September 11, 1996

Woman Betrayed by Loved Ones Mourns a Double Loss


Related Article
  • A Refugee Escapes From Togo, Body Intact but Family Torn
    By CELIA W. DUGGER

    KPALIME, Togo -- Just around the corner from the Kassindja family compound lives another young woman who ran away from home -- but too late to escape having her genitals sliced off against her will.

    The woman, Mariam Razak, was 15 when her family locked her in her room and sent in five women to hold her down, as she struggled wildly, while a sixth cut off her clitoris and genital lips.

    The event left Mrs. Razak with an abiding sense that she had been betrayed by the people she loved most: her parents and her boyfriend. She now believes, nine years later, that the cutting and the infection it caused deprived her not only of sexual pleasure but of the ability to bear children.

    It was love that led to Mrs. Razak's disfigurement. She and her childhood sweetheart, Idrissou Abdel Razak, said they began having sex as teen-agers, and then he decided they should marry.

    Without telling Mariam, he asked his father, Idrissou Seybou, to seek her family's permission to marry her. Mr. Seybou offered a substantial dowry, and her parents consented. Mariam was not told.

    "My son and I asked her parents to excise her," Mr. Seybou said. "Other girls who were informed in advance had run away. That's why we didn't tell her it would be done."

    On the day of her excision, Mariam's boyfriend, a 17-year-old taxi driver, was working in Sokode, a town north of Kpalime. He admits now that he knew the ceremony was going to happen but did not warn Mariam. She believes they could have found a way to trick their parents into believing she had been excised, if he had only stood by her.

    When he returned, he found she had been rushed to the hospital because her wound would not stop bleeding. Once there, she developed a debilitating infection. She remained in the hospital for three weeks. But while her body healed, she said, her bitterness deepened.

    And she resolved not to marry the man who had failed to protect her. She borrowed $20 from a woman she knew and took cheap taxis to Nigeria, where she stayed with friends. It took her parents nine months to find her and bring her home.

    It took Mr. Razak six more years to woo her back. He brought her gifts of cloth, shoes and jewelry. He told her he loved her. He begged her forgiveness. Finally, the anger that marked her round face softened. And in 1994, they married. Ever since, they have lived in his father's compound.

    But Mariam Razak knows what she has lost. She and Mr. Razak had made love in their youth, before she was excised, and she said sex was very satisfying. Now, they both say, she feels nothing. She compares the permanent loss of sexual pleasure to having a terminal illness that lasts a lifetime.

    "When he goes to town, he buys potions to give to me before sex to make me feel pleasure, but it's not the same," she said.

    He agrees.

    "Now that it's cut, something was lost in that place," he said. "She feels nothing there. I try to make her feel pleasure, but it doesn't work very well."

    And their grief did not end there. They have also been unable to conceive a child. They have gone to doctors and traditional healers, to no effect.

    Mr. Razak promises that he will not take another wife, even if Mariam does not get pregnant. "Since we were children, I have loved Mariam," he said. "We'll keep searching for a treatment."

    And if they ever have daughters, he vows he will send them out of the country to protect them from genital cutting.

  • Copyright 1996 The New York Times Company