The Mystery Behind The Bushes

(A Poem on FGM)

I was just a girl...

Kim on my back,
Kicking and wailing like he knew what the day held.
My dress — tugged up,
My back — bare,
My ears — full of his cries...
But my soul?
My soul was listening to something deeper.

A sound...
Not quite human.
A wail,
Ripping through the bush like a curse set free.
Running feet —
Not joy,
Not play —
But terror.

I should've run.
I should've screamed.
But I froze...
Like my grandma’s chicken sensing death in the wind.

They took her.
Aunt Cheru.
The girl who topped the district.
The one with Nairobi dreams and Jesus in her prayers.

Three boys.
Three shadows of men,
Dragged her like a goat headed for slaughter.
And she screamed —
“I don’t want it!”
“I hate it!”
But they didn’t hear her humanity.
They only heard tradition.

Mum came home...
Ate ugali and mursik like nothing happened.
Napoleon of our village —
Yet her silence was a sword that pierced deeper than any cut.

I dreamed that night.
Of boys chasing me.
Of wetting myself.
Of screaming...
But no sound came.
Because silence is how it begins.
And silence...
Is how it continues.

Then came Muspeni.
Drunk with pride.
He said, “She’s becoming a woman now.”
Said they’re “cutting off the girlish sides.”
Said she’d be “complete.”
Complete?
Like a story with the last chapter ripped out?
Like a song stopped mid-chorus?
Like a bird with no wings?

Mum took me there.
To the shack.
To the Bush of Secrets.
And there they were—
Girls wrapped in skin and clay.
Girls who once dreamed like Aunt Cheru.
Now sitting in silence.
Their voices turned into smoke
rising from a bonfire of stolen girlhood.

One week.
Two.
Three.
And they came out —
Painted, perfumed, paraded.
Like trophies.
And the men danced —
Took them.
One by one.
Except Changwony...
Because madness isn’t considered beautiful.

But I ask—
Isn’t it mad to carve a girl’s future out of her body?
To bleed her into a bride?
To decorate her pain in beads and songs?

They said Cheru was now a woman.
But she never went back to school.
Never touched her books.
Never told me stories again.

They didn’t just cut her body...
They cut her life.

So now I speak.
Not from fear,
But from fire.
Not in whispers,
But in war cries.

For Cheru.
For me.
For every girl who wonders when her turn will come.

Let this be the last silence.
Let no more dreams bleed into dirt.
Let no more daughters be “completed” with a knife.

Let us end...
The mystery behind the bushes.

Based on a true story. Ask me for details

#Essy The Poet