“Sagal: A Glimpse of An-other”

Creators of Justice Award 2021 | Third Prize: Essay

A writer, rights activist and governance consultant living in Johannesburg, South Africa, Ayesha Kajee has conducted research across much of sub-Saharan Africa, and has observed elections and peace processes in several countries. She was previously the founding director of the International Human Rights Exchange program at Wits University in Johannesburg, where she also lectured in Politics and International Relations. Ayesha briefly directed South Africa’s Freedom of Expression Institute before leaving full-time work to care for an invalid parent. She now works on a freelance basis. Her focus areas include transitional justice, African political economy, gender justice, media, migration and environmental rights.

  Her smile contained an odd tangle of acceptance, immense pain and longing for the unattainable. She didn’t shed a tear, but looked on, utterly bemused, as I lost my fiercely-guarded professional composure and broke down. After a few minutes, she poured me some water, patted my arm and mumbled something vaguely reassuring, though I couldn’t make out the words. She’d been trying (reluctantly, and after some persuasion from me) to articulate how infibulation, a “cultural practice” from her childhood, had impacted her life journey.

Sagal had been my neighbour for over three years. We lived next door to each other for eighteen months before exchanging anything more than smiles and greetings, and my occasional admiration of her three beautiful children. I would have assumed that since we were both thirty-something Black Muslim women in a Christian-dominated society, our commonalities would have caused us to gravitate towards friendship much sooner.

Since that didn’t happen, I wondered if she regarded me as odd and immodest, a professional singleton living solo in a community that venerates marriage and motherhood. Sagal is from Somalia, she wears calf-length, happy-hued burqas that cloak her elegant neck and shoulders, over even brighter, multi-patterned caftans or dresses. She appeared to cherish her privacy, never taking up my repeated offers of a neighbourly cuppa and chat. In my jeans and skirts, my interpretation of hijab is fairly loose; while I mostly cover my hair in some manner that projects my Africanist Muslim identity, it’s sometimes allowed to fall to my hips, which reveals my South Asian ancestry as surely as Sagal’s deep-set chocolate eyes reveal hers.

We live in Mayfair, Johannesburg, a multi-ethnic South African neighbourhood with a long history of hosting immigrants to Egoli (the Place of Gold), the name by which Johannesburg is referred to in most South African vernaculars. Over the past decade, economic migrants and refugees from Somalia and the Indian sub-continent, along with a fair sprinkling of Malawians, have moved into Mayfair en masse. The previous wave of incomers to this suburb were, like my family, fourth- generation South Africans of Indian origin, who left their apartheid ghettoes when the Group Areas Act was scrapped. Panicked by the newest influx of ‘foreigners’, many have now moved away, cloaking their xenophobia under the pretext of increased crime rates and deteriorating roads and other public amenities. Nonetheless, several of us remain, along with a handful of compatriots of Portuguese and Lebanese origin, who pre-dated the ‘Indian’ incursion.

As I reversed out of my driveway one afternoon, Sagal flagged me down with a desperate air of anxiety, requesting a lift to her sister Amal’s flat less than a kilometre away. I gathered from her somewhat garbled explanation that Amal was in labour and experiencing immense pain, and gladly transported Sagal and her infant daughter to Amal’s home. My offers of a lift to the nearest doctor or emergency room were politely but firmly declined on the ground that both sisters’ husbands were on their way home.

The incident did serve to comprehensively break the ice between us, as Amal’s recovery and subsequent delivery of a healthy baby provided sufficient conversational scope for Sagal to broach the portals of my home for tea and samoosas. We settled into a routine of Saturday morning chats over tea every two or three weeks, if I spotted Sagal on returning from my weekly expedition to the bakery, butcher and grocery store. These teas were always at my home and upon my invitation, though Sagal would shyly contribute biscuits or pastries on occasion. According to Sagal, her husband approved of these meetings as he wanted her to improve her conversational English.

At first, our conversations were halting and sometimes confusing, limited both by language constraints and our strangeness to each other. But I believe it was that very otherness, combined with a sense that we did share something important beneath our outward differences, which continued to draw us together. Sagal eventually lost her shyness with me, and even deigned to remove her burqa indoors during the summer, arms flying amid a graceful jangle of bracelets, as she gesticulated to emphasise some point I’d failed to grasp. It was not unusual for us to dissolve into giggles at our sometimes-ludicrous attempts to make the other understand, and her two youngest children became familiar with the box of battered toys that I keep for my numerous godchildren, nieces and nephews.

Sagal often shook her head at what must have appeared, to her, as my eccentric feminist notions of gender equality in Islam, rarely arguing about the Quranic verses or prophetic sayings with which I tried to substantiate my views. Despite the closeness in our ages and my varied life experiences, Sagal stubbornly continued to regard me as a child on these matters, and prophesied that I’d change my outlook ‘when you are married’. We once even prayed together, which generated an interesting discussion on commonalities and difference in religious practice. Sagal’s opinions were largely informed by the notion, not uncommon in patriarchal communities, that women are the carriers of family or societal honour and dignity. Incrementally, Sagal gained confidence in her English-speaking abilities and I consented to air my limited Swahili vocabulary, since she could understand some Swahili, having lived briefly in Kenya en route to South Africa.

Despite this burgeoning intimacy, it was some months before I first broached issues of Somali politics with her, though we’d previously discussed my work and intermittent travels in general terms. At the time, I worked on the Africa project of the Institute for International Affairs, and was becoming increasingly interested in the root causes of Somalia’s governance failures. Sagal would share her opinions, but often brought additional insights to subsequent meetings, from which I deduced that she had discussed the issues with family members or others in Johannesburg’s Somali community. It was through Sagal’s keen intellect and gentle guidance that I began to appreciate the complexities of Somali tribal lineage and the intricate web of sub-clans and allegiances that characterise Somali society.

Though I urged her to, she never brought Amal or other friends to tea, whether because they wouldn’t come or because she wanted to keep our interactions to herself, I couldn’t tell. Amal’s baby was more than a year old when I finally gathered sufficient courage to raise the sensitive subject that had been on my mind for several months, following research trips to Kenya and Sudan. Sagal visibly recoiled, hastily drained her teacup in silence, and was unusually firm in withdrawing her children and herself from my home. Castigating myself for my lack of tact and my idiocy for barging into her intimate life, I saw and heard nothing from Sagal for several weeks; she refused to answer my calls, and I hesitated to ring the doorbell since several family groups occupied different sections of the neighbouring house and its outbuildings.

Almost seven weeks elapsed. As I nosed my car into its garage at dusk one evening, in a blue funk over some work mishap, I gave an incredulous start. Sagal was moving alongside the car; she’d been standing outside the little gate leading into the adjacent property and all three of her children were visible on the other side, the youngest two howling, while the eldest had a closed, half-defiant expression on his face as he tried to pull them towards the house. Sagal followed me into my yard, waiting while I parked and unlocked my semi, then silently shouldering my laptop case and indicating that I should precede her.

Inside, she bolted the door behind us, and it was only as full glare of the overhead lights fell on her face that I realised she had an enormous purple bruise covering half of her left cheekbone and eye. Impatiently, she shrugged off my concern as though this were of no import, though she did give in to my determined hug with a single, convulsive shudder.

After a few seconds, she withdrew, studied my face as intently as I was studying hers, both of us uncharacteristically silent. The tinny chimes of her cellphone startled us out of our joint reverie. She answered brusquely, her tone a far cry from her usual lilting cadences, and I intuited that it was her husband on the other end. She ended the call, murmured that she had to go and turned towards the door. As I picked up my keys to remotely open the garage door, her spine visibly straightened. She drew herself up and in, and turned to face me again, arms hugging herself in an echo of our brief hug of just a few minutes past.

Inclining slightly towards me, she decisively declared, ‘I come for tea on Saturday, I tell you’.

Stunned at her sudden willingness to invite herself for a visit, I stammered out an assent and added that my fresh samoosas had arrived from Durban. At that, she grinned, made as if to embrace me again, then changed her mind and promptly exited, again murmuring, ‘I tell’.

Utterly confused as to what I was to be told and half-convinced that she’d been beaten up, I dithered about whether I ought to call someone. The question was, who? The only other Somali adult with whom I’d exchanged more than social inanities was Amal, and she wasn’t exactly welcoming. The police or other authorities were out of the question; I had no conclusive proof and honesty compelled me to acknowledge that I’d previously had no reason to believe that Sagal was a victim of domestic abuse. I decided to wait until Saturday.

The following Saturday I jettisoned my usual shopping expedition, opting instead to tidy up the house and fry the samoosas. I was taking no chances that Sagal would show up while I was out. She finally rang the bell before noon, more than an hour later than our usual teatime. We chatted inconsequentially while I fussed over making the tea, but once we were comfortably seated at the kitchen table, an awkward silence enveloped us. In my mind, I considered and discarded several conversational gambits; none seemed capable of breaking through the grey smog in which we were wrapped, and I was frankly too terrified to try.

After shifting awkwardly in her chair a few times, Sagal dredged up the courage to begin.

‘I want to tell you…’ She paused, considering the depths of her tea as though what she was trying to articulate was inscribed there. ‘I want tell you about cutting, about Sunna.’ The dropped preposition, something she takes especial pains with, is indicative of her internal struggle.

In the long, long silence that followed, I considered how ironic it was that Somalis use the term ‘Sunna’ (generally meaning tradition of the prophet Muhammad (PBUH)) to describe a practice that is so inherently misogynistic and anti-Islamic, and which in actual fact is not practiced at all in the region where Islam originated. In Sudan too, I’d discovered during my travels there, the word is colloquially taken to mean circumcision, including female circumcision. Across most of Somalia, Sunna for females refers to total or Pharaonic infibulation, involving total removal of the clitoris as well as the labia minora and much of the labia majora. The mere thought makes me want to cross my legs, defensively.

Sagal eventually stirred, sipped her tea, repeated, ‘I tell you about cutting’, and fell silent once more. The ball was obviously in my court, and I was clueless where to begin. Hesitantly, I enquired whether I could record our conversation, reminding her of the recent work I had done with Zimbabwean women migrants on remittances, and how that had sparked conversations about the assaults they routinely endured during their journeys to South Africa. I pledged that Sagal would not be identified by her real name in my notes and that I would destroy the tapes once I’d transcribed them. She nodded apathetically and I set up my old-fashioned mini recorder; the first time that our conversations were captured thus.

Again, silence fell. To break the ice, I enquired about Sagal’s children and learned that they were spending the day at Amal’s. After a few false starts, I asked her to suggest a name by which I could refer to her in my notes. Of a sudden her face animated and she declared ‘Sagal’, which, according to my internet search means ‘morning star’, but which she gave me to understand describes the morning sunshine as it is refracted by the rain. I marvelled at how she had unhesitatingly chosen a name that perfectly described her, with all her contradictions and complexities.

She actually opted to call herself Sagal for the purposes of our interview, somewhat eerily narrating events in the third person, with an occasional prompt from me. It was as though she could more easily speak of her experiences if she drew on the mask of Sagal.

Sagal was circumcised between the ages of 6 and 9; she’s not sure exactly how old she was, but recalls that at the time her brothers all seemed much older than they actually were, so reckons she was seven or eight years old. She remembers the day was a holiday, with a mini-festival, almost ‘happy like Eid’, she recalls wistfully, where she had a new dress (red with a green pattern) and special food was cooked. She looked forward to ‘becoming (a) woman’, even though she had seen other girls in the town hobbling in pain afterwards. It was just something that all the girls did, she wasn’t clear on the details, though she knew she would stay at the circumciser’s home for about two weeks and when she came back she would be a woman, her family would have slaughtered a goat and they would give her gifts.

After the meal was eaten on that fateful day in her life, Sagal was accompanied by her mother, aunts and other female family friends, in a joyful procession. These women, who’d always showered her with affection, whom she’d been taught to revere as mothers, held her down on a prepared bed while the cutting was done. She couldn’t see, because someone held a scarf over her face, but the pain, she says, was ‘very bad… xanuun …. too much paining … Eina!’ This last is a South African colloquialism for an unexpected hurt. She remembers screaming, smelling something pungent and trying to kick her immobilised legs, and she thinks she passed out.

Her memory of the ensuing days is hazy, almost as though she has blocked the trauma out, and it is evident that this retelling is forcing long-buried recollections to the surface. Though her voice is largely emotionless and she continues to speak, eerily, about ‘Sagal’ as though narrating a stranger’s story, the tenseness in her shoulders and her restless gaze, which avoids my eyes, reveal the true emotional cost of these disclosures.

Sagal remembers that her legs were bound together, that she was given something to drink and that she slept a lot during those days. Without prompting, she reveals that urination was particularly excruciating, burning ‘like fire’, and that she cried a great deal each time. The woman who did the cutting made her apply a herb poultice after urination. Sagal adds that the smell of blood, more than the sight, still makes her feel faint. She grins, weakly, and falls silent again.

After a few minutes, she tells me that, several weeks later, once she’d returned home and was free to examine the healing scar tissue, she was shocked and terrified to discover that she had ‘no kintir’. Having established that this was the Somali word for clitoris, I was emboldened to bring out a biological sketch of the female genitalia, which first disconcerted, and then amused Sagal. She made it quite clear that uncircumcised genitalia were ugly and too male, in her view, telling me that women must be smooth and clean-shaven ‘there’. With some prodding, she consented to draw for me what she thought she looked like, post-Sunna.

Sagal’s little drawing, essentially consisting of a heavily-inked ’black hole’ with irregular lines representing scar tissue both fore and aft, was what broke my composure. Something about those crudely drawn strokes conveyed both the horrific violence and violation of what had been done to Sagal, as well as the barrenness, the silencing of an essential facet of every woman’s life journey. It was this absence, this not-there-ness of her sexual persona (as I interpreted it) that affected me even more profoundly than the atrocity of Sagal’s mutilation and my empathy for her physical pain. I ached with the realisation that she could never experience the transcendence which the physical, spiritual and psychical union with the Beloved can bring, and inwardly railed at the brutishness that could desecrate what nature had so lovingly gifted her with.

And here she was trying to comfort me, plying me with water and murmuring soothing nothings in her melodious lilt. I wanted to hug her and be embraced by her, this sister of mine, born from the same soil into such a different reality, but something in her eyes, some armour against pity, deterred me. Instead, I reached for a wet-wipe and she picked up her narrative.

After the cutting, Sagal said, it wasn’t too bad, she healed well and resumed the tenor of her life, but was now allowed to perform certain house-tasks that were only for women, including cooking special foods. Later, she and her friends were also able to proudly claim that as ’sewn girls’ they were pure and marriageable, and the few girls in town who were not cut were regarded as unclean and odd and subjected to teasing.

But one of her peers who’d also been circumcised around the same period as Sagal was not so fortunate. She experienced urinary incontinence, was often absent from school, and the damp patches on her clothes or where she’d been sitting were constant sources of embarrassment and mockery for long afterward. Years later, Sagal claims, she heard that this woman died after bearing a stillborn child.

When I enquire whether these types of complications – incontinence, stillbirths, maternal death, etc. are a result of cutting, Sagal shrugs, her eyes remote, as she tells me it is Sunna, it is a religious imperative (as is hijab) to keep girls modest and maintain clan honour. I am gobsmacked and yet simultaneously angry that she persists in this vein after all she has endured and witnessed, but am unable to articulate this.

Suddenly, she thaws, visibly relaxing, and confides to me that Amal had always had problems menstruating after being cut, and that Amal had to have both her children born by Caesarean section, which was why Sagal had been so frantic on the day when she’d begged me for a lift. We chat about childbirth, about Caesarean versus cervical deliveries, and Sagal admits that many Somali women have complications during childbirth.

But, she insists, this is because some men and their mothers are cruel while others, like her own husband and mother-in-law, are compassionate enough to loosen or cut the stitches that bind sewn women to a very narrow opening after their cutting. She explains that if a husband is compassionate and loving towards his wife, he will ask his mother to do this before the wedding night, so that intercourse is less painful for the bride, and so is childbirth, though the latter may require further incision of the vulva to facilitate a baby’s passage. The mother-in-law is thus assured that the bride is chaste and is also able to demonstrate from the outset what a catch her son is, and how fortunate the bride is to have secured him as a husband. Other men, concerned only with their own fulfilment, prefer to claim their brides intact, which can cause perineal tearing and cam cause infections and other complications, including during childbirth.

During my subsequent research, I was to discover that the phrase Sagal used, gabar tolan, literally means ‘sewn woman’, and is an aesthetic ideal as well as a socio-moral imperative among Somalis. Indeed, the root word tol is also used to describe the ties that bind clans and tribes together, often through marriage. Uncut women are actually viewed as unfeminine, immodest, and prone to lascivious behaviour.

Sagal’s revelations, shocking as they are, embolden me to enquire about the details of intimacy and intercourse. Matter-of-factly, Sagal informs me that actual penetration is almost invariably painful, for her and most of the women with whom she has dared to discuss this. She points out that the whole purpose of cutting is to prevent premarital sex and promiscuity, to uphold honour, as she has already explained. However, her voice lowers and she smirks a little as she coyly divulges that she enjoys other aspects of intimacy, that Somali men are good at foreplay, and that she particularly likes to have her breasts, buttocks and ears caressed. She uses the word salaax, which I translate from her gestures to mean ‘caress’, a definition supported by an online dictionary which defines the word as ‘massage’. I am somewhat nonplussed at these prurient and frank disclosures from one who has previously appeared ultra-modest, and unsure whether or how to ask about orgasm.

Instead, I ask technical questions, and learn that, on average, she endures painful intercourse three or four times a week, that more than half of the time penetration is very painful (between eight and ten on a ten-point scale), but that it is actually somewhat pleasurable about twenty percent of the time. Sagal sees sex as her duty as a spouse and she is pleased that her husband achieves satisfaction from her and does not stray, especially in an environment where there are many ‘bad women’. Noting these statistics, my mind boggles at the thought of stoically enduring such agony week after week, of subordinating this pain to the ‘higher goal’ of wifely duty, for years, with no end in sight.

I notice that it is past 4pm. For the second time, Sagal and I pray together, first our delayed lunchtime prayer, and then our pre-sunset prayer. Since she shows no sign of her usual haste to leave (perhaps because this is the first time we have been totally unencumbered by children), I invite her to help me dispose of Friday’s leftover food. We both devour curry and rice with sambals, neither of us saying much.

Once she has eaten, Sagal leans back in her chair twirling her glass, with an unusual glint in her eyes. She meets my gaze, holds it and asserts that I am not to feel sorry for her, that she is very happy and loves her husband very much. I’m speechless, and stutter an apology though unsure what, exactly, I’m apologising for. Sagal shrugs this off, giggles, and confesses that her husband is very good at farees; from her gestures I infer that this is manual stimulation and from the blissful expression on her face I am given to understand that she does, indeed, experience some form of orgasm despite the cutting. Together, amused yet simultaneously embarrassed, we search for terminology in our respective languages to reinforce this point, finally settling on isu tag fiican, which I take to mean ‘wonderful (orgasmic) sexual encounter’ but later find out that the phrase can be literally translated as ‘very good merger’.

Soon after, satisfied that I now know she is capable of physical satisfaction, Sagal takes her leave. My mind is still teeming with questions and conjecture, not least about whether her stormy relationship with her mother, an issue we have discussed before, is rooted in the betrayal of her circumcision. I also dearly want to ask her if she will allow her beloved only daughter to be cut, and to discuss with Sagal her obvious irritation that cut women are exoticised and othered by those who are not, but I assume that we’ll be able to chat again about these and other things; that there’ll be time for me to air some of the uncertainties and doubts I still harbour, to fine-tune the interview and to allow Sagal to address any misconceptions I may inadvertently have drawn.

But Sagal, it seemed, had other ideas. Almost as though, having discussed what I’d been importuning her to do, she withdrew behind a mask of superficiality. The next Saturday, she declined my invitation to tea on the pretext that she was expecting guests later that day, a reasonable enough excuse. But in subsequent weeks I caught nary a glimpse of her, and on the one occasion when I rang the bell, her eldest child surlily informed me that his mother was not home.

About five weeks after our interview, I departed for Zimbabwe to observe the elections there followed almost immediately by a conference in Germany, and thus it was that I had not seen Sagal for more than two months when I learned that her family had moved away and that another (markedly less friendly) group now occupied her portion of the house next door.

Sometimes a fluorescent flash of burqa on the street convinces me that I’ve found her, my Somali sister, but I’m invariably mistaken.

I never saw Sagal again.

Glossary

Naagh - wife, woman, not sewn or defibulated, deflowered, opened woman

Kintir – clitoris

Siil – vagina

Ibtir siilka – vulva

Hijaab – headscarf, veil, burqa (covering hair but not face)

Cuduur – illness, sickness (chronic?), disease

Gabar tolan – ‘virgin, infibulated woman, sewn woman, sewn girl, circumcised woman(Type 111)

Galmo – sex , coitus

Wasmo – sex, intercourse (sometimes used in vulgar terms)

Wasmo kulul – pleasurable sex, literally ‘hot sex’

Raginamo – manhood, manliness, virility

Farxad – happy, happiness

Naafo – disabled / disability, unable to function properly

Khaffiif/ Khafeef – mental illness

Xanuun- pain

Kacsi / dareen kacsi – arousal; lust; sexual desire

Shahwa bax/ byo bax – ejaculation (literally ‘when sperm leaves’) , also refers to orgasm (male and female)

Salaax – to caress/ to massage

Farees – masturbation; stimulation by hand (from far = finger & and faree = to touch with fingers)