Fire Eyes.

AuthorStoller, Joyce

Soraya Mire's film Fire Eyes is a documentary film about female circumcision--a euphemism for the brutal reality of female genital mutilation. This custom is practiced in forty countries in Africa, the Islamic Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia. More than eighty million women and girls now living have had their genitals excised--the equivalent of every adult female in the United States.

Fire Eyes opens on a seven-year-old Somali girl about to undergo the surgery. Her mother, who suffered the same fate when she was seven, tells the child that she is carrying shame just for being a woman, and that "the evil piece of flesh" between her legs must be removed for her to become pure and worthy of a husband.

The procedure is performed by a midwife while the mother holds down the girl. The girl's screams are drowned out by the attendant women's chanting.

Somali filmmaker Mire, who was herself a victim of this practice, sees the mutilation of girls as child abuse, and as an ideological mechanism designed to perpetuate women's sexual, cultural, and economic inferiority.

But Fire Eyes also...

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