Katoucha Niane

"One day, my mother said we were going to the cinema. And I found myself the victim of a horror movie, an unimaginable trauma that I had never managed to talk about, until I found love and wrote In My Flesh"

"I embodied the most arrogant and admired kind of femininity, I who was supposed to be diminished"

"Let's draw attention to the religious, medical, psychological and social realities of this ancestral practice"

"I was inflicted – with no anaesthetic, of course – this very private and irreversible mutilation in the name of ancestral custom"

"I was dragged away by the old hag in a plane whose doors closed behind me like those of a safe: or a tomb. After my mutilation, this kidnapping was for me a second death"

"As I had grown into a young woman she says, I could no longer bear the authority of the very one who did not protect me. I had only one desire: to go away, from my mother, my family, my country"

"As I am reaching the halfway mark in my life she says, I am full of projects and hope to bring them to fruition in my land of birth. Africa is looking forward... but for the time being, serenely, I cherish the pleasure to be back home, looking at the silvery sea like Ulysses after his long, eventful journey home"