Desert Flower
by Waris Dirie
Certainly an interesting choice, made principally for the cross cultural aspects of the life story.
Waris Dirie travelled a long way, from desert nomad via runaway to a fashion model, a film star, and then to a UN Ambassador.
There were many incidents along the way.
She started work for the UN in 1997 at the age of 32, and “Desert Flower” was written the following year after she had started her campaigning work against FGM.
This timing we thought to be indicative of the reason for writing the book, i.e. to expose the iniquity of FGM to a wide audience.
The recollections of her childhood as a nomad were fascinating and easily read,
they made a very believable background against which the viciousness of genital mutilation without anaesthetic,
without even basic hygiene and forced upon tiny, vulnerable girls, came as a very rude shock.
Waris was clearly a rebel in her own culture, to the point where she ran away from home rather than face a forced marriage.
Blessed with stunning good looks, a sharp brain, and an ability to juggle with outcomes from a course of action,
she eventually came to the UK, earned a few bucks in MacDonalds, became a Pirelli Calendar girl, worked the fashion circuits, and eventually became a UN Ambassador.
Some of her behaviours seem very self-centred, and some of us took a dislike to her in the pre-UN phase of her life.
As naïve nomad travelling to London she certainly had some hilarious comfort zone challenges.
An interesting viewpoint was expressed against all of this, the view that her emotional development was arrested at the point when she underwent the trauma of circumcision.
It then became a survival story.
And only when she had, many years later worked through that trauma and come to terms with it, did she begin to mature as an adult and find a real purpose in her life.
The book was unsatisfactory in several ways, but particularly why she had seemingly rich relatives in Mogadishu,
and an uncle who was a senior civil servant, and yet the extended family included people living as animal minders.
This raised unanswered questions about the description of her flight across the desert.
So, in summary, an interesting read, an educational read, and a challenging read.
But ultimately an unsatisfying read, and the account of genital mutilation and its consequences, could hardly be described as “enjoyable”.
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PC. 10 March 2018.
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