I escaped the Arab Muslim wedding, because my parents were murdered in front of me at the age of six and my Egyptian grandmother handed me over to UNICEF (to be ‘left for adoption’ after she got permission from the Mullahs—adopting being illegal in Egypt) because she could not fathom having a chocolate colored granddaughter in her White Arabic family. Through UNICEF, I was eventually placed with a Black American family in Washington D.C. and did not learn that I was vaginally infibulated until my Black American mother gave me a bath the first time I arrived in America. She and my new Black American father rushed me to D.C. General Hospital that night, horrified at the stitching between my thighs.
My life is not typical of the African girl who has been circumcised or infibulated. I grew up Americanized. My Black American parents wanted to have my vagina “corrected” at 16—but I refused because it was the only thing that connected me to my birth mother. Losing my virginity at 17 to my Black American tutor (who to me was White because of his egg-nog colored complexion) took an entire month. Imagine having your upper lip pulled up over your entire head—that’s how it feels for a ‘cut girl’ when she first has sex, you literally pass out. On one occasion in the back of his car, we got ‘stuck’ like dogs and had to be “wet” by fire hose to get us apart. It was so humiliating. Each attempt was excruciatingly painful for me, but like any teenaged girl I was determined to prove that I loved my man. Later, in my twenties traveling the world as a model and actress, I learned the value of having “pinhole pussy”—I could manipulate men with it. No matter how many of them I bedded, it appeared to each next guy that I was a virgin. And when men think they are the first and it’s even tighter when they return—they do a lot more for you. My vagina gave me all manner of problems—hormone imbalances; winter time shrinking. But because of my power over men sexually, I grew to take pride in my vagina. I refuse for instance to allow Westerners to tell me that I’m “mutilated.” I don’t accept that. I am different, but my life is not over, I am not defeated and I see myself as inconvenienced; violated—but not mutilated. With its shield face and Arabic writing, my vagina is very pretty to me.
Activists using the term “mutilation” forget that this is a Psychological condition, not just physical. We that are cut have to live our entire lives with our vagina. We have to move on and accept this horrible inconvenience and find joy in it.
I am now 42 and have given birth to two sons by cesarean—yet I am like a 12 year old down there. It does not change. This tightness that is created for male pleasure (no other reason, despite what the religious men say) is a never-ending curse of pain and ecstasy; sexual rapture bound up in brutally inhuman suffrage for the woman. I have learned to live with this—to even exploit it for my advantage. But I would not wish it on anyone. My vagina has been for men…and not for me!
So to watch a man—a man calling himself a ‘Black man’—lay on a table and holler moans that invited laughter as his friends cut chunks of his pink genitals away and at them—was so devastatingly powerful that it reduced me to loud, butchered sobbing. I couldn’t stop crying. Add to that the psychological effect of having to cope with the strangeness of Western reaction—particularly Black American friends defending this image and claiming that the intent of the art was to help girls like me.
Help us how? Who did it change? Who among the masses even understood what they were watching? It looked like a Halloween comedy show! Far and wide—people were laughing! No one watching that video thought of little African infants lying on the ground in rows between Cassava plants being cut on by dutiful old women. No one thought of that.

And that brings me to the most painful experience of the video, the one that came in the days after I watched out—the shutting out of my voice and of women like me by arrogant bougie African American writers and publications—writers and publications that would claim to speak ‘for us’ in delineating the experiences of African women and girls in public forums—yet slander my name and claim that I am “crazy” and shouldn’t be understood or have a voice.