• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 362 0

people there has always been a tsunga. It was hereditary, like the priests. Before the people became a tribe they lived too. But that was considered an evil time, because although everyone knew they had a mother, because she had given birth to them, a father was not to be had in the same way. You could not be sure. And so, your mother’s brother was your father. The house always belonged, in those days, to the woman, and there were never children without parents or a home. But somehow this was seen as evil. Anyway, from the time of memory, always, in my family, the women were tsungas.

But why is that? I asked my mother.

Because it is such an honor, she replied. And also because it is the way we fill our bellies.

She was a sad woman, my mother. I never saw her smile.

She often prayed.

When I became old enough to be aware of her suffering, I began to notice that when she prayed, she faced a certain direction, and that she often went off, walking slowly, looking back over her shoulder as if she thought someone followed her, in the direction of her prayers.

Once, following her, I saw her enter a blighted forest where no one ever went, walk up to a hole in a rotting tree, and take something out of it. She unwrapped it, looked upon it, kissed it, and replaced it, all in a single motion. This forest was a kind of no-man’s-land. Barren. Everything dry and dying. It was said this blight was caused long ago by a man and a woman fornicating there, when the area was planted in cereal grains. But this had happened so long ago no one remembered their fate, or even who they were.

After my mother had left, I crept up to the tree in which the small wrapped object lay, and took it carefully down into my lap, where I unwrapped it. It was a small smiling figure with one hand on her genitals, every part of which appeared intact. This was before I was circumcised, and so, with the ready curiosity of a child, I lay right down to compare my vulva to the little statuette’s. Hidden behind a boulder, I very cautiously touched myself. The blissful, open look of the little figure had aroused me, and I felt an immediate response to my own touch. It was so sudden, so shocking and unexpected, it frightened me. I hastily re-wrapped the little figure, placed it back in its niche, and ran.

I would often go back to the blighted place and take the little figure down from the tree and play with it. But it seemed too powerful for me to ever again compare to myself. And so, I never again touched myself. If I had, then at least I would have known the experience that the work of the tsunga was trying to prevent.

Can you imagine the life of the tsunga who feels? I learned not to feel. You can learn not to. In this I was like my grandmother, who became so callous people called her “I Am a Belly.” She would circumcise the children and demand food immediately after; even if the child still screamed. For my mother it was a torture.

Then, one day, my mother had to circumcise the girls in my age group.

Prior to that day, for weeks, she prayed to the little idol constantly. And when my turn came she tried to get away with cutting lightly. Of course she took the outer lips, because four strong eagle-eyed women held me down; and of course the inner lips too. But she tried to leave me a nub, down there where the charge I had felt with the little statuette had seemed to be heading. She barely nicked me there. But the other women saw.

What my mother started, the witchdoctor finished. He had learned all the healing and cures that he knew from women, which was why he was called a witchdoctor, and he wore the witch’s grass skirt, but the witches who taught him had been put to death, because they refused circumcision and were too powerful among the women to be left free, uncircumcised. He showed no mercy. In fright and unbearable pain my body bucked under the razor-sharp stone he was cutting me with…

I could never again see myself, for the child that finally rose from the mat three months later, and dragged herself out of the initiation hut and finally home, was not