girls. My mother felt the practice was primitive and useless. She didn’t want me to have anything to do with it. In her village, the practice of the Eleventh Rite had been banned years before she was born. So I grew up sure that all the circumcising would happen to the other girls, girls born in Jwahir.
After a girl goes through her Eleventh Rite, she’s worthy of being spoken to as an adult. Boys don’t get this privilege until they’re thirteen. So the ages between eleven and sixteen are happiest for a girl because she’s both child and adult. Information about the rite wasn’t withheld. There were plenty of books about the process in the school’s book house. Still, no one was required or encouraged to read them.
So us girls knew that a piece of flesh was cut from between our legs and that circumcision didn’t literally change who we were or make us better people. But we didn’t know what that piece of flesh did. And because it was an old practice, no one really remembered why it was done. So the tradition was accepted, anticipated, and performed.
I didn’t want to do it. No numbing medicine was used. That was part of the ritual. I had seen two freshly circumcised girls the previous year and I remembered how they walked. And I didn’t like the idea of cutting off a part of my body. I didn’t even like cutting my hair, thus my long braids. And I certainly wasn’t one to do anything for the sake of tradition. I didn’t come from that kind of background.
But as I sat on the floor staring into space, I knew something had changed in me last week when I ended up in that tree. Whatever it was caused a slight shake to my step that only I noticed. I’d heard more from my mother than the story of my conception. She’d said nothing about the hope she had in me. The hope that I would avenge her suffering. She hadn’t been detailed about the rape, either. All of this was between her words.
I had many questions that couldn’t be answered. But when it came to my Eleventh Year Rite, I knew what I had to do. That year there were only four of us who were eleven years old and girls. There were fifteen boys. The three girls in my group would no doubt tell everyone how I wasn’t present at the rite. In Jwahir, to be uncircumcised past eleven brought bad luck and shame to your family. No one cared if you weren’t born in Jwahir. You, the girl growing up in Jwahir, were expected to have it done.
I brought dishonor to my mother by existing. I brought scandal to Papa by entering his life. Where before he had been a respected and eligible widower, now people laughingly said he was bewitched by an Okeke woman from the bloody West, a woman who’d been used by a Nuru man. My parents carried enough shame.
On top of all this, at eleven, I still had hopes. I believed that I could be normal. That I could be made normal. The Eleventh Rite was old and it was respected. It was powerful. The rite would put a stop to the strangeness happening to me. The next day, before school, I went to the home of the Ada, the priestess who would perform the Eleventh Rite.
“Good morning, Ada-m,” I respectfully said when she opened the door.
She met my eyes with a frown. She might have been a decade older than my mother, maybe two. I stood almost her height. Her long green dress was elegant and her short Afro was perfectly shaped. She smelled of incense. “What is it, Ewu?”
I winced at the word. “I’m sorry,” I said, stepping back. “Am I disturbing you?”
“I’ll decide that,” she said, crossing her arms over her small chest. “Come in.”
I stepped in, briefly noting that I’d be late for school. I’m really going to do this, I thought.
On the outside, her house was a small sand brick dwelling and inside it remained small. Yet somehow it was able to harbor a work of art that was gigantic in visual power. The mural that splashed over the walls was unfinished, but the room already looked as if it were submerged in one of the Seven Rivers. Painted near the door was a human-sized fish-man with a strikingly lifelike face. His ancient eyes were full of primordial wisdom.
Books told of huge bodies of water. But I’d never seen a drawing of one, let alone a giant colorful painting. This can’t really exist, I thought. So much water. And in it were silvery insects, turtles with green flat legs and shells, water plants, gold, black, and red … fish. I stared around and around. The room smelled of wet paint. The Ada’s hands were stained with it, too. I had interrupted her.
“You like it?” she asked.
“Never seen anything like it,” I said quietly, staring.
“My favorite kind of reaction,” she said, looking genuinely pleased.
I sat down and she sat across from me, waiting. “I … I’d like to put my name on the list, Ada-m,” I said. I bit my lip. To speak this request made it true, especially when spoken to this woman.
She nodded. “I wondered when you would come.”
The Ada knew what was happening with everyone in Jwahir. She was the one who made sure the proper traditions were performed for deaths, births, menstrual celebrations, the party thrown when a boy’s voice drops, the Eleventh Year Rite, the Thirteenth Year Rite, all of life’s markers. She’d planned my parents’ wedding and I’d hidden from her whenever she came by. I hoped she didn’t remember me.
“I’ll add your name. The list will be submitted to the Osugbo,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Be here at two a.m. a week from today. Wear old clothes. Come alone.” She looked me over. “Your hair—unbraid it, brush it out and rebraid it loosely.”
A week later, I snuck out of my bedroom window at twenty minutes to two in the morning.
The door to the Ada’s house was open when I arrived. I slowly stepped inside. The living room was decorated with candles, all the furniture cleared away. The Ada’s mural, mostly finished, looked more alive than ever in the candlelight.
The three other girls were already there. I quickly joined them. They looked at me with surprise, and some relief. I was one more person to share their fear. We didn’t speak, not even a greeting, but we stood close together.
Besides the Ada, there were five other women present. One of them was my great-aunt, Abeo Ogundimu. She’d never liked me. If she realized I was here without the consent of Papa, her nephew, I’d be in real trouble. I didn’t know the other four women, but one of them was very old and her presence demanded respect. I shivered with guilt, suddenly unsure of whether I should be there.
I glanced at a small table in the center of the room. Set on it were gauze, bottles of alcohol, iodine, four scalpels, and other items I didn’t recognize. My stomach rolled with nausea. A minute later, the Ada began. They must have been waiting for me.
“We are the women of the Eleventh Rite,” the Ada said. “We six guard the crossroads between womanhood and girlhood. Only through us can you move freely between the two. I am the Ada.”
“I am Lady Abadie, the town healer,” the short woman next to her said. Her hands were pressed closely to her flowing yellow dress.
“I am Ochi Naka,” another said. She was very dark skinned and had a voluptuous figure that she showed off with her stylish purple dress. “Market seamstress.”
“I am Zuni Whan,” the other said. Under her loose blue midlevel dress, she wore pants, something women rarely wore in Jwahir. “Architect.”
“I am Abeo Ogundimu,” my great-aunt said with a smirk. “Mother of fifteen.”
The women laughed. We all did. A mother to fifteen was a busy career indeed.
“And I am Nana the Wise,” the imposing old old woman said, looking at each of us through her one good eye, her hunched back forever pushing her forward. My great-aunt was old, but she was young compared to this woman. Nana the Wise’s voice was clear and dry. She held my eyes longer than she did the other girls’. “Now what are your names, so that we are well met?” she said.
“Luyu