Unnecessary insult - Iyad Abdulrahman

For me, I did not need much time to wake up from my childhood fantasies, and I found myself, by pure coincidence, castrated and squeezed inside a thick burlap fabric carried by my mother. I was nine years old when my mother carried me on her hunched back, far from all the dreams I knew, and she took me toward the traveling road east (Ethiopia). At that time, my mother did not want me to climb on her back and wrap my arms around her neck like boys usually do in a moment of recklessness, because, as she explained to me then, having spread feet would only increase the tearing of my wounds; so she forced me to curl inside the burlap and pulled me onto her back like village men pull sacks of barley, and she took me along an unfamiliar dirt road, preceded by a group of elderly men, women, and children. *** In this work, Iyad Abdulrahman addresses a subject that Arabic novels have not previously touched upon, or at least a different angle of treatment regarding the issue of sacrificing masculinity for religious reasons. The work tells the story of a black child forced to leave his village and lose his masculinity at his mother’s wish, seeking blessing and closeness to God by joining the (Aghwat) in Medina and Mecca, a group dedicated to serving the sacred feelings, provided that its members are castrated. This system was stopped in the late 1970s by a religious fatwa that ended a thousand years of these practices.