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An estimated 90 million women in Africa have undergone genital mutilation,(1) a practice commonly and wrongly referred to as female circumcision. It is carried out in about twenty-five African countries and in some parts of the Middle East and Southeast A sia. This ancient and harmful practice, which is justified on cultural grounds by most of its practitioners, has remained a taboo subject for hundreds of years. Despite decades of efforts by a few dedicated health practitioners, educators, religious group s and activists within the African countries where it is practiced, relatively little formal discussion of its effect on women's lives has occurred within Africa or elsewhere. This silence in turn has helped sustain its persistence long after its perceive d usefulness as a ritual passage to womanhood.
In the last couple of years, however, a few major events have played a key role in bringing the issue to public attention in Europe and North America, sparking intense interest in the subject by the popular media. While covering the 1993 United States intervention in Somalia, many journalists from western countries were first introduced to the subject, and their often graphic reports widened the awareness about female genital mutilation at home. From France came reports of legal cases involving Malian immigrants who were convicted for excising their daughter. In 1992, American novelist Alice Walker's popular fictionalized account, Possessing the Secret of Joy, featured an African woman who was traumatized by female genital mutilation. Following the publication of this novel, Walker collaborated with British filmmaker, Prathiba Parmar, in the making of Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women, a film made in the Gambia, West Africa. It was accompanied by a boo k with the same title. The African woman of Possessing, Tashi, is a sexually dysfunctional, psychotic murderer and martyr, as symbol of us all, a victim without agency or positive will. In 1992, Gloria Naylor's Bailey's Cafe introduced us to Mariam, an Ethiopian Jew, who, mutilated, pregnant and rejected by her people, miraculously wandered into the neighborhood of Bailey's Cafe to be salvaged and nurtured by an American woman.
The American media, with their unique appetite for sensation, embraced such developments and presented female genital mutilation as the major new disaster threatening the African continent. Television programs on female genital mutilation appeared on ABC' s Day One, Night Line, PBS's Charlie Rose and Charlayne Hunter-Gault's Rights and Wrongs. Walker was interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air and Talk of the Nation. The print media also had its share of coverage, with New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal seemingly taking the lead in condemning the practice. MS, Newsweek, Essence, U.S. News and World Report, and a host of others still continue to keep this issue in the public mind. With such extensive coverage one would assume that critical background information and context have been firmly in place, setting into motion plans of action for the eradication of female genital mutilation. But to get such a meaningful outcome, there must be a dialogue and a sharing of agendas between the people who are in the forefront of this struggle, the Africans on the continent, and the crusaders in the West. However, the writers, broadcasters and proselytizers about this issue in the US and in Europe, Westerners themselves, seldom seem to go beyond treating it as yet an other gruesome, primitive preoccupation--a nightmarish freak show presided by loathsome old women. While a few African professionals have been given minor supporting roles in this debate in the U.S., the tone and focus has neither been initiated nor shape d by Africans.
The first evidence of an effort to bring the voice of Africans into this one sided debate was a New York Times Op Ed piece by a group of African women represented by Seble Dawit and Salem Mekuria. In it, we urged that an examination of the practice of genital mutilation should not be isolated from other traditional practices, harmful or beneficial, and should be seen as part and parcel of all practices that subjugate and oppress women around the globe. We also pointed out that the terms of any discourse which deals with issues such as female genital mutilation, a traditional practice whose roots go very deep into the cultural and social fabric of various societies in Africa, or the agenda for its eradication, cannot and should not be defined in the absence of those who are directly affected by it.
The current representation of and discussion about female genital mutilation, be it in literature, film or other popular media, not only ignores the critical voices of Africans, but makes no attempt to present the context within which the practice perpetuates itself. Although we will not have enough space to respond to all that has been said and done in the short period of the past year, we would like to take this opportunity to address the intervention by Alice Walker and Prathiba Parmar, which seems to have caught the feminist imagination elevating female genital mutilation to the position of signifier for all the evils of gender oppression. We believe that Walker's novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy, the highly popular film and book co-produced with Parmar, Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women, have uprooted the problem of genital mutilation from its context, reduced all other struggles by African women to one issue, transplanted it, kidnapped it, and placed it in the hands of some liberal feminists who are more concerned with the preservation of the clitoris over and above the humans of whom it is only a part. The scene is now one in which the proverbial professional mourners weep louder than the bereaved. "We talk a lot about power, usually male power, in the women's liberation movement. But seldom is the power some groups of women have in relation to other groups of women acknowledged."
Like all forms of literary and visual production, feminist production reflects the class position, concerns, ideological orientation, and overall world view of those individuals. In our opinion, a revolutionary/empowering production best articulates the interests of the majority of women, especially those from the so-called "Third World," which includes the continent of Africa. Empowering feminist production has the responsibility to expose not just the practices, but the institutions, structures, and systems that embody and perpetuate the oppression of women. Through a clear analysis of the contradictions that are inherent in these, such works should name, articulate, and denounce the identified forms of oppression, creating consciousness specifically targeted at the oppressed. They should validate the humanity and dignity of the victims, depicting them as people who possess the potential to change the oppressive conditions that militate against their full realization, infusing them with a spirit of determination and a thirst for revolutionary change. The feminists' task, therefore, is to facilitate the empowerment process; not to take it over, or to dominate the victims' struggle.
Warrior Marks, the book and the film, both set in a village of the Gambia, do more harm than good to the cause at hand. The story begins with Alice Walker's re-telling of how she lost one eye when she was three years old, and how, for years, she felt handicapped and isolated. She referred to her brother who inflicted this wound on her as a "warrior" with a gun, and the blinding or her eye, a warrior mark. She blames her parents for giving her brother the gun and by implication for allowing him to mutilate her. She then goes on to say: "It is my visual mutilation that helped me to "see" the subject of genital mutilation." (Warrior Marks, p.18) The warrior/macho syndrome may be to blame here, but, what leap of imagination, what historical suspension bridge could link two drastically different acts. Without diminishing Walker's pain and loss, we would argue that the equation she draws and the basic premise of the film is erroneous. Her mutilation was intended to injure her and this may have excluded her from her community, while the tradition of genital mutilation of women and girls is primarily intended to protect them from greater harm and to include them into their communities. If her basic premise is wrong, how sound then are the rest of the arguments that permit her to locate herself as the speaker for the voiceless? Indeed, the depiction of the victims of this oppressive practice in Warrior Marks is so demeaning that the overall effect is one of denigration rather than empowerment. The African women subjects are presented as a collection of helpless bundles of mutilated creatures, stereotypes who are far from being living, dignified human beings. They are pitied and patronized, instead of being cherished, nurtured, and invested wit h faith as human subjects potentially capable of understanding and changing the conditions that dehumanize them. "The painful debates around the question of differences between women are a reminder that, when arguing the case for a feminist gaze and an effective feminist intervention in mainstream culture, it is prudent to consider just who is looking at whom!" (The Female Gaze, Shelagh Young) In Warrior Marks, the book, Walker tells us of big Mary, a Gambian woman whose daughter, little Mar y, has recently been circumcised. Among other things, Walker tells us that she asked big Mary about sexual pleasure, and proceeds to inform her about the harm done to a woman's sexual response by genital mutilation. "'Well,' she replied, 'my sex life is perfectly satisfactory, thank you very much!' (How would you know, though, I thought.) I said a heartfelt Good for you! slapped her palm, and let it go." (Warrior Marks, p.44) This negation of big Mary's experience patronizes and effectively reduces Mary to a minor who is oblivious to what she is missing.
In the same manner, Walker confronts an elderly woman who is identified as a circumciser. The woman is dressed up for the filming occasion and sits looking proudly at the camera. Walker proceeds to ask her what she uses to perform the mutilation. The old lady declines to answer, claiming that it was a secret, that no one is supposed to speak about it. Undaunted, Ms. Walker blurts out the answer to her own question.
The village is the most internal culture and geographic manifestation of self within the African experience. What goes on in the village reflects a historical continuum of traditional culture. The old woman is the most private personage in the village. An d in the case of this particular village, the Secret Society women are among the most respected personalities. In fact, one of Walker's informants in Senegal related to her that in their language, there were no words with which to discuss female genital mutilation. So, does the power to appropriate the master's language give Walker and Parmar the license to humiliate respected elders, the mothers and grandmothers, who must insist on the un-speakability of this archaic practice, mainly because it is not within their power--linguistic, social, or political--to articulate the experience? What was accomplished by this macho gesture? Does Alice Walker, with her thousands of dollars and hours of film, really think that she has the only answer to this intractable problem? Is this answer the one she proposed through Tashi, in Possessing the Secret of Joy, to assassinate the mother/mutilators? As the camera roamed, giving us glimpses of those multicolor clad images of African women lazily sauntering by, it seemed to be probing Freud's "Dark Continent" in search of the missing or "blinded" genitals. Walker condemns the practice with statements about her deep love for African children. Surely she can't mean to malign African parents' capacity to love their children and to protect them from danger! It is hard to believe that Alice Walker is not aware of the implications of such an invasive approach. Are we now to focus our attention on Africa as a continent of physically mutilated, psychologically deficient, and mentally deranged women who, as she presumes in her book, have to "chew on their sticks to keep from exploding?" (Ibid.)
A puzzling but contemptuous attitude permeates Walker's book and Parmar's film. While locating female genital mutilation as one among a host of oppressive practices to which the African woman is subjected, the writer and filmmaker proceed to make it clear that they are in the Gambia to deliver their own version of things. They are out to scold and condemn, and have no time for explanations and/or discussions with the very people whom they have gone to such great lengths to save. They hardly discuss, in an y meaningful way, the wider context within which possible methods of eradicating female genital mutilation can be effected. Much like the early explorers of the "Dark continent," their journals are riddled with notations of the harsh climate, their greedy guides and the discomfort of being in an underdeveloped country.
What was truly lost in this situation was the educational moment. Perhaps, with a little more careful planning beforehand, and serious and meaningful consultation and collaboration with grass roots activists, Walker and Parmar would have produced a book and film which African educators could use as part of a larger continent-wide campaign against the practice. A better approach might have been a willingness to examine how various cultures and groups of parents across time and place have honestly believed this violent act to be a loving one and ultimately for the benefit of their children. The diverse and diffuse situations in which FGM is considered acceptable becomes significant only in seeing the true complexity and depth with which the tradition is entrenched in a wide variety of cultures. The fact that various forms of female genital mutilations still persist suggests that the groups who perform the practice have a strong sociological investment in it.
Commonly cited reasons for the preservation of the practice include: cleanliness, aesthetics, prevention of stillbirths, promotion of social and political cohesion, prevention of promiscuity, improvement of male sexual pleasure, increased matrimonial opportunities, good health, fertility and for preservation of virginity. (The Circumcision of Women: A Strategy for Eradication, Olyanika Koso-Thomas, p.5) Some societies believe that undergoing this practice has a healthy calming effect on women as well as help them to regulate fertility. It is also important to note that in most African societies, fertility is a tool of negotiation for women to earn power within the family and the society at large. By undergoing genital mutilation, women are prepared to negate sexual feeling and to view themselves only as fertile beings, as if by removing the sexual parts of themselves they retain only their fertility. Furthermore, women are socially expected to show that they have no sexual desires. This is not uniquely an African condition. It exists in every society where unequal gender relations dictate the conditions under which women have to live.
The persistence of female genital mutilation in Africa cannot, therefore, be separated from the power imbalance in gender relations, from the low levels of education, economic and social status of most women. The latest United Nations figure shows that 75 % of African women over the age of twenty-five are illiterate. (The World's Women, UN Publication, 1991, p.46) At fifty years, African women have the lowest life expectancy in the world (Ibid., p.56), with maternal mortality rate of 675 per 100,000 live births. (Ibid., p.58) Europe has less than 75 per 100,000. Furthermore, it belongs squarely within a continuum of gender oppression that includes the murder of female children, less health care for girls, less nutritious foods, less schooling , harder work, child marriage and early pregnancy, breast implants/reductions, anorexia nervosa, and the millions of dollars we spend on cosmetics and harmful diet programs. All of these stem from an ideology of women as producers and reproducers, objects , imperfect as we are, to be shaped and molded, cut and tucked, into a more appealing commodity for man's pleasure. Neglecting to make the connection between the physical pain suffered in female genital mutilation and other, less obvious yet equally powerful ways in which women suffer, results in a shallow--if not irresponsible-- analysis of the issue.
The current furor in the West about female genital mutilation, and particularly here in the U.S., strips the practice from the social and political reality of gender relations. How effective can this ultimately be in helping African women? Raising the social status and economic independence of the African woman are factors as important in and integral to determining her overall health and happiness as will be stopping her genitals from being excised.
The work of several women's groups in Africa are instructive in supporting our argument. Maendeleo Ya Wanawake Organization in Kenya, after successfully doing qualitative and quantitative studies among four national groups, is now implementing strategies for eradication developed by women from and for their regions. The Uganda chapter of the Inter Africa Committee trains traditional circumcisers for other profitable vocations and has seen exciting results. The Association for the Progress and Defense of W omen's Rights (APDF) in Mali works closely with the government to develop policy level intervention on female genital mutilation within the framework of violence against women. There are several other groups working to eradicate this practice in every cou ntry where it exists. Our task should be to find out how all these groups are faring, ask them what they need to advance their struggle and how best they can use our special talents.
Those both inside and outside of the "village" can help to socially and economically empower the women who are our elders, to come together and find a rite that will achieve the desired ritualistic need. As the "village" consists of men and women, children and elders, they too must be included in the process. If outside agencies would like to help, let them sponsor a Council of Women to come together from the four corners of Africa and other areas of the globe, to develop a non-invasive, non hazardous mea ns of ritualizing passage and status. Encourage positive usage of various holy books--the Torah, the Bible, and the Koran--to point the way. Support the work of locally based African women who live daily the realities and can propose sensible intervention s. But, for any of this to have meaning, we must first locate and challenge our own position as rigorously as we challenge that of others.
* This article is a condensation of several essays by African women edited into one piece by Salem Mekuria who is an assistant professor of art at Wellesley College and an independent film maker, from Ethiopia. The contributors are: Rashidah Ismaili AbuBa kr from Niger, Associate Director of the Higher Education Opportunity Program at Pratt Institute in New York; Asma Abdel Haleem, a lawyer from the Sudan and a board member of the Center for Women, Law and Development in Washington, D.C.; Seble Dawit, a lawyer, an Ethiopian, working as an independent consultant in human rights; and Nahid Toubia, a physician from the Sudan and executive director of the Research Action Information Network for Bodily Integrity of Women (RAINBOW) in New York.
1) Female genital mutilation is a practice that involves the "surgical" removal of part or all of the female external genitalia. Reasons most frequently cited by people who practice it include traditional or religious dictates, for hygiene, to secure virginity, to prevent promiscuity and to control sexuality. The equivalent of the simplest form for males is castration.
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