Do They Hear You When You Cry?
SynopsisPlot
Fauziya Kassindja's harrowing story begins in Togo, Africa, where she enjoyed a sheltered childhood, shielded by her progressive father from the tribal practice of polygamy and genital mutilation. But when her father died in 1993, Fauziya's life changed dramatically. At age seventeen Fauziya was forced to marry a man she barely knew who already had three wives, and prepare for the tribal ritual of female genital mutilation--a practice that is performed without painkillers or antibiotics. But hours before the ritual was to take place, Fauziya's sister helped her escape to Germany, and from there she traveled to the United States seeking asylum--and freedom. Instead, she was stripped, shackled, and locked up in various INS detention facilities for sixteen months.
Story
About this book
Fauziya Kassindja grew up in Togo under the protection of a father who rejected certain tribal customs, including polygamy and female genital mutilation. When he died in 1993, that protection disappeared. At seventeen, Kassindja was married to a man with three existing wives and faced the prospect of genital cutting, a procedure carried out without anesthesia or medical safeguards. Hours before the ritual, her sister helped her flee the country.
Kassindja traveled first to Germany and then to the United States, where she sought asylum. Rather than finding safety, she was detained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service for sixteen months, held in various facilities where she was strip-searched and shackled. The book recounts the conditions of her detention in detail, drawing on her own account of daily life inside the system.
A second central figure in the story is Layli Miller Bashir, a law student who took up Kassindja's case and worked to secure her release. The book follows both women's paths, connecting Kassindja's experience in Togo with the legal process she faced in the United States and the question of whether asylum law could recognize her claim.
