Shadows & Light
PART 1: AUGUST 2017
[letter]NA[/letter]So, I talk about my vagina all the time because I just think we’ve all got one and everyone is obsessed in a weird way but at the same time we’re so embarrassed about talking about it. You know?
[letter]LB[/letter]I suppose that’s generations of being told we should be embarrassed about talking about it?
I didn’t even know I had one until I had FGM [female genital mutilation].
How old were you?
I was seven. There I was, in a very happy and non-chaotic childhood, a very privileged childhood, and all of a sudden there’s a civil war. We were travelling and visiting family in Somaliland, and it was like, you know, suddenly there were bombs dropping, and everything else. We got smuggled out from Somaliland to Djibouti, and Djibouti is where we resettled. Djibouti is ethnically Somali as well and my dad’s side of the family lived there. We ended up being there for about eight, nine months? Our passports were no longer valid, so, we couldn’t come back to the UK. So, we had to go through the process of applying for papers to come back and then claiming asylum when we got here.
So you waited there with family?
And drank loads of Fanta with my cousins.
[Laughs].
I remember somebody knocking on the door and me going to the door with excitement. I honestly just thought maybe one of my uncles had made it out, and I listen back to it, and I think to myself, ‘Oh my God, you poor fucking child.’
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I didn’t know she was a cutter but I just didn’t like what she looked like. She was in a burka, and the thing is that nobody really wore the burka back in those days.
Right. An intimidating silhouette if you’re not familiar with it.
Yeah. It was just somebody dressed in black, and the babysitter at my grandmother’s would always, like, you know, tell us these horrible stories about people dressed in black that kidnap kids that don’t behave. So that was my context. I didn’t think she was a cutter, I just didn’t like her. My mum asked me to go and get changed. And I thought, ‘Well, I’m not going with this woman. I don’t like her’. And so I just ran out the back door—and it wasn’t dissimilar to what I used to do in Manchester. If my mum pissed me off or anybody pissed me off I would just pretend I was running away.
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I remember I ran out the back of the house and then I just kept running. And then I bumped into my cousin, Thad. And he was there from Manchester as well. And he was the only other person who knew English. And I was like, ‘I don’t understand.’ And my mother was like, ‘Why are you talking to boys about that?’ And then she grabbed me and pulled me back.
I remember my own feelings as a child of, I don’t like this situation, I’m just going to run.
And the weird thing is, had the war not broken out, I don’t think I would have had FGM. All that would have happened is that I would have come back the year after and I would have been seven or almost eight. And my mum… I think she would have just said ‘no’ or just had more control over things.
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But the war did break out and everything was all kind of fractured. I think for my mother and my grandmother, it was just kind of like, fuck, they’re never going to come back, they’re going to be living with all these white people forever, and there’s never going to be this ability to, I think, ‘influence their upbringing’. The anxiety of not having any kind of connection.
Giving an identity?
It kind of reminds me of boarding school here, in a certain way, being sent away at five years old—it’s like, it’s quite heartbreaking. I think I date guys that are exclusively right wing and privileged because they have such fucking traumatic childhoods. [Laughs].
[Laughs].
They talk about how they were sent away as seven-year-olds and how traumatic it was, but they would still do it to their children. I’m just thinking, ‘Well, why would you?’
It’s a very different but cruel tradition.
Abandonment, yeah.
It’s like a sort of bizarre brainwashing.
And I think that’s what it was with my mum and my grandmother, it was just this weird thing where they just did it. And then they never talked about it. And for me that was as strange—the fact that they never talked about it again. I thought, can we have a conversation about this? Because I really want to understand why. And if she’d given me an explanation, I probably— I mean, she couldn’t, because she didn’t have the words. Unless she said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what I was doing,’ I don’t think I would have accepted anything else.
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And I mean, the whole point is that, it’s a mother’s responsibility as soon as she has you, and knowing she knew, she didn’t have the power to stop it. She had privilege but not power.
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I was listening to this amazing woman who was speaking at a conference in Mogadishu. So, Mogadishu is the capital of what was the United North and South Somalia. So now it is Somalia. This woman was talking, explaining it as a matter of identity. If 100% of you are cut, it’s how you identify as being a woman. And the reason why it’s still covered up is that nobody talks about it. It’s not that anybody has any ownership of it. It’s just that nobody is discussing it. And that was the same kind of conversation I was having with myself.
So when you finally made it back to the UK, how did you feel?
We landed back in Heathrow in April. I was wearing a—I remember—I was wearing a pair of Levis, Nikes, and a Disneyland T-shirt. I don’t know where my dad got them from, but me and my sister were both wearing Micky Mouse T-shirts. And we landed back in Manchester and literally about a few weeks later Hillsborough [human crush disaster at the football stadium in Sheffield, 1989] happened. And I remember thinking, like, is the world on fire… I started to consume news because I just thought I needed to be informed. I think I also just assumed that my uncles and my grandfather were going to be on the news being rescued. I had no context for that. Because I’d never seen news before that and I’d never had any need to really watch news or TV, but it was just kind of my own connection to seeing what was going on in the world. And also, because I think all the adults were congregated around, constantly watching the news, I just sat with the adults and just kind of tried to listen for information.
To try and make sense about what had happened?
And as we were watching, Hillsborough happened. And I still remember Hillsborough being televised, and just thinking, ‘Oh wow, there must be a war everywhere.’ Not understanding that the two were not connected and were in two different continents. And just weirdness, and then I think that’s what led me to my weird place of food and George Orwell. [Laughs].
That helped?
I started reading George Orwell, it was the first thing that made sense after that. And ate, and ate a lot, and got really fat. And then I learnt about bulimia from Neighbours; it was the weirdest thing.
Neighbours the TV show? I guess that’s where kids learnt about most things at that time? [Laughs].
I was literally just trying to find context for all this madness, and food wasn’t healing me. The news wasn’t soothing me, and books weren’t informing me.
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For a long time I wasn’t okay, but in the end it did work out. But it took me sitting up and saying, actually, I’ve had the ability to process this, she hasn’t.
So, there’s no resentment or blame?
No, because my mother was educated but she knew she had no power over the FGM. Or, indeed, later, my talking about it—
She did everything else that she was able to control.
And I threw it all back in her face. And I think that really upset her. And it’s at that moment when you see your mother as just a human. Just a woman. The fact that when people say, what would you have changed? And I think, you know, I would have been a lot kinder to myself. And I would have been a lot more respectful to my mum and to my sister. Because in telling my story, I’m implicitly telling their story. And my sister’s the only one I’m happy for to be pissed off at me…
But I would have thought that your sister and your mum are very proud.
In a weird way, I think they are now.
I mean, it’s hard when someone close is being that raw, open, and that graphic, that could be hard for a more introverted character to handle.
I think she’s now understood why I was doing it, but at first, my sister, she was actually more like, ‘It’s not like we can be uncut. What’s wrong with you?’ And I was thinking, ‘It’s not about not being uncut…’ ’Cause she didn’t feel the level of guilt that I saw in these kids. And that’s something that inspired me to get out and have the conversation and talk more openly. I was like, ‘You know what, my mum is just going to have to get over it’, and the thing is, the fact that I loved my mum enough that I knew that she’d get over it.
Right.
I knew that my mum and I were always gonna fall out, I knew we were going to fall out on the fact that I was into white guys and I knew that I was gonna do something that was controversial. But I’d sacrificed our relationship for something that wasn’t beneficial to me; that’s what was so painful to her. I think she kind of wanted me to do some wild things and then come back and be very reserved and very Somali. But I was never that wild as a teenager and I was never that wild in my twenties. I’m just like, this is the person I am. I think the world around me has gotten more conservative though.
Do you mean politically?
Yeah. Like in terms of the growth of Islam and everything else. Um, and I haven’t changed. It’s really interesting with my little cousins because they are these very well-educated kids, they go to a similar school as I did, they go to a grammar school. But every time I speak about something, they say, you’re so white. And I was like, what does that mean? I just think, you are Londoners; like, the concept of being ‘too white’, what does that mean? Like, you know the reason why your mum sends you to that school is so you can actually be a lot like me.
Do they identify as more conservative?
Well they don’t have a political view, but they do identify themselves as Africans and Muslim, as Somalis, before they would identify as British or as Londoners.
Right.
Which is an interesting thing, you know, when I try to take them to Nando’s and they’re asking if it’s Halal. And me and Sofia, my niece, look at them and it’s like—and my niece is six—she was like, ‘Hamsa, it’s Nando’s.’
So even without your speaking out, there still would have been friction with your family because of the way you embraced British culture?
I think it was my inability to communicate this: ‘When I’m 16, I’m gonna have sex.’ I wanted ownership over my vagina. I was like, I’m going to do with it whatever I want to do with it so screw you.
I still don’t think that equates to being an asshole.
I’m glad that nobody wanted to shag me at 16 because of that determined thinking. I’m also glad I was too scared to leave Cardiff because everybody in Cardiff knew my uncles so they wouldn’t go anywhere near me.
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I think my activism was never driven by the fact that I wanted to change the world. It was just driven by the fact that I felt really guilty about how I had been, like… Basically I had the FGM, I came back. And then when I was, like, 11, my kidneys started failing because I’d had infibulation [the surgical removal of the external female genitalia and the suturing of the vulva and is the most invasive kind of FGM]. I was 11 years old and I had this sewn vagina. I remember at that point disconnecting from my emotions and disconnecting from other things. And I just, like, turned into a total asshole until I was about 25, 26.
Well, trauma can do that.
Yeah, but I was an ass to a lot of people. It’s been a weird ride… I think I’ve lived like several lives in a weird way. I think if somebody meets me now compared to even, um, a year and a half ago, two years ago—I’m a completely different person because I think I’ve kind of dealt with a lot of the dark spaces that I was in.
How much had been spoken about FGM before that?
There was always campaigns. And I had seen the campaigns since I was little.
And you felt the need to take an active role in these campaigns.
I remember girls who were older than me, like, you know, 17 or 18, were being taken to Manchester, by themselves, or London, or to Dubai to have FGM. And I would look at them and I would say, ‘What the fuck is wrong with you? They’re like, ‘Shut up. Why are you even talking about this? What do you even know?’ And I was like, ‘It’s really stupid. It doesn’t make any sense.’ I just kept shouting about how this was really fucked up but none of them were listening to me. So, I disconnected with that identity. I was very proud to be Somali. I was very proud to be a Muslim. But I was like, this has nothing to do with any of that.
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I was asked to talk at a school after meeting a teacher there in a feminist network; she said, ‘We have a large cohort of Somali girls in our school and we just can’t get through to them. Would you come in and talk to them about universities and aspirations?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, cool, fine, whatever.’ But in the back of my head, I thought, I’m always that white Somali to them. The one that’s too out there. Too all these things. So, I literally, like, dressed down. I think I might have put on a headscarf. But I had a random piercing. I walked in. And I said something. And the first thing this girl says is, ‘Miss, do you have a boyfriend?’ I was like, ‘No. And also you guys are like 13 years old. Why do you want to talk about boyfriends?’ And she said, ‘I’ve got four boyfriends.’ And I said, ‘That’s extremely concerning.’ I remember how patronising I was, like, ‘I’m really concerned about that. Blah. Blah. Blah.’ And then the teacher went out. And then they got really boisterous and really intimidating. And then there was one on that side called Renda and another one called Petra, she had the most beautiful gap in her teeth, they’re all wearing headscarves. And I thought, ‘Why are you all wearing headscarves? You’re 13 years old. What is wrong with you?’ I said, ‘How many of you have had FGM?’ Or, ‘How many of you know someone who has had it? Let’s just put our hands up.’ Because I’m just thinking that nobody’s going to say it because they weren’t going to tell anybody. And then, like, 13 out of 14 had. And weirdly enough Petra hadn’t and she’s like, ‘What?’
Because they’ve never talked about it to each other.
No. And then, literally, these angry girls all regressed to being kids. And I regressed to being a kid. And so I was crying and they were like, getting upset. And then Renda just like flipped and was like, ‘You don’t [go and] think you’re amazing because I know your mother is going to do it this summer.’ And blah, blah, blah. And she vividly described what happened to her. And when the teacher walked in we all just shut up and we just turned off. And then someone said, ‘Let’s talk about anal sex.’ And I was like, ‘Why would you… What?!’
So these are quite outspoken girls, they aren’t the suppressed wallflowers one might expect?
Yeah. So then I started mentoring. But after a while I left and came to London. And then I’m feeling shit. I felt bad for the fact that there didn’t seem to be anybody working on FGM that I could kind of connect with.
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And then I remembered this charity ’cause I’d invited them to Bristol to talk about FGM. I called them: ‘You guys are based in London. Do you have volunteers and stuff?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, we do. We have a mentor programme starting.’ And then they connected me with this one girl, and we’d go out for dinner and we’d have conversations and everything else. And she basically had just come out of these sessions with the mental health institute. And she was in love with this Somali boy. And he when she told him she had FGM, he said, ‘Well, it’s just basically going to be like a cockroach in your mouth.’
That’s vile, what does that mean?
You’re not going to have any feeling. I want a woman that’s going to really get into it. And he broke up with her.
Poor girl.
Exactly, and understandably, she had a nervous breakdown. And I kept saying to her, ‘You know it’s going to be okay. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re amazing. Blah. Blah. Blah.’
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She was doing art as a part of her therapy and she had a show that I was meeting her at. When I got to the place, the people that were organising it were like, ‘Oh, where’s so-and-so, where’s so-and-so.’ And I said, ‘Did you guys not call her? Are you not concerned about her?’ And they were like, ‘No, but she’s late, she’s late.’ And then she walked in. And they rushed her onto the stage. And she literally fell apart. She’d drawn this really graphic illustration of her standing in the bath with blood running down her legs, and then I just thought, you know what, it is all my fault, she does not know that there’s another girl in this room who has the exact same thing… had the infibulation. She’d had the infibulation and was thinking about going to France to get reconstructive surgery. And I kept saying to her, ‘It’s okay, it’s about accepting yourself.’ And I thought, you know what, my soul is so fucking complicit to her. So, I took her hand and took her off the stage. And I was like, I couldn’t even see anybody in that room. I took her to the corner. And she’s, like, hyperventilating. And I say, ‘It’s going to be okay. You are going to be okay.’ And she’s like, ‘How do you know?’ And I say, ‘I’ve been there. I’ve had the same exact experience. I’ve had pain.’ So we were having this, like, really intimate conversation. And then she looked up and behind me. And then I looked behind me. And I had no idea that this guy who had become like my boyfriend, like a big part of my life for a while, had been behind me. And I was like, ‘Oh God… Now I’ve got to go take care of him.’ And I was like, ‘Let’s just go home.’ And we got a cab home and nobody said anything and he’s like, ‘I’ll cook dinner.’ And I remember he had one of those open plan kitchens and he’s standing there and I’m sitting on the couch. And he’s making steak. And he’s like, ‘Yeah, but you don’t remember it do you? Everything’s fine, right?’
‘Make it okay for me.’
Yeah, it was literally, ‘Make it okay for me’. I was like, ‘I’m fine. It’s okay. It’s okay. You don’t need to worry about it, whatever.’
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Anyway, that was the point I just thought, okay, I’m gonna start doing more activism work. I said I was going to quit my job for six months. I was wanting to have those conversations. And then I did my first ever interview with the Evening Standard and everybody immediately said, ‘Oh, she’s just a whore talking about that’, but it was just like, I wasn’t any of those things…
But it’s not surprising when we all live in that non-discursive society where even talking about your vagina is deemed unacceptable.
The most painful shame I used to get were friends or my girls that I grew up with. And they are like, ‘Fuck you. Why are you talking about this?’
Like you were putting the shame onto them?
Yeah. But I was like, have you ever listened to anything that I said? I never talk about it as being something that is cultural. I’ve had the time to absorb my experience but no one else has so when I was speaking, even though it was just about my experience, I was basically telling theirs. They’re like, ‘Shut the fuck up. What are you doing? Why are you talking about those kinds of things?’ So yeah, that was hard. And then my mum was part of that world.
But what I find interesting is, did none of those people go, ‘Thank God you’re talking about it?’
Some would message me in private saying, ‘Oh my God I’m so proud of you.’ But in public it was, ‘Oh my God, you’re such a fucking bitch.’ They couldn’t understand why I had to be so public about it.
Because the only way to change anything is to be public about it.
The interview for the Evening Standard totally burned me, with a headline of ‘Flashback from Smell of Dettol’.
Sensationalist.
And that went all around the globe. And then I got the ‘You ghetto slime. Blah. Blah. Blah.’ And then my grandfather, God rest his soul, was like, ‘That’s the stuff we need to fix.’
Wow.
Yeah. He was the one.
Someone of that generation. Naively, I wouldn’t have thought that the simple telling of your own personal story would be so demonstrative. But I guess by doing it you’re opening a massive Pandora’s box.
Yeah, yeah and that’s the thing, that’s why I’m very flippant about it. It wasn’t the easiest thing to do.
Well, I guess you were thrown into the deep end and then had to work out how to navigate it.
And that was what was similar to standing for the Women’s Equality Party (WEP). I knew they were going to get so much shit for it. I didn’t know how much it was gonna escalate though.
And you did get a lot of shit for it, death threats…
I got a lot… I didn’t think it was going to escalate to that point ’cause I was just thinking, like, ‘Guys, what the fuck, I’m black, I’m young, I’m a woman.’ I think anybody else that hadn’t been me, hadn’t been through my life, it would be, like, fucking crippling. And the whole point is that you shouldn’t have to deal with it. Other people got shit, but I got like so much shit. Death threats, racism…
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The fact that I was challenging every political party… But the Labour Party felt more uncomfortable with me challenging them because of the fact that, ‘Well you should be with us and wait for us to figure this shit out. Not really putting it in our face’. And I found that as triggering as being a teenager always being talked about and talked at, and never engaged with. I had six years of trying to get people to understand FGM was wrong. And then I had six weeks of intense conversations with those same very privileged, very white, very middle-class people, who thought they knew but they actually didn’t. Pretending they cared but really didn’t. And me sitting on those panels and being shouted at, asking me why I’m standing. It’s a fucking democracy, it’s like, what do you mean why am I standing?
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When I used to say FGM was child abuse people were like, well no, it’s not, it’s culture. I had lefties telling me I didn’t understand my own culture. Germaine Greer and I were on a panel together talking about neo-liberalism and, like, you know, we’re trying to root out celebrations that women have carved out for themselves. And I was just thinking, there’s nobody holding you down and cutting your vagina.
So she was trying to say that FGM…
[Was] a celebration of womanhood. Yeah, and I think she took that from a very interesting narrative of what is happening in certain places, like Sierra Leone, like the drums and everything else.
... it’s a mother’s responsibility as soon as she has you, and knowing she knew she didn’t have the power to stop it. She had privilege but not power.
So the ritual and the ceremony? Defending cultural rituals?
Yeah.
But whatever they may be?
When I talk to people, even like with Women’s Aid, or radical feminists in conversation where they say, actually no, it’s not the same as rape, because it was being done by women. And I was thinking, no no… ... The idea of FGM as a form of violence and not something that just happens when people are ignorant—they just couldn’t deal with that. While society is telling stories of the uncared-for girl whose husband found her uncut on her wedding night and had to cut her himself. But back on that panel, they weren’t asking the right wing woman who was running for the Christian [Peoples] Alliance, they weren’t asking the UKIP person. They were asking me why I was running. Just like the fact that, you know, they weren’t questioning the community leader why he was sitting there talking about why FGM happens, like, giving reasoning for FGM. I’m thinking, dude, we don’t sit here and ask, like, context for rape. ... But I was a lot stronger until like the actual death threats came. Then I just thought, fuck this, I don’t need to do this. But then I remember I dragged myself out of bed the next day to campaign. Catherine Mayer [co-founder of the Women’s Equality Party] was giving out leaflets with me and one of my friends had got a security guard for me, and we were in Muswell Hill high street!
Liberal north London?
Exactly. Catherine started talking to this woman and then her daughter came up to me, and I was really tired and on edge. So this kid came over, and I was having a conversation with her, and she was talking about her mum, and I said, ‘Oh, where are you from?’ She was from Uganda. And she said, ‘Oh, are you— you going to be a politician?’ I said, yes. Then she said, ‘Do you think I can be a politician one day?’ And I said, yes; but you’re going to have to work really hard. And we had this interesting conversation, and Catherine was talking to her mum, and her mum was really concerned about, like, you know, how does she actually raise this kid alone, and her mum had died… I went over and I felt it was basically my mum with me. And I said to her, ‘Honestly, it’s the hardest thing but the fruits of your labour are people like me standing in the street giving out leaflets to be MPs. She’s in a place where she can be whatever she wants to be.’ And there is that platform for her.
Right. Although not without being harassed and abused?
I just remember the contrast of feeling so shit about being threatened and then just seeing this girl and this woman for the first time seeing her daughter being able to have the ability to have a future. That was the election day; still I think the next day I was just so happy for it to be over. When anybody asks me, ‘Do you want to be an MP?’ I’m like, no, because you actually have to equally represent people, and there are some people that are just assholes. So I’d rather be in the House of Lords.
[Laughs].
Represent democracy. [Laughs.] On those red benches, rather than having to door-knock.
Why did you stand in Hornsey and Wood Green?
Standing for election made more sense there because other political parties don’t necessarily engage. My constituency was predominantly Somali, predominantly black, and the vote tendency hadn’t changed for over 20 years. So Labour didn’t bother campaigning there because they knew they were gonna get the vote. The Conservative and Lib Dems, because of resources, couldn’t campaign there. So these people are unrepresented in the sense that Labour never does anything for them because they’re always gonna get their vote. And then nobody ever challenges that.
Yeah.
I certainly don’t believe that capitalism is the answer to everything. Do I believe communism is the answer? Definitely not. But do I think that we need to work towards a socialist narrative where people are taken care of? Yes; yet at the same time, I don’t knock people for being successful. Does that make me a by-product of New Labour? Yeah. It’s like, I’m not really embarrassed about saying that. I think people want you to be embarrassed about your politics, and, just like my FGM, I’ve never been embarrassed of my FGM, and I’ve never been embarrassed of my politics.
The only things I really engaged with in this election were Sophie [Walker, WEP leader] running against Philip Davies [Tory MP] and the launch of the Progressive Alliance, where Lib Dems, Greens and WEP came together. Sophie gave a great speech there.
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All of our conceptions of politics are turning on their heads. I realise some of my views have been somewhat lazy liberalism. I guess I just assumed that Labour were for the good of people without questioning. For years. Everything needs looking at again, not just from the comfortable perspective of liberal affluent privilege.
And it was the same with the FGM.
So you saw all this before.
Oh no, I knew all this as a kid, but I now have the education to be able to talk to the media. I have the ability not to break down when I’m talking about my experience and contextualise it as violence against women and girls. So I’ve now got power. So this is what I’m gonna use the power for.
What do you think about Theresa May?
Theresa May is a big disappointment but she will always have a place in my heart for the stuff that she did when she was Home Secretary. She put into law the Serious Crime Bill that made it so everyone in touch with a child that’s under the age of 18 that knows of FGM has to report it—any concerns, you have to report that. So basically, if I was going to Somalia today because of the law and everything else, my teacher would have a duty to tell, when I walked into a hospital with a sewn-up vagina, all that kind of stuff. And she did that, and when I met her I thanked her and she started to well up and I was like…
I notice that you are happy to have a conversation with anyone, no matter what their politics are. And that’s what’s interesting about the WEP, is that they are having conversations with people. And that’s what I saw with the Progressive Alliance: sensible cross-party conversation. We’re all in it for the same reason, we all want things to be better.
Exactly. And you can only be at that point when you are very comfortable acknowledging that privilege is ok…
What do you mean by privilege?
I might have no money in my bank account tomorrow but I know that I could live. It’s that simple. I’m comfortable enough to know that there’s not going to be a dictator but then I also know that if I get too relaxed or too comfortable then it could happen. So, it’s like, acknowledge your privilege and don’t become too complacent about it.
Well, if you’ve got the air and breadth to be able to think about other people…
Exactly. So then that’s why you do it, sort out what’s eating you before you try to rescue anybody else.
No, I think it’s a really interesting view.
The reality is the people that have time are always… But then don’t hate the fact that those people are giving up their time; they might be rich but they’re giving up their time. Everybody that’s saying, ‘Fuck you, you don’t even care about us.’—no, actually they do.
So were you there for Jeremy Corbyn’s speech at Glastonbury? He’s getting people talking, no?
I was like super, super uncomfortable with the whole thing, because we should never idolise somebody, or at the same time, never dehumanise somebody like we did with Theresa May.
It’s the same kind of frenzy—extremes. It can only be a good thing to have so many young people engaged, but what’s the real engagement—actual policies or a social media hyperbole.
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I don’t pretend to like Theresa May’s politics, but I was at a protest where people were burning effigies of her and it made me feel really uncomfortable.
Exactly. Neither of them have the answer but the answer comes from working together. We’re not going to be working together if we’re like that. And conversation is the most important.
Not hurling accusations and abuse.
I’m very frank. But that doesn’t give you the right to step over the mark or whatever it is. I met a woman the other day and she said, ‘I came to one of your talks at WOW [Women of the World festival]’, and she said, ‘I cried through the whole thing and you said, “Hi, my name is Nimco and I’m gonna talk about my mutilated vagina, let’s talk about how we’re gonna end it in the world.”’
And serious issues don’t have to be spoken about in polite or academic terms. But they have to be taken seriously. What I love about the way you talk is the honesty and the language that you use. It makes it relatable. And real. And sometimes unnerving but that feels appropriate.
I do it in a very flippant way and I don’t cry about it or whatever, but then people think that there’s no, like, strategic thinking behind it, but I do think that hope sells more than horror.
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Somebody called me ‘a loudmouth’ the other day. She was like, ‘Oh, you’re such a loudmouth.’ And I’m like, well there I was thinking I was a shit-hot activist with three law degrees, like fuck you.
PART 2 JANUARY 2018 LEGISLATION
What’s happened since the summer? Last time we spoke (in August) you were leaving for Somaliland the next day. Things have progressed a lot.
So yeah, so I was there for 20 days; I went there to go film a piece about how I believe that FGM could end in a generation. And everybody was like, shut the fuck up. But we reformed the conversation about FGM as violence against women and girls.
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While I was there, I met the guy who was gonna be in the presidential election in October. 13 October was going to be the beginning of the presidential campaign, so I’d met the then candidate who was the front runner, Muse Bihi [Abdi], who ended up becoming President. But when I met him he’d just been selected as the candidate of the ruling party. It was really funny because I always say that I’m immensely privileged and I was a spoiled brat, that’s like, just how I grew up, and this guy was the guy who freed my grandfather from the prison. And he was there on my grandfather’s deathbed.
Wow, so you knew him?
No, but I had, like, some leverage, the ability to go sit in front of him and be brutally honest about things. So I went to meet him, and the guy was like, oh you’ve got half an hour. I’m like, he’s a presidential candidate of a non-recognised country, shut the fuck up, he’s got more than half an hour. I didn’t say that, but that was my head.
[Laughs].
I thought, fine, I’ve got half an hour, I’m not gonna beat about the bush, I’m just gonna say it. And I said, ‘Hi, how are you? Obviously I’ve spent the last few years in the UK doing FGM work, and I think FGM happened completely out of context for me, and you know my family, and the fact that I believe that Somaliland doesn’t really have a massive hold on FGM. It doesn’t believe in it as much as other places. And we could really be the country that ends it. And you are tipped to win, and I would really love for you to, um, to do something about that. To have the conversation about FGM.’
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‘And if you don’t want to do anything about it, I’m thankful that you met me.’ And I literally was like, ‘If you do want to do something about it, I’d be so happy.’ And he’s like, ‘Have you finished?’ I was like, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘First of all, you’ve got balls to sit here and talk at me. I’ve never been talked at by a woman and been told what to do by a woman. Ive never been told what to do by a young woman, like, a kid.’ I was like, ‘Well I’m not a kid, I’m 34.’
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He was like, ‘I’m 60-odd, shut up.’ ‘I congratulate you for being your grandfather’s daughter.’ And then he started talking about FGM and how it was, like, a massive issue because we don’t talk about it with men. I didn’t expect him to be as open and honest and humble in the way he was. Then he started to get personal. He said, ‘I’ve got these… I won’t lift up my shirt ’cause nobody wants to see an old man’s belly, but I’ve got these markings on my stomach.’ ‘When I was ten, I had, um…’ He had something wrong with his stomach. And it had to be fixed medically but his mother didn’t believe in medicine. So she took hot iron rods to it to release the stress, or whatever; it was some kind of traditional practice. And he said, ‘I could feel the pain, I could smell my skin burning. But it was my mum! So when she took me to the hospital, and she was told that I’ll have to have medicine and stuff like that, then they’d also have to fix this, she felt bad. I saw her feel bad, but I got defensive on her behalf, it made me feel bad. But I understood that I didn’t want her, because of her ignorance, to feel like she was less of a person in front of this white doctor that was helping.’ And he said, ‘I took pride in those things, but ultimately I always knew that if my kids got the same stomach issue I would take them to a doctor.’
Right.
So, he said, ‘That’s the thing about FGM, it was ignorance, and then some of us repeat it because we felt protective of our mothers.’ ‘But there’s a time and a place for everything. And 2017 is not the time or place for FGM. I’m open to the conversation about ending FGM, I’m open to it being part of my political campaign.’
Wow.
‘And I’m open to working with you,’ and I was like, fuck.
Amazing.
And then I went back in October when the election was imminent to talk to all three of the candidates because I didn’t want to be seen as being partisan. All three political party members and chairmen said that they would pass legislation.
[Nimco realises she is drinking out of a David Bowie mug and stops for a second].
What?
You gave me a David Bowie mug, thats so ironic. It’s— I love the story of him and Iman, those two being so different and to really understand each other, I think it’s like a once in a lifetime kind of connection.
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But then he was also the litmus test for all white guys that Somali girls brought home.
[Laughs]. Really?!
Yeah. ‘Was he as bad as David Bowie?’, was the question. If you ask any Somali mother about it. ‘Was your boy as bad as David Bowie??’
[Laughs]. That’s brilliant. So the president now…
We’ve helped draught the legislation and we’ve kind of given it to him, he can only introduce the legislation, then it’s the parliament that passes it. So, I’m in contact with the chief justice person, who seems kind of fun.
And the new rape bill?
So basically the new rape legislation criminalises marrying girls under the age of 18. People used to get out of rape if they married the woman they’d raped. So now all that is criminalised.
When did that come in?
About five weeks ago.
Right. So that probably came indirectly from you?
Yeah, indirectly in the sense that the impetus is there to start doing things, they don’t necessarily fear being feminist and being forward anymore.
Can you see in the future Somaliland being a leader, influencing other countries?
Yeah. If the poorest country with the highest FGM prevalence rating in the world can do it, then there’s hope for all. I do believe by 2030 we can reduce FGM by 70% globally, but we have to be progressive. There was a woman yesterday going, ‘Oh, I don’t want to hear this conversation about ending FGM in a generation, like, shut up.’ I’m like, you shut up. You shut the fuck up; it’s like the whole point. I believe that there’s seven year olds today [the global average age of FGM is five]—If we put in work right now, the five year olds, like Sofia’s generation [Nimco’s niece], by 2030, will be in their twenties.
Right.
Then it means the next generation wouldn’t have been cut because the generation before them had been. So I was at this school in Somaliland with ITV [commercial TV channel in the UK] and I said it really breaks my heart that probably 80% of these girls have been cut. But also, they are the future. They’re the older sisters or the mothers of a generation of girls that will never know FGM.
Yes.
And that is what I’m fighting for—it’s the positive, it’s the future. It’s that kind of narrative. The ability to have a childhood. And I think that was what was powerful about that trip: not just having the conversation with the president, but him, like, you know, rubber-stamping the fact that I was looking at these girls as the future. 100% of them could have been cut. The point is, 100% of their kids cannot be cut. 95% of their kids cannot be cut. We are at the brink of really reducing FGM, and it’s that whole point of, you’ve kind of finally climbed that mountain and you’re looking down—like, you know, I could see it.
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And if you actually, like, you know, end FGM, within that conversation, change the value of a girl, the ability for her to be educated at seven is a given
But I’d sacrificed our relationship for something that wasn’t beneficial to me; that’s what was so painful to her. I think she kind of wanted me to do some wild things and then come back and be very reserved and very Somali