Knocked Flat

The bleakness of their stares reflected strikingly against the white, freshly painted walls. Little boys, some as young as four years old, dangled their brittle legs off a wooden bench. Their little bodies receded underneath black droops of cloth. On their heads rested the same cloth but it was detached and pointy at the top. Somewhere in between, their soft faces emerged--besmeared with eye-crust and flies. The one seated to the far left, suddenly, was the first to go.

Reluctantly, he dismounted. Standing up, the little boy was received by an elder, a caretaker of some sort, who hoisted off the thin cloak and unveiled the boy’s deathlike frailty. Around his teensy waist, dividing his naked youthfulness into halves, sagged a string of rawhide trinkets. Dewy eyes looked on as this unclothed boy followed his caretaker away. Shortly, he returned, wet and quivering. Clinching his jaw, holding his breath, he fought the onrushing tears as if he was pushing back the raging sea. But before he and the others realized what would occur next, he was shuffled through another swinging door.

I sat beside the others; no pair of feet touched the ground besides mine. All of the little boys, including the first, were Talibé. They had been brought by the Dara (a Koranic school) to a volunteer-based health clinic to be circumcised--a traditional procedure to preserve the Fitrah--i.e.the purity of creation, for Muslim boys. Unlike other Islamic circumcision rituals however, where the operation can be performed as early as the 7th day of infancy, in Senegal, the boys wait until a more primary age, such as five or six--an age that can box the day’s toe-curling trauma into a takeaway memory.

The boys remaining on the bench soon followed. However, against the crescendo of horror that now pelted off the white walls, their reluctance to join the others grew palpable. But on they went. As they returned, they were naked and shivering. The frightened bodies were then shepherded directly towards the frantic shrieks. Passing them, on the way out, were the first to be finished. Waddling and still wheezing, their little features were screwed up. All the teeth-gritting from the pain had left their faces exhausted and puffy.

Soon, the bench filled up again. Most were too busy adjusting to their new discomfort to notice that I had stood up. Moseying around, I stepped outside to catch a break from the unsightliness of it all. When I walked back in, the older caretaker of before stood over them. Menacingly, he sniffed for runaway tears. Although freshly altered, the lot of them promptly buried their gulping sobs. The slowest to suppress, the littlest, was smacked. Furiously crying now, he added an audible hysteria to the still bleakness and as his crying strengthened in pitch, the pacified ones and I withdrew to a half-zombified daze.

Against the white wall, that relentless bounce, the playful ‘let’s pretend’ that the Talibé palliate their wearisome circumstance with, was knocked flat. The street-kid in them too had vanished. It seemed that the circumcision had a greater effect: the thick foreskin of the Talibé identity, the very construct that causes us to be callous, had been scraped off as well. What remained, staring back at me, was a true identity-- the little, motherless child.

Upon leaving, offering a few sympathies in Wolof, I made an attempt to mollify the littlest one’s irrepressible tears. But he paid no attention. Again, I patted his shoulders and urged him to regain his composure but he would not. It was rather clear today he would not outplay the bleakness. His dislocation, the recent trauma, the raw pain had wedged too deep `