Sutura: Gendered Honor, Social Death, and the Politics of Exposure in Senegalese Literature and Popular Culture
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Sutura: Gendered Honor, Social Death, and the Politics of Exposure in Senegalese Literature and Popular Culture by Ivy Mills A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in African American Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Tyler Stovall, chair Professor Karl Britto Professor Gina Dent Professor Robert Allen Fall 2011 Sutura: Gendered Honor, Social Death, and the Politics of Exposure in Senegalese Literature and Popular Culture copyright 2011 by Ivy Mills Abstract Sutura: Gendered Honor, Social Death, and the Politics of Exposure in Senegalese Literature and Popular Culture by Ivy Mills Doctor of Philosophy in African American Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Tyler Stovall, Chair This dissertation explores the ways in which sutura—a Wolofized Arabic concept that can mean discretion, modesty, privacy, or protection—mediates the production of the boundary between gendered life and ungendered death in Senegalese literature and popular culture. In the ethics of the Wolof caste system, the order of slavery, and local Sufism, the unequal distribution of sutura produces a communal “inside” of those who possess a refined, ideal form of life and humanness, and an abject “outside” comprised of subjects who possess a bare form of life that is exposed to social and moral death. While sutura is one of several concepts that constitute the Wolof code of honor, it serves as the very membrane between the state of honor and the state of shame. The inherent lack of sutura attributed to subjects like the slave and the griot reproduces their permanently shamed state, and sutura’s transgression exposes the previously honorable, high-status subject to a publicly visible dishonor, a death-like state worse than physical death. The gender hierarchy is one of the many overlapping hierarchies that comprise Wolof society, thus entangling the possession of a legible gender with the possession of sutura in the production of normative humanness and virtuous life. This study tracks this entanglement in its investigation of the production of ungendered, socially dead subjects in contemporary Senegalese culture, revealing that inclusion in the honorable community of the nation is predicated on the possession of a gendered legibility mediated by sutura. The chapters are organized around media scandals that exemplify this dynamic and suggest that contemporary figures of bare life—rogue wives of Sufi sheikhs, maids, prostitutes, gay/trangendered men—are abjected through a mechanics inherited from older Wolof ethical orders. However, as the novels and video melodramas that I foreground as a counterpoint reveal, the ethics generating those mechanics are contested. Indeed, the conservative ethics of sutura are challenged by various liberal-secular, feminist, and Muslim ethical orders currently vying for dominance in the Senegalese public sphere. The new regime of exposure that has taken hold of the media in the wake of the mass democratic movements of the 1990s provides a stage not only for 1 unprecedented scales of abjection via the generation of moral panics, but also for popular contestation of that abjection and the production of new inclusive humanisms. In the midst of the raging pro-sutura versus anti-sutura debate, I propose that a recasting of sutura within a progressive Muslim ethos would disarticulate sutura from social hierarchies, thus enabling the formation of an ethics of communal care and protection that could still be coded as both Senegalese and Muslim. 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii Introduction 1 The Politics of Teraanga and the Politics of Sutura Chapter 1 13 A Literary Representation of the Murid Subaltern: Sutura and the Gendering of Pious Submission in Ken Bugul’s Riwan, ou le chemin de sable Chapter 2 61 The Slave, the Maid and the Prostitute: Sutura and the Limits of Womanhood in Senegalese Video Melodrama Chapter 3 118 The Góor-jigéen Exposed: Gendered Honor and Death in Aminata Sow Fall’s Le Revenant and the Same-Sex Marriage Scandal of 2008 Bibliography 168 i Acknowledgements Conceptualizing, researching, and writing this dissertation was a lengthy and all- consuming process. At times, the project’s gestation was so painful it literally made me tear my hair out. It was nevertheless a labor of love, and I have boundless affection for my first-born, however imperfect she may be. While I hope that the greater part of the suffering associated with this project was my own, others made vital contributions in the form of pre-natal care, financial assistance, moral support, and scholarly DNA, without which the project would not be possible in its current form. Funding for research in Dakar was provided by the U.S. government’s Fulbright program, the Rocca grant program of the Center for African Studies at UC Berkeley, and the Block Grant program of the Department of African American Studies, also at UC Berkeley. Years of invaluable Wolof study were funded by FLAS monies, a program that I ardently hope will continue to be funded by the state. I could count on Martha Saavedra, the Director of UCB’s Center for African Studies, and Lindsey Herbert, the student adviser in UCB’s Department of African American Studies, for institutional support during my graduate studies, as well as for friendship, cheerleading, and intellectual exchange. In Dakar, institutional support was provided by the U.S. Embassy, WARC (the West African Research Center) and my temporary employer, Suffolk University’s Dakar Campus. Several scholarly panels organized by WARC, particularly those that focused on women in Senegalese politics and Senegalese literature, informed my conceptualization of the dissertation project. I am grateful to SUDC for providing me with employment, thus making it possible for me to stay in Dakar for two additional years. My experience teaching there was blessed; the academic commitment of my diverse group of African undergraduate students continues to sustain and inspire me, as does their love. In Senegal, the Gning, Kandji, Sow, Sané, Bâ, Diop, Dieng, Gueye and Tall families all provided kinship and hospitality, spoiling me with their excessive teraanga and covering me with their protective sutura. In the U.S., Carol MacIntyre and Meryl Siegal took pity on a poor dissertation writer, providing rent-free shelter and proving that hospitality is also an American value. My incredibly supportive and generous parents, William and Elaine Mills, housed and fed me while I was in the most challenging and isolating phase of the writing process. I am thankful to those who read various parts and iterations of this project. Toby Warner, Paap Alsaan Sow, Xavier Livermon, and Irene Siegel all provided valuable feedback. My committee chair, Tyler Stovall, was a consistently generous and encouraging reader. Gina Dent pushed me to higher standards, reminding me what I am capable of and guiding me to my academic voice. After my years of immersion in Senegalese Studies, she helped me bring the work back to African Diaspora and Feminist Studies. Karl Britto subjected the dissertation to an attentive, nuanced reading, and he was consistently available for discussion and feedback. I also thank Robert Allen for his support and affability. ii To my many Wolof teachers—Paap Sow, Mariame Sy, Daouda Camara, Kevin Moore, Henri-Pierre Koubaka, and Yacine Diatta—Yalla na leen Yalla fay. It is thanks to you that the Wolof language feels like home to me now. To my graduate cohort members —Xavier Livermon, Marlon Bailey, and Libby Lewis—I would not have gotten through it all without your unfailing love, solidarity in times of struggle, and intellectual comraderie. Finally, I thank Dieng Sala, who at times was guilty of hindering the progress of this dissertation, but without whom I would not have lived sutura in such a profound way. iii Introduction The Politics of Teraanga and the Politics of Sutura In countless Senegalese popular songs and common-sense declarations, Senegal is praised for being the country of teraanga. Arame Fal’s Wolof-French dictionary defines teraanga as civility or honor,1 but it is generally understood to refer to the specific component of the Wolof code of honor that indexes hospitality or generosity. According to this idealized code, it is incumbent upon honorable subjects to welcome guests into their house, feed them copiously, and attend to them with care and respect.2 Teraanga makes the inclusion of the stranger into the family and the community possible, whether that incorporation lasts only for the duration of a guest’s visit or results in the stranger’s permanent integration into the family as fictive kin. Popular iterations of Senegal’s teraanga thus figure the nation as an honorable subject that is committed to civility and open to outsiders. Having been at the receiving and giving ends of the teraanga relation during the four years I resided in Dakar and the many other years I have been embedded in Senegalese communities in France, the United States, and Senegal, I am repeatedly moved by the beauty and overwhelming sincerity of the ethical practices that instantiate this ideal. Indeed, for the many non-Senegalese who have a love affair with Senegal that can only be described in mystical terms, teraanga is one of Senegalese culture’s romanticized—and even divinely granted—attributes. While I was in Dakar, my exposure to the complex terrain of contemporary cultural politics also taught me that communal and familial teraanga has its limits. Popular debates around the exploitation of maids, the degradation of virtue embodied by prostitutes, the banishment of rogue Sufi wives from pious legibility, and the threat to communal life that góor-jigéen (gay/trangendered subjects) are purported to pose in the wake of a media-generated same-sex marriage scandal led me to a meditation on the terms of full inclusion into the normative honorable community, as well as of the care and protection that that inclusion guarantees.