I'M PROUD TO BE A WOMAN!.....DESERT FLOWER TRAILER
Desert Flower is a film about the true story of supermodel Waris Dirie who escapes Somalia, after running away from an arranged marriage. She eventually ends up in London, where she is discovered by a photographer and becomes a supermodel. While the story chronicles her life, the main focus of the film is on something that happened to her as a little girl.
When she was five she became a victim of female genital mutilation a practice in which a girl's genitila is cut off usually with a dirty razor blade. In a lot of cases the girls end up bleeding to death, or dying from an infection later on. Besides torturing the girl, it also ensures that she will never have any sort of sexual pleasure, because it usually involves removing the clitorsis. Sex will then most likely always be painful, as well as ensuring child birth is excruciating as well. In a lot of cases what remains is then sewed up so that her "husband" the man who is old enough to be her dad (or grandfather) that she is sold off to when she is a child, can than cut her open, before raping her on their "wedding night".
I actually think the most powerful part of the film is the last five minutes in which she gives a speech to the UN about her experience as a victim of this. She talks about how when she was little she didn't want to be a woman, because everything is so painful and it means constant suffering. By the age of five, I as a little girl on the other side of the world had come to the same conclusion. I looked at the way my father treated my mother, and the constant amount of abuse. The fear I lived with daily both inside and outside of my home. Never knowing if when I left my house if some strange man was going to kidnap, rape and kill me and never knowing which day when I returned home that my dad was going to kill us. Then came the day that I decided when I grew up I would become a doctor. Only to spend hours crying, because I, as a 5 year old, had never seen a woman doctor before, or women really in any positions other than teachers and wives, and I thought it was one of those things I wasn't allowed to do because I was a girl.
To me being a woman, meant living in constant fear, being in constant pain; physical and emotional, never seeing your dreams manifest, and therefore never being happy. The sad thing is there isn't any little girl between Waris as a child in Somalia and myself as a little girl in America who hasn't drawn this same conclusion. On some level every woman on this planet has internalized this message.
The most touching part is how she is proud to be a woman, and is proud of who she is despite all she's gone through. The older I get the more proud I am of being a woman as well. It reminds me of a quote that this woman in I believe it was Sudan said, who was a part of the Women for Women International group. Her village was burned down by a group of men, so than the women moved to a new location and decided to start their own restaurant with help from the organization. She stated "I'm proud to be a woman, even if the men don't think we're important." Amen to that!
***If you want to learn more about Waris's Desert Flower Foundation which is all about ending FGM you can go to the website below. They also have a lot more information about FGM and the estimated 150 million women worldwide who have been affected by it.
http://www.desertflowerfoundation.org/en/
