Unnecessary insult

For me, I didn't 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 stooped back, far from all the dreams I knew, and she took me toward the traveling road east (Habeesh). My mother at that time 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, the spread feet would increase the tearing of my wounds; so she forced me to curl inside the burlap and then 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 topic that Arabic novels have not previously touched upon, or at least a different angle of treatment for the subject of sacrificing masculinity for religious reasons. The work tells the story of a Horn of Africa child who is forced to leave his village and lose his masculinity at his mother's wish, in order to seek blessing and closeness to God by joining the (Aghwat) in Madinah and Makkah, 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.