"The Desert Flower"
Waris Dirie
Biography
Waris Dirie, (born 1965, Galcaio, Somalia), Somalian fashion model, author, and women’s rights activist known for her efforts to eliminate female genital mutilation (FGM), also called female circumcision.
Dirie was one of 12 children born into a large nomadic family living near Somalia’s border with Ethiopia. Much of Dirie’s childhood was spent tending to the family’s herd and obtaining enough food and water to survive. At about age 13 she ran away from home to avoid an arranged marriage with a much older man; she embarked on a long and treacherous journey that took her through the desert to Mogadishu and, from there, eventually to London to serve as a maid in the home of an uncle who was beginning a term as an ambassador. When his tenure ended, Dirie elected to stay in London illegally. She was illiterate, but she found work in the kitchen of a fast-food restaurant and a room in a facility run by the YMCA, and she took classes to learn to read and write English.
In 1983, at age 18, a woman on the street approached Dirie about modeling and directed her to the British photographer Terence Donovan. The photos he took launched her career. In 1987 she graced the cover of the multinational holding company Pirelli & C. SpA’s exclusive Pirelli Calendar and appeared in the James Bond film The Living Daylights. She went on to appear on the runways of Paris, Milan, and New York; in advertising campaigns for top beauty brands, including Revlon and Chanel; and in leading fashion magazines such as Elle, Glamour, and Vogue. Her modeling career was chronicled in the 1995 BBC documentary A Nomad in New York.
Dirie, who had undergone FGM at about age five, overcame personal and cultural barriers to speak openly about it during a 1996 magazine interview. Her celebrity status helped to catapult the topic into the public eye, and in 1997 she was appointed as the United Nations Population Fund’s special ambassador for the elimination of FGM. In this capacity Dirie traveled and spoke extensively, vigorously pursuing her goal of preventing future generations of women from suffering as she had. In the late 1990s the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that more than 130 million girls and women had undergone some form of FGM. While it was also performed in the Middle East and Asia, FGM was most prevalent in Africa; in Dirie’s native Somalia the procedure was performed on an estimated 98 percent of women. She experienced the most extreme form, called infibulation, in which all or part of the external genitalia is cut off and the vagina stitched up, with only a small—and often insufficient—opening left for the passage of bodily fluids. Dirie’s procedure was performed under unsanitary conditions without anesthesia, and she was forced to endure excruciating pain and both short- and long-term complications. She recounted her experience with FGM, as well as her dramatic transformation from nomad to fashion model, in her autobiography Desert Flower: The Extraordinary Journey of a Desert Nomad (1998).
At the turn of the century, Dirie retired from modeling to focus on activism. She founded the Desert Dawn Foundation (2001) to raise funds for Somalian clinics and schools as well as the Waris Dirie Foundation (2002) to advocate for the abolition of FGM. In 2010 the Waris Dirie Foundation was renamed the Desert Flower Foundation. It coordinated such projects as Save a Little Desert Flower, and in the 2010s it established medical centres for the treatment of FGM victims in Berlin, Stockholm, Paris, and Amsterdam.
Dirie authored several additional books, including Desert Dawn (2002), which recounts her return to Somalia, and Desert Children (2005), which provides information on FGM. Dirie received numerous awards for her activist efforts, including the Women’s World Award from former Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev (2004) and admission to the Legion of Honour, France’s highest order, from French Pres. Nicolas Sarkozy (2007). In 2009 she cofounded the PPR Corporate Foundation for Women’s Dignity and Rights. Her life is also chronicled in Desert Flower, a 2009 film adaptation of her book. In 2020 a musical of the same name premiered at Theater St. Gallen, Switzerland.
Summary
Desert Flower: The Extraordinary Journey of a Desert Nomad is a memoir published in 1998 by the Somali model, author, and activist Waris Dirie. The book recounts Dirie’s harrowing life story, from her roots as a member of a nomadic family and the unspeakable abuses she suffered as a child, to her extraordinary rise to international fame, first as a fashion model, then as an ambassador and advocate for women’s rights, and later as an author.
Dirie’s story begins in 1965 when she is born in the East African country of Somalia, in a city called Calkayo. Her parents are both Somali, but they do not live according to the contemporary customs that most do in their country. As pastoral nomads, Dirie and her family live in the harsh and unforgiving desert, constantly moving and cut off from the cosmopolitan influences of large and small cities alike. They live in the tradition of their ancestors moving around frequently with the animals they herd, among other ancient survival tactics passed on to each successive generation of wandering desert-dwellers.
But while many of the family’s traditions are crucial to their survival, other practices of the nomads are not only extremely outdated, but they also result in horrific pain and long-term trauma for young girls like Dirie. The author reveals that as a five-year-old she was a victim of female genital mutilation, a extremely painful procedure that usually causes lifelong damage to the reproductive organs and that often result in fatal bleeding and infections. Female genital mutilation is a cultural practice often done out of a sadistically misguided interest to preserve a young woman’s “purity.”
Her mutilation, however, is only the beginning of her suffering as a woman. At the age of 12, Dirie learns she is to be wed in an arranged marriage to a 60-year-old man. In exchange for her hand in marriage, Dirie’s father is set to receive five camels from the groom. To avoid marrying the old man, Dirie runs away from her family. Her ambition is to reach Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital and also its largest city. Dirie also hopes that the relatives she knows in and around the city will accept her into their home.
First, however, Dirie must cross a stretch of desert full of natural and man-made dangers. Not long after running away, Dirie understands why so many women stay behind in bad situations, rather than face the countless dangers of escaping. For example, in the desert Dirie encounters a truck driver who tries to rape her. Dirie survives the attack, but only after fighting the trucker with her hands.
After a long, painful series of trials and hardships, Dirie finally arrives in Mogadishu and is allowed to stay at her older sister’s house. Unfortunately, her stay is short-lived, but Dirie finds other relatives from her extended family who kindly get her on her feet. Along with a number of these relatives, Dirie leaves Somalia behind and settles in London, England. Here, Dirie obtains a job at the embassy through her uncle who has been appointed the Ambassador to Somalia in the United Kingdom. Things go well for a time until her uncle’s term ends, and he and the rest of her relatives decide to return to Somalia, insisting that Dirie accompany them. Dirie refuses, going so far as to make it so she physically cannot leave the county, hiding her passport and ID from her relatives and thereby preventing them from coercing her into leaving with them.
Eventually, Dirie’s family accepts that they have little choice but to let her stay in London. But with her uncle out at the embassy, Dirie too loses her job there. To stay afloat, she works at McDonald’s. Meanwhile, the trauma inflicted upon Dirie during her early years still haunts her. For instance, when a prominent photographer asks Dirie if he can take her picture, she becomes extremely uncomfortable, owing to a lifetime marked by sexual violence—or the threat thereof—carried out by strange men. If not for these crippling trust issues, Dirie might have found success as a model much earlier.
Fortunately, Dirie keeps the photographer’s business card and phone number. After some time spinning her wheels and going nowhere, Dirie—at the urging of a friend—calls the photographer who agrees to meet her. His name is Terence Donovan, and he is a famous fashion photographer and producer a number of music videos, including Robert Palmer’s smash hit “Addicted to Love.”
Confident that he has discovered the next big thing, Donovan uses his industry connections to convince the prominent Italian tire manufacturer, Pirelli, to put Dirie on the cover of its 1987 Pirelli Calendar. Dirie then parlays the exposure into high-profile appearances in ad campaigns for some of the world’s biggest fashion and beauty brands, including Chanel, Levi’s, Revlon, and L’Oreal. Hollywood even comes knocking, giving Dirie a small but memorable part in the 1987 James Bond film, The Living Daylights, starring Timothy Dalton. Whether on the runways in Milan or in the pages of Vogue, Waris Dirie is a hit. And while she owes Donovan an immense debt for helping get her foot in the door, for Dirie to achieve such rare success—and to do it so quickly despite having no prior experience—is not something that happens because of connections alone. Rather, it’s a testament to her Dirie’s own strengths: her talent, her energy, and her discipline.
Modeling gives her money and stability. Beyond these comforts, her career also gives her a measure of status and respect as a woman that, had Dirie stayed in the desert, would have forever eluded her. But what’s most important, in Dirie’s mind, is the megaphone her newfound fame has given her, which she views as an opportunity to reach millions with her story. For Dirie, it’s not enough to have escaped the pain and terror of one’s origins when millions of other girls and women suffer still under the weight of opression. And so as painful as it is to think and speak about, Dirie feels she has a responsibility to use her position and the platform it affords her to do all she can to end the crime of female genital mutilation.
Before Dirie can help others, she has to come to grips with her own memories of genital mutilation. And so in 1997, she tells the magazine Marie Claire about having undergone female genital mutilation and reveals that her two sisters were given the same gruesome, horrifically painful procedure. Ironically, a whole decade after losing her job as a staffer for her uncle, the Somali ambassador, Dirie herself becomes a UN ambassador committed to eradicating FGM, completing a deeply circuitous route from world diplomacy to modeling and back again.
Desert Flower was adapted into a well-received 2009 film starring the Ethiopian-born model/actress, Liya Kebede. But there’s no substitute for reading Dirie’s account, which Publishers Weekly describes as, “On all counts, an astoundingly dramatic and moving tale.”