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 Our passports were no longer valid, so, we couldn’t come back to the UK.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.’
...
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. 
...
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.
...
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.
...
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.
... 
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.
...
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.
...
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.
...
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?’ 

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.