<p>Female genital mutilation is the excruciating and damaging experience endured by many women and children in various cultures across Africa and elsewhere in the world. Even when survivors find themselves, for one reason or another, relocated to what should be safe havens, the practice follows them like a ven geance ghost.</p>
<p>This unique text, combining oral history with literary art, compiles testimonies and poems about FGM: the humiliation, deprivation and loss it occasions. These accounts, factual in some cases and lyrical in others, reveal the practice as lived or witnessed and the visceral responses to it. The anger is palpable, the battlement tangible. Besides the pain, though, is the hope born of voices raised by governments, organizations, institutions and individuals, urging that FGM be abandoned or transformed into rituals for building self-esteem without the blades.</p>
<p>We are grateful to Femrite, Women Writers Collective in Kampala, Uganda, for the courage to have published this revealing work.</p>