009. Sandra is the author of Sahara Soul Food, Sandra’s Den as well as the poetry collection book titled Rhythm of my Rhyme.

 

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