Sai Hankuri

A Little Off the Top

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve heard a lot of chatter about something women call “guriya”. None of my dictionaries are of any use (guriya literally translates as “cotton seed”). Nor are the educated (and relatively cosmopolitan) Hausa nurses. Yet, nearly all of the women with fistula I’ve talked to have heard of guriya. And most cited it as a potential cause of fistula.

After many long hours with many embarrassed women (dismayed by my anatomical ignorance, no doubt), this is what I’ve discovered:

Guriya is something that some girls are born with. It is a small piece of flesh within (or maybe just outside of) a girl’s vagina which grows as she grow. If it isn’t cut out during infancy it will eventually block the vagina entirely, impeding the woman from consummating her marriage. Some tell me it starts off the size of a pebble, some compare it to a grain of sorghum, while others liken it to a chicken heart. I’m told that women with guriya refuse their husbands, euphemistically explained: “If he is outside, she is in her room. If he is in her room, she is outside”. I’m told that many men are so ashamed that they cannot consummate their marriage, ashamed that they married someone who “isn’t even a woman”, they don’t tell anyone for years. Eventually, the lack of a pregnancy betrays the secret and the bride’s family sweeps her away, bringing her to the “wazami”, the local barber who moonlights as a traditional surgeon. If he believes that she has a guriya, he uses a homemade iron knife to carve it out (he dulls the pain with a paste made from the seeds of a bush tree). He then sends her home to christen her marriage the same day. I’m told that wazami frequently cut haphazardly, often nicking or entirely severing the urethra, causing a fistula.

Confused about the biomedical explanation for guriyas, I probed and probed – “can everyone see the guriya, or just the wanzami?”, “does a guriya actually stop a woman from being able to consummate her marriage, or does it just stop her from having the desire to do so?”, “how frequently are little girls born with guriya?”. The answers were often contradictory and unsure.

I decided to take these questions to the expert.

The wazami was an eccentric fellow. He insisted that he wasn’t a day older than 19 (the ten children he sired and the wrinkles around his eyes suggested otherwise). He prodded my leg inappropriately. He repeatedly demanded large sums of money. He smelled of booze.

His job description? Conduct circumcisions, take out the uvulas of infants, carve out wisdom teeth, make medicines from bush plants, heal “sunken-in” heads, conduct scarifications, extract tumors, cut out guriya, and, oh, yes, cut hair. He emptied out his dusty leather bag, packed full with desiccated animal parts, horns used to vacuum suck “bad blood” out of bodies, hand sewn leather amulets, dried herbs and seeds, ancient iron rods, sundry powders and pastes, and an electric beard cutter – after all, he is a barber.

I prod and pry (and at the interview’s low points, plea) – but still, it isn’t clear if anyone can actually see a guriya, or if it’s symbolic – a somatic manifestation of aberrant behavior – such as refusing a husband.

 

“How do you know a woman has a guriya?” I ask him.

“Simple”, he says “if a girl doesn’t like to be flirted with, or shows no interest in men, she probably has a guriya.”

If she doesn’t want to get married. If she isn’t kind to men. If she isn’t interested in their physical proximity. Guriya.

 

The average age of marriage is 15 here – and often girls from rural areas are married much younger (most women I’ve talked to tell me that they didn’t reach menarche – their first period – until two to four years after their weddings). Even if one is a consenting adult at the time of marriage, women have very little choice in whom they marry – most often a paternal first cousin. Sometimes a much older paternal uncle. Even still, when women do have a choice of whom to marry, or have a “love marriage”, the stories lack Western romance: “He saw me at the market one day. A few days later, he came and told my parents that he loved me. We were then married”. Often “love marriages” are set without the bride or groom having exchanged more than a sentence with one another.

Given this, could guriya simply be a more palatable explanation for female sexual resistance? One that doesn’t call in to question existing structures, expectations, or cultural norms, but rather pathologizes aberrant behaviors? (Think the early 1900’s diagnosis of “hysteria” or “frigidity”.) Or even a mechanism to dissuade women from protesting? The knowledge that resistance is futile (and may even result in non-reversible bodily damage).

Or, could there be a physiological explanation? Do wanzamis perform a hymenotomy when they remove a guriya? Or is guriya some sort of catch-all for abnormal vaginal growths, anything from abscesses to cancers to benign cysts?

Without much clinical knowledge or first-hand experience, I rely on diagrams sketched with a stick in the sand, on hearsay, on the story of a cousin of a friend, on euphemisms. I draw conclusions from silences, from giggles, from expressions of shame. Ultimately though, I cobble together theories and hypotheses, presenting them at conferences, proffering them as truth. The reality is that the relationship between women’s bodies, local interventions, and symbolic meanings remain largely a mystery to me. And as usual, I’m left with more questions than answers.

The only certainty? My reluctance to get a hair cut.