of Ritual: An Odyssey into Female Genital Circumcision in Africa, Routledge, 1989.
They wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word undone. These women could be undone; or not. They seemed to be able to choose.
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, Virago, 1987.
MICA
1.
The door is thick and made of iron. The key is so big and heavy I must hold it in both hands. It’s more like a bolt really, a long, hard shaft of black metal, scored and notched along its whole length. I quake at the blasphemy I am about to commit, then insert the key and push until I feel it bite. I turn it with both hands and the door opens.
The smell is powerful, raw, ammoniac. My breath catches in my throat and my eyes water. I am angry with myself for this simplistic animal response, so typical of weak (wo)Mankind, and make myself take a step forward into the close atmosphere. I have smelled similar in the stables, this reek of straw, of livestock and vegetarian excrement. It should not upset me so much. Of course the womanidols are made of flesh. This cannot be helped. But I had not expected this, our hallowed citadel, to smell like shit.
The Orchid Nursery is set into the centre of the corp-yard. The high, round dome is made of segments of lovely pink-hued glass, a rare flesh colour created by masters of the art of isolating and manipulating fundamental aspects of the elements, water, air and the earth, our wild mother, whose unreliable humours must be subdued and made to obey the dictates of Men lest we all fall pray to the exigencies of her whims. The shimmering half-globe rises from a circular stone wall inscribed with the sacred maxim, form follows function. This wall is twice the height of a Man, the granite surface obscured by the boughs of espaliered pear trees, their limbs splayed flat against the wall.
Most of the Nursery is under the earth; the mysterious lives within enjoy the filtered sunlight, safe against the extremes of seasons and the gaze of profane eyes. Before the western face of the Nursery is the stone altar with its Plea Box for annual Beseechings. It is a sacred secret/un-secret, a mystery, but one we all see every day. It lies at the heart of all the concentric circles of our Perfect State.
We pass by the Nursery all the time on our daily rounds and sometimes a girlie will stop to pay her respects to the womanidols within, who we know to be there though we never see them. We leave small offerings sometimes, a comb we have made, a piece of fruit. These are always gone by morning. But we don’t go in, ever. The careforcers do, but they never tell, having sacrificed their voices to their sacred tasks when they are first commissioned. The Seed-Bearers enter the Nursery too, when they are selected for service, but they are Men so naturally we rarely speak to them. And of course those destined to become womanidols go inside; they go inside once only and they never, ever come out.
But I needed to know if Pearl was there. I was so very angry with her when first she went missing. When the anger passed, as of course it had to, I found that it had misled me, obscured my deeper feeling: a terrible fear for my friend. My anxiety was raw and red and had to be salved, for I had come to fear for my wits. So I stole the key from the Careforce office. I did not know what would happen to me if I were found out, did not know if a punishment had been invented for a crime nobody had ever committed before. I went by way of the underground passage from the office, the only way in or out, at least as far as I know. I was shaking violently and I could smell the acrid pungency of fear on my skin and my breath.
Yet all my life I have imagined being here, the place that all little girlies desire to end their childhood. The highest privilege is to be among those chosen to serve as a womanidol, clean and Perfect. Females born of unPerfected (wo)Men become foot-soldiers, gardeners or house-mothers if they are not themselves graced through a successful Beseeching for Perfection; the boys become Craftsmen or Scholars, Seed-Bearers or Ecumen. But the sons born of womanidols become our Properganders, Men of Right-Sight and Construers of the sacred DoppelBook, and are destined to succeed our Brother Ministers, the wise and mighty heroes of Liberation, for they are marked as Elect by GodFather (Blessed Be His Cock-and-Muscle, alive-alive-oh-oh ever amen). They devote their lives to prayer and interpretation of the Holy Strictures from the age when their tender lips can first form words until the day they are taken by merciful death into the embrace of GodFather (BBHCM) in Heaven above to live forever in blissful oversight of many farms and factories, with cunny aplenty trained perfectly in all the sexual arts, five-hundred apiece, that they might always be sated and (wo)Men need not be overtaxed.
The Properganders of Art & Pain, of Yearning & Duty, of Instruction & Destruction, guide us within the blessed order established after the long, hard-won Liberation. They teach us with righteous words and show us the way through this evil world that exists in tension of oppositional forces that must ever be kept separate. Evil is always ready to assail the good by seeking ingress to the minds of Men and (wo)Men through our ears and eyes and mouths and very skins created by GodFather (BBHCM) to seal us off from the world’s profanity. Oh, the evil ones have soft phrases and pretty images to seduce us. The sensuous touch of the light-fingered breeze who cools the sweat risen to the skin from righteous labour, and she says, Only rest awhile – such temptations are sent to test us, and must be resisted. Or the wicked magic of the twilight, arousing the passive air as if it were the exposed skin of a virgin, but then comes the inevitable setting of the sun, filling the sky with blood. Our Properganders are our guides through this world of art and pain, yearning and duty, and they maintain harmonious relations between the Houses for they are the safeguards of Civilisation itself.
The week before had been our birthday. Mother Oblation 7th came into our cunnydorm to wake all the new Oblation Fifteens of Stone House: Anapaite, Antimony, Galena, Nickeline, Opal, Pearl and me. All of our stone names have meanings. Like my name, Mica, which means ‘crumb’. So there stood MaOblat at the door on the first day of my life as a (wo)Man. The light from the kitchen haloed the frizz of hair escaping her cap so that it shone brightly. The smell of nutmeg from the kitchen was making my belly rumble and my mouth water. MaOblat’s face had on its usual look that Pearl calls ‘poo-jammed’, and it is true that while MaOblat might want to be pleasant, her feelings are all blocked up behind a plug of hard scale. Of course I never let Pearl know I agreed with her about that because she did not need any encouragement in her irreverence. I have a duty to my friend and I have kept her safe so far – or so I thought last week.
‘Fifteens,’ said MaOblat from the doorway, ‘As you know, today is your Day of Attainment. The Plea Box on the Altar awaits. You may Beseech. Then cake.’ She had forgotten to detach her electric whisk-aug from her right wrist-branch with its multi-purpose connectors. Cake mix dripped onto the floor while the safety light flickered through the thin weave of her crone’s opaque dressless. (It had only been last year that she’d finally given in to a decent matron’s garb – someone must have told her – at last – that it was simply not enough just to have her fat surgically removed and redistributed and her pendulous labia tightened to disguise the ravages of age, thank GodFather, Blessed Be His Cock-and-Muscle!) I wrapped my arms around my body and hugged myself against the cold of the morning, perhaps for the last time. By this time next month, GodFather willing (BBHCM, alive-alive-oh-oh ever amen), I might well be Perfected, inshallaweh, or at least augmented like the mothers and the soldiers. I felt nervousness and pride uncoiling below my heart and spreading like tentacles of hot magnesium wire through my body from heart to cockslot.
But Pearl wasn’t having any of that. ‘How festive,’ she murmured quietly to me so that no-one else could hear. ‘Maybe she’ll let us watch a bit of telly with the careforcers later,’ she added, ‘even stay up for the Late News post-Anthem. Yay.’ Pearl has always been a sharp one, but this level of sarcasm
