Painful Discourses: Borders, Regions, and Representations of Female
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Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2006 Painful Discourses: Borders, Regions, and Representations of Female Circumcision from Africa to America Tameka Latrece Cage Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Cage, Tameka Latrece, "Painful Discourses: Borders, Regions, and Representations of Female Circumcision from Africa to America" (2006). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 905. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/905 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. PAINFUL DISCOURSES: BORDERS, REGIONS, AND REPRESENTATIONS OF FEMALE CIRCUMCISION FROM AFRICA TO AMERICA A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Tameka L. Cage B.A., Dillard University, 1999 December 2006 Acknowledgements Thanks to my committee: John Lowe, Carolyn Ware, Joyce Jackson, Femi Euba, and Mariano Sana. Special, sincere thanks to John Lowe for being an outstanding mentor, guide, and wall of great support in my completion of this project. To my family for their unwavering support of everything I do: my mother, Cynthia Williams Cage, my aunts, Marilyn Denise Jack and Pamela Bedford, my sister Lateisha S. Cage, my father, Willie L. Cage, Jr., and grandparents, John and Mary Owens and Bertha Rivers Mason. Thanks to my circle of sister-friends for the prayers, love, laughter, and encouragement they offered during the completion of this work: Twanda Joseph, Menthia Clark, Sybil Clark- Amuti, and Jaime Collins-Hilton. Thanks to my brothers James R. Ross, Jericho Brown, Kwaku Amuti, Michael Hilton, and James E. Alford, Jr, for redefining masculinity and naming it “love.” To my Bucknell community for their warmth, well wishes, intellectual support and love: Shara McCallum, Nina Banks, Linden Lewis, Angèle Kingué, John Rickard, Michael Drexler, Alf Siewers, Saundra Morris, Kelly Finley, Paula Buck, Robert Rosenburg, Leslie Patrick, Carol White, Sue Reed, Vickie Snyder and Peg Cronin. Thanks to my students for the joy they bring to my life each time I walk into the classroom. Special thanks to the students of “English 321: Race, Space, and Place.” You offered light during the difficult time of balancing three courses and a writing life. Teaching you is a shared act of love and equal exchange. I give, as you give; it has been an honor to be your professor: Mahdi, Alice, Katharine, Tinecia, Casey, Chyncia, Nick, Jake, Margaret, Meredith, Terri, and Bryan; stay “beautiful.” ii Thanks, above all, to God for love, grace, and a new beginning. I find strength in your peace; it is a marvelous place. Thank you. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements........................................................................................................ ii Abstract.......................................................................................................................... v Introduction: Migrations of the Self: Writing about Female Circumcision............ 1 1. Borders, Regions, Representations: Female Circumcision and Discourse........................................................................................................................ 10 2. Place(ing) Alice Walker: Feminisms, Trauma, and the Politics of (African) Sisterhood in Possessing the Secret of Joy and Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women............................................................................................................................ 47 3. Freedom to Choose: Education, the Body Conflict, and Masculinity in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The River Between................................................................ 96 4. “What Was Before and What Was After”: Agency, the Body, and Culture in the Narratives of Two East African Women.................................................................... 127 5. “A Question of Life and Death”: Women’s Resistance, Solidarity, and the Problem of Modernization in Ousmane Sembène’s Moolaadé................................ 154 Conclusion: The Future of Representation............................................................... 192 Bibliography................................................................................................................ 195 Vita................................................................................................................................ 215 iv Abstract This project considers issues of representation and how literature, personal testimony, popular culture, and African film script a narrative of change and/or participate in change in the female circumcision debate. Texts that currently shape the female circumcision debate are increasingly focused on viable methods of social change and couch issues of change in dynamics of discourse and representation, including Obioma Nnaemeka’s Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge: African Women in Imperialist Discourses, Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf’s Female Circumcision: Multicultural Perspectives, and Oyèrónké Oyewùmi’s African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood, all of which I cite in the dissertation. These texts resist “othering” and focus instead on how African women self-identify in a world that often images them as helpless and devoid of agency and power. This project not only brings new information to bear about how female circumcision is transnationally discoursed, but also offers new ideas of how members of the global community view the “other.” In addition, Painful Discourses offers new readings of literary texts that have female circumcision as a major theme; positions literary texts as key in discourse-making about FC; emphasizes the necessity of women’s personal accounts of circumcision to educate nations about this practice; and privileges African perspectives about FC. The project details central issues in female circumcision discourse, particularly the dynamics that fuel how female circumcision and the millions of girls and women who have and will undergo the procedure are represented, as well as crucial moments, persons, and representations that have created a moment of “border crossing” in our transnational understandings about the v practice, including “travelogues,” ethnography, autobiography, and US print media. The project also features the personal narratives of two women who were circumcised in East Africa. The project appropriately ends with the consideration of African novelist and filmmaker Ousmane Sembène’s 2004 film, Moolaadé. The film is a cinematic representation of anti-circumcision discourse as well as an aesthetic masterpiece that confronts the changing identity of an unnamed village caught between traditions of the past and “modernities” of the present. I conclude the project by offering new ideas for representation. vi Introduction Migrations of the Self: Writing about Female Circumcision Navigating issues of power, authority, and difference is never a simple task. Ethnicity, the body, and representation further complicate politics of identity, producing a “hectic” discursive moment where one must prove who one is, from where one comes, and to what discursive landmark one is going before one can easily “speak” on an issue. To speak out of turn, in a postmodern context, is the new identity theft. As Paul Gee asserts in Discourse Analysis, we must begin “with the question of who you are when you speak or write and what you are doing…If I have no idea who you are and what you are doing, then I cannot make sense of what you have said, written, or done” (22). In light of Gee’s insistence that to “speak” necessitates a clear declaration of identity, I open with an explicit statement of who I am, what I am doing and hope to accomplish in this analysis. I am an African-American womanist/feminist/activist/researcher interested in how representation shapes the world in general, and female circumcision as a cultural practice in Africa in particular. I am not African, though my ancestors were. Yet I acknowledge that my ethnicity as African-American has prompted my interest in Africa. I have visited the continent twice, not to retrace or find my roots necessarily, but in effort to rediscover the community I have lost due to slavery and the Middle Passage, historical circumstances neither I, nor my ancestors could control. These two visits, however, are not the only determinants in how I “see” Africa. For indeed, I have been taught to see the continent—“under Western eyes” (Mohanty 17) — as “other.” Unfortunately, being born of African ancestry does not cure this “dis-ease” (Wilentz 2). 1 In Black Women, Writing, and Identity: Migrations of the Subject, African Diasporic scholar and womanist/feminist Carol Boyce Davies elucidates the relationship between Black women’s identity and place and the implications of this relationship on Black women’s fictions and personal narrative. She posits that the Black woman writer is a “shifting subject” who courts multiple identities