Petals of Pride

Mama, don’t put me under the knife
Give not to culture
A slice of my precious life

My body I feel you holding
In the warmth of a mothers touch
Betrayed by the act of folding
Into the excuse of social norms we use as a crutch

With your hands you cover my eyes
Knowing I am fragile like bone-china
Yet for now my sense of sight
Lives in the pain that radiates from my vagina

Papa, don’t get friendly with the razor
Let not a community of traditions
Be a girl’s appraiser

Hold not a feast
In my cutting honour
For the wounds are rising like yeast
From hurt for which my father was a donor

How can you celebrate
The closing of a blooming flower
As my helpless tears reverberate
And I sit in the remains of my bloody shower

They have cut me open now, Ma!
And taken away my labia
They have sewn me up now, Pa!
Deformed my genitalia

My voice is drowned
In the rhetoric of
Infibulation
And the forced entry of penetration

My vagina a medical journal
Riddled by excision
And cutters calling it
Mere female circumcision

How have I been transformed into a vessel
Carrying the burden of a man’s sexual pleasure
Robbed of my rights to even wrestle
For the part of me I treasure

Mama, don’t put me under the knife
Give not to culture
A slice of my precious life

Papa, don’t get friendly with the razor
Let not a community of traditions
Be a girl’s appraiser!

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* Billene Seyoum Woldeyes holds an MA in Gender & Peacebuilding and is an MA candidate in Peace, Development, Security and International Conflict Transformation. She is an Ethiopian poet, writer, feminist activist and blogger at http://ethiopianfeminist.wordpress.com
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.