# 157: Desert Flowers on Women’s Day
Story behind the Passage
In case you have not noticed it yet: Today is International Women’s Day. Berlin actually has an official holiday to celebrate the occasion. I have not participated in any Women’s Day-related events today. I do not even know which events I could have participated in. But I wanted to choose a book about a strong woman today, one that had a strong impact on me. When I started thinking about this, I immediately knew which book to choose.
Waris Dirie’s story affected me more than any other, I think. Well, comparisons are hardly possible in this case anyways. At least, at the time when I first learned about the story, it had a lasting impact on me — up to the present. Maybe it was even too early for me to hear about Dirie’s cruel fate back then. I do not know. I can only reconstruct it roughly. Now that I see that the book was published in 1998, I was 15 back then. I do think I got it right when it was published because, as always, I learned about the book and Dirie’s story via television.
It was not just any TV show. I remember exactly what it was. It was a weekly program called “ML — Mona Lisa.” The German readers will probably remember it. It targeted women and presented relevant topics in a way that no other show did. I just googled if it might still exist but the Second Public German Station (ZDF) stopped producing it in 2017. I did not watch it anymore during the final years. They had changed the concept into some more general lifestyle magazine that targeted women and men with less edgy journalism. Usually, I am not into any formats that target women only. But with this format, I did not watch it anymore after they had changed the concept.
So, back to Dirie. ML showed her story in a special on women’s genital mutilation. I am not even sure if they showed the story and the report from Africa in this show or if her story was not even out yet and they alreay raised awareness. It does not matter. What matters is that I remember almost every detail of the report, many “disturbing” images. As I am writing above, maybe I was too young to be watching such violence committed to women. Maybe I just was not prepared. Maybe it was just the right time to see it because, as I am writing above, it had such a huge impact on me that I can hardly compare it to anything else. Obviously, this was not only the case for me. As you can still read in the online yearbook of the show, this particular issue remained in the memory of the German TV audience:
“In 1997, an ML report on female genital mutilation in Africa shook up the German TV audience and made the topic public.” — Barbara Dieckmann, my translation
“1997 rüttelte ein »ML«-Beitrag über die Beschneidungen in Afrika die Menschen hierzulande auf und machte das Thema öffentlich.” — Barbara Dieckmann
The description in the article states that the show was always alert to “explosive” topics, and I fully agree. Showing a German audience how women not too far away were being mutilated with dirty razor blades and bleeding and suffering for their entire life thereafter was more than many here could imagine — including myself. As always when I watch such things, I do get very sad but I also get very angry. And anger can become a powerful source of energy to change things — to fight like a lion. This energy is also what I probably saw in Waris Dirie and her courage to leave behind her African home, the place where her (female) relatives had done this to her, to start a new life in Europe as a demanded fashion model. Of course, she could not have known how her story would continue before her escape. But she was brave and determined enough to revolt and to not just accept that custom was custom.
I guess, this is what most impressed me about the story. Not only the suffering and the pain that she had endured. No, she simply followed her heart by not accepting her fate. And that is something that especially people from the “West,” actually, from anywhere, still have to understand when thinking and talking about such things (including myself). What I mean is the story behind the story; the path to becoming aware of an injustice. This is not self-evident. If you grow up in a world where customs are being practiced the way they are practiced, you are part of this culture. Even if these practices make you suffer — physically and mentally — it is not self-evident that you start questioning them. This especially holds true for the pre-internet age when you could not simply check on Wikipedia how women were living in other countries.
I am writing this long intro because I think, this courage to actually question your own mind-set is one of the bravest things one can do. By questioning the rules and rituals of your own culture, you are questioning everything your own life is built on. That also means you run the risk of losing everything your life is built on if you not only continue questioning these things but if you actually turn away from them. By the way, just think of all the fuss about the British Royals today and the interview of Harry and Megan with Oprah. You can think whatever your want to think about it but the couple is basically doing the same thing: They are publicly questioning ‘ancient’ monarchic rituals. Yes, they might have several personal motivations for doing so but the point is: This is how taken-for-granted norms get fundamentally questioned and eventually overthrown.
So, back to Dirie. I remember I must have bought the book Desert Flower right after watching the program or at least quite soon. As you probably know if you read my stuff more frequently, I always loved Africa from early childhood onwards. Consequently, reading this story about her fate changed my view of Africa. Of course, Africa is a huge continent and female genital mutilation is not practiced in all countries. But it does not matter. All of a sudden, thinking of Africa felt differently. The images from the coverage mixed with the images that came up when reading her book would not go away. Still, all this also heightened my fascination with the continent — and its women. This is why, on a day like today that celebrates women, I want to draw attention to those women around the world who are enduring incredible things without giving up; without becoming bitter — who even share their stories publicly to encourage others; like Dirie, the “desert flower.”
My Learnings
“Another benefit of growing up in Africa was that we were part of pure nature, pure life.” These passages appear in the chapter “Thinking of Home.” It is the last chapter in the book and it focuses very much on a celebration of Dirie’s home country Somalia. This in and of itself is so outstanding because she shows appreciation for a country, its culture and the people that afflicted the most horrible burden on her body and psyche.But there is only one Africa and that is exactly what Dirie describes in many different facets there.
You know, people from the “West,” especially cultural scholars, often judge passages like the one above about nature to romantizations of Africa or the Orient or whichever part of the world. But this is Dirie writing and she talks about how much nature and growing up with it is related to her African heritage. The reason why I am highlighting this sentence here is because “we,” in Europe, for example, have very much forgotten about what nature means to us as human beings. Now we have Covid and people are rediscovering how much good a walk in the woods can do to them. And they will spend thousands of Euros again on expensive retreats that take them back to “nature” after all this is done.
But nature in Africa (and many other parts in the world) still means something else. It means a deep relationship with the soil, the seasons, darkness and light, animals and forces of nature. Really understanding nature, all its signs and peculiarities, is what you learn when you grow up in and with nature. And no, I have not grown up there but this deep bond between nature and the people is definitely something — if not the most important thing — that attracted me to Africa in the first place and it was also the driving factor that made me go there several times. It is also the reason why I prefer going to the mountains and the desert alone, if at all possible. You can enjoy “pure nature, pure life” a lot more intensely if there is only nature and you. I know, this sounds terrible to some, but it is my personal experience, nothing else, I am not trying to make any universal claims.
“From the beginning, I had the instinct for survival; I learned joy and pain at the same time.” These are insights that you can only gain retrospectively. I think, sometimes, this “instinct for survival” is somewhat of a placeholder for explaining things that cannot be explained by other means or in any rational terms. I often wonder how some people manage to survive, given what they are going through and what they have already been through in the past. The only answer I can find then is: “instinct for surivival.” This is my theory, you can only fully internalize this if you accept early on that there is no joy without pain and that there is no pain without joy, I guess. And both have to be “learned” in on this journey that people call life.
“It’s when you don’t have something that you appreciate it, and since we had nothing, we appreciated everything.” Now with Covid, more people might have come to realize what this sentence actually means. The simple fact that civil liberty and the freedom of movement was and partly still is limited in some places, makes it a thing to be appreciated more than usually. I am not sure how long this learning will last after humanity will go back to the new normal after the disease is in more control. But at least right now, there are many examples of how this truth applies to our current lives.
Especially with respect to the Women’s Day, I just wish that we all imagine ourselves in places where women do not have the rights others have and where they do not have the freedom to choose their own path of life, not even talking about choosing their own husbands and choosing their right to be protected from physical harm. Still, the point is, I think, imagining is not enough. Imagining and thinking and even reading does not necessarily make people learn and understand. We also see this during Covid right now. People can look at crowded intensive care stations and dying people on TV every day. They still do not get it. Even our politicians do not (there are some recent examples). But then, as soon as they set foot in a hospital and stand right in the middle of the mess, this is when the penny finally drops and they do understand what is happening.
What I am saying is, yes, we live in this interconnected online world now where women from the “free states” think they know how women in other parts of the world are doing. But the truth is, I doubt it. We need to actually talk to these women, personally listen to their stories and we need to GO THERE (as soon as we can again) to really experience what it is like. This is the only “therapy” to make people act, I think, in a sustainable and long-term manner. Yes, I started this post, as I start most posts, with a story from a book that very much changed my life, but what it really did is: It made me go to Africa and many other places to fully understand the situation. Did I “save” the women there? Has this changed anything in their lives? No, mostly, it has not. But all this changed me, an that is what I am grateful for. All my actions are inspired by experiences like these. And the stories we read are at least entry points.
By the way, this not only holds true for women’s solidarity across cultures, it starts right here. If you want to know how some women are suffering under their beating husbands right here, right in your country, in your city, go look, you will find them, you can talk to them, you do not have to travel to Africa. And you do not even have to go anywhere. The only thing all these stories and life lessons can make you do is become a person that appreciates life and that picks up some of this “survival instinct.” Just like Dirie does at the end of her book: If we all come into this habit of being grateful for what we have and learn to actively change things that are in our sphere of influence, we can all become desert flowers.
Happy Women’s Day!
Reflection Questions
1) Which story of/by a woman has influenced your life?
2) Are you currently missing something because you do not have it anymore? What is it?
3) What can you personally do to improve the situation of women?