Dawa told us of midnight and a conversation heard through the cracks of a door. Her parents spoke of home, of Sierra Leone, of a place where their childhoods resided, and of their plan to take the girls back. For a vacation, they said. To learn your roots, they insisted.

And perhaps they did intend that, but the biggest reason they were taking the girls “home” was to get them circumcised.

Genital mutilation.

“My sister doesn’t know what it means,” Dawa said. “I have heard stories, though. One of our cousins died after the procedure because the tools used weren’t sterilized. My mother called it an accident. A mistake.”

Uncircumcised women are considered dirty. As if a woman’s ability to achieve sexual pleasure makes her unnatural or deviant.

Do they not consider that if the God they profess to serve wanted women to live without sexual pleasure, they would be born without clitorises?

We gave aid to Dawa and Zainab, but what about those countless others? Who hears their screams? Who answers their pleas for help?

What rhetoric convinces people, mothers, to perpetuate this particular violence against girls?

The world continually tries to steal a woman’s right to her own body—who she allows to touch her and who she doesn’t. They take it one step further and try to remove the pleasure that belongs wholly to her.

Does this not make you angry?

Can you blame us, then, for wanting to burn the world down sometimes?

Even when the break is in the heart, the body bears evidence of it. You know what we’re talking about. Of course you do. Being a girl, a woman, means being fluent in the languages of pain and power. Knowing what hurts and how much and if you have the ability to endure it.

Ever notice how many derogatory terms are actually words that describe female bodies? Yes, we are talking about words that you may have used yourself despite being a girl or a woman, perhaps not realizing that all you are doing is being complicit in the way the world recognizes women not as people but as bodies: bodies to objectify and to police.

Feminism isn’t a four-letter word.

You know what is?

Rape.

The Medina, the Riad, and the Red City

If cities have hearts and pulses, the ones belonging to Marrakech would be ticking frenetically. Time, so as not to be squandered, is defined by haste here. We, still drunk on the blue of Chefchaouen, are disarmed entirely by the chaos in the Medina of Marrakech. The Medina, in case you don’t know, refers to the part of a Moroccan city that belongs to the Arabs.