For two years, Tseneat carried her rape inside her. The agony never faded. It attacked her from the inside out. The remnants of the attack stayed in Tseneat’s womb – not as a memory or metaphor, but a set of physical objects:
Eight rusted screws.
A steel pair of nail clippers.
A note, written in ballpoint pen and wrapped in plastic.
“Sons of Eritrea, we are brave,” the note reads. “We have committed ourselves to this, and we will continue doing it. We will make Tigrayan females infertile.”
The objects, revealed by X-ray and surgically extracted by doctors more than two years later, were forced inside Tseneat as she lay unconscious after being gang-raped by six soldiers.
