April 2012
“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
—Albert Einstein (via unapologetically-black)
Play
Performance art or Bad Taste?
Kola Boof’s Story (read the rest here):
I was vaginally infibulated in Omdurman, Sudan soon after my birth. Infibulation in my region of Africa in 1969 meant that the muscles inside the vagina were cut loose and reconfigured ‘tighter’ (supposedly to incur ‘purity’ as the Mullahs claimed that the Koran states: “Woman is Impure”). After the tightening process, the vagina is stitched shut—you grow up having your period through a straw—which can take some women an entire month. On the outer lips of the vagina, seared in Arabic, they put the name of your father and his mosque on the left side—the right side of my vagina was left blank for the name of my future husband to be seared on with a hot poker later. My clitoris was not removed, because my birth mother was an Oromo, not a Muslim and wouldn’t allow what Arab Muslims call ‘the worm of unclean thoughts’ to be cut away. Thus I cannot speak on the horror of having no feeling, no clitoris. But protocol follows that years after this ritual—at your wedding ceremony, the groom is given a small razor. This is to slit you open so he can begin penetrating you on the ‘wedding bed’—a process that can take weeks.
This video’s gone viral already but I just wanted to bring to attention the thoughts experience of Kola Boof who underwent genital mutilation in her home country, Sudan. Her blog post (follow link above) highlights some of the key issues with this “cake” and the divisions that it reveals even within the black community in the US. (Though long, her piece is POWERFUL- I URGE you to read it)
As disgusted as this video makes me feel, I was even more shocked by the blatant ignorance of some youtube users (“Lord, what fools these mortals be”)… but then again what’s new.
