Biografia dirie

Early life
Dirie was born into a nomadic tribe in Somalia. Her home was a portable hut woven from grass. According to her autobiography, at age five, her mother held her down while a local woman cutaway her genitals. Afterwards, she was stitched up tightly, leaving a hole the diameter of a matchstick and making it nearly impossible to walk. "I felt not complete with myself as a woman. Some daysI felt so powerless," she said. "When I think back about that, it still disturbs me. But coming back over that is still the hardest thing for me because you have to learn about yourself, you have tofeel comfortable with yourself." Although Dirie survived the procedure, her sister and two cousins did not. Waris ran away from her home because of an arranged marriage.
Modeling career
Dirie fledSomalia at the age of thirteen because her father gave her in marriage to a 61-year-old man in exchange for five camels. She escaped the marriage by traveling to her uncle's home, and hid her passportwhen he was going to return her. She ended up staying in Britain illegally and surviving by scrubbing floors at McDonald's. By chance, she was discovered by photographer Terence Donovan, who put herface on the cover of the 1987 Pirelli calendar. From there, her career took off, being placed in ads for designers such as Chanel. "It's very sad that I had to make the choice to leave my country andat the same time I did not want to leave," she said. "Africa is different. I was young. I had nothing to worry about. I had my family, I had my animals, I had my simple life. It was beautiful." Dirienow lives in Vienna, Austria but still feels the contrasts between the West and her war-torn home. "Here it seems like it is chaos forever and I'm trying to sit down for a moment and there's no timefor that," she laughed. "In Somalia we don't have clocks so we don't care what time it is. But in the West, everything is money-money, power, sucking, sucking away. It is never enough." In 1987, Waris...