Essential Rite of Passage or ‘Ultimate Child Abuse’?

Soraya Mire, a 31-year-old Somalian filmmaker, is sitting on the floor of her modest North Hollywood apartment, telling a story about her college years in France.

She lived in Grenoble, having escaped--literally, she says--a planned marriage with a cousin in Geneva. One day, in the grip of extraordinary pelvic pain, she called for an ambulance, then passed out. When she awoke, she says, she was in a hospital, undressed, being examined. A group of doctors was standing at the foot of the bed, looking at her in horror.

Was Mire in the process of a sex change?

Sex change? She’d never heard of such a thing.

Well then, what was wrong with her?

Wrong?

The doctors had apparently never seen the results of a procedure undergone by an estimated 80 million African girls, a procedure without which women are considered to be unchaste and unmarriageable.

The doctors had never seen the results of a female circumcision.

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Mire, like many critics of the tradition, thinks the term “female circumcision” is merely a euphemism. She uses the term “female genital mutilation.”

She is nearly finished with a 70-minute documentary film on the subject and, when it is done, she hopes to enter it in several film festivals and offer it to PBS. She has raised two-thirds of the $300,000 it will take to make the film through grants, donations and technical services.

An essential rite of passage in a broad swath of nations across the African continent, female circumcision may also be found wherever Africans from those regions migrate, including the United States. Mire occasionally receives inquiries from African immigrants--does she know anyone who will circumcise their daughters?

Many reasons are offered for circumcision--chastity, purification, rape prevention, cleanliness. It is believed to control the sexual impulses of women, to satisfy men sexually. Some Muslims believe the practice is required by the Koran, though this is disputed by religious scholars.

The procedure is usually performed on girls 5 to 9, but is sometimes performed on babies and adolescents.

“It kills the spirit of a child,” says Mire. “You see it in her eyes.”

The mutilation can be as mild as cuts in the clitoris or as extreme as the complete excision of the clitoris, both sets of labia and the suturing--or infibulation--of the vagina, leaving only a tiny hole for the passage of urine and menstrual blood.

Complications, including death from hemorrhaging or infection, are legion, according to United Nations health officials and feminist groups who oppose the practice. Walking and urinating can be difficult, bladder infections are common, intercourse can be painful and childbirth--often protracted--can be fraught with danger to mother and baby.

Dr. Groesbeck Parham, chief of gynecological oncology at the Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center has observed firsthand the cultural importance--and medical complications--of female circumcision.

In 1986, he spent several months in Khartoum, studying with a Sudanese doctor known for treating circumcised women whose vaginal tissue is seriously damaged during childbirth.

In Los Angeles, Parham has “reversed” the infibulations of about 20 African women. He recently operated on a single 26-year-old, whose greatest fear was that her future husband would not think of her as a virgin, even though her hymen was intact.

“When you are confronted with a situation rooted in such deep cultural mores, you have to be careful not to become arrogant,” says Parham. “But . . . I think it is a practice that needs to be revamped.”

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Mire was circumcised late--at 13. Her mother waited until her father, who opposed the practice, had left the country on business. A doctor performed the procedure--the extreme version--in a private home.

“I am doing this because I love you, honey,” her mother told her. “I want you to have a good life and be happy.”

Unlike many girls who are circumcised by midwives, Mire received local anesthesia.

“I knew exactly what was happening,” says Mire. “More than the pain, it was the sound of the scissors cutting my body. After that, my life just changed.”

She was unable to walk for months and suffered many infections until the procedure was reversed in her 20s.

“When they touch you there, they touch your mind,” she says. “To me, this is the ultimate child abuse.”

So dangerous is the deeply entrenched practice that last month, the World Health Organization, citing the deaths of tens of thousands of women and agony of millions more, announced its intention to end it.

That won’t be easy. Female circumcision is fiercely defended by men and women alike. Though viewed through Western eyes, it does seem like nothing so much as child abuse, many Africans are outraged that a precious part of their culture is under attack.

Alice Walker, the novelist, stirred controversy last year with “Possessing the Secret of Joy,” in which circumcision was portrayed as barbaric and the death-by-hemorrhaging of one character as murder.

“Africans were very mad at her for that,” says Mire.

Not just Africans.

Arisika Razak, a Berkeley midwife who is African-American, said several African-American women on the board of her professional association blocked a speaking invitation to Walker because they objected to her negative depiction of the practice.

“They felt she had no right to dictate what the culture should be,” said Razak. “My feeling is, every culture needs to have rites of passage, but (in this one) women die!”

Perhaps the fact that Mire is African, and that she has suffered the wound herself, gives her a sturdier moral platform from which to preach.

An unfinished version of her film, “Fire Eyes,” opens with a Somali woman in San Diego combing her young daughter’s hair. “It is shameful if you are not circumcised,” she tells the girl. “No Somali man would marry an uncircumcised woman.”

Later, the mother explains: “The reason behind this is our ancient tradition that we won’t let go. They circumcised my mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother. And this must follow the young generation.”

Six months ago, Mire’s mother asked for her forgiveness.

“I am not angry with her,” says Mire. “I have no hate. She thought she was doing something for her child. But if I ever have a daughter, I will not circumcise her. I won’t let anyone make her feel she is unworthy or unclean. She will keep the gift that God gave her, the gift they took from me.”