Nina Smart's Wild Flower: The Bondo Woman

1168 Words5 Pages

Nina Smart is brave, and courageous, and strong. Using her own personal story as a memoir captures the reader in numerous ways to begin their thinking on the practice of female genital mutilation, also known as FGM. By using her story, Nina Smart was able to draw attention and sympathy towards those affected by FGM since it was personal and shows how real and terrifying this experience may be. Nina’s story could possibly be very different from the rest of the females’ stories in Sierra Leone who also went through this experience, but their stories all end up to be similar. The story is so varying for Nina since she had grown up in Romania and lived with her white family. Because of her background, the Bondo women, those who were involved in the FGM ritual, were highly fascinated by Nina and began to call her the “Opoto,” meaning white person. The Bondo women were focused on making the Opoto become a part of their secretive group, but Nina had other plans (77). Every female, including Nina, share the same fear for the Secret society of the Bondo women. Nina goes into and adds the ideal amount of detail when describing her story and the Bondo’s rituals when she discovers what they actually do to the females …show more content…

A middle ground is defiantly possible for this situation. I do believe that overall FGM is immoral and completely wrong, but it is a little different when it comes to culture. The short page says, “Members of both cultures were horrified when they learned of the other’s apparently barbaric way of treating their dead,” after the comparison of how the Greeks and the Callatian Indians manage their dead. I think that this can also relate to the topic of FGM because in our western world this topic is absurd, but to them it is something they have rendered since the beginning of