Female Genital Mutilation and its Consequences:

Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker

and Desert Flower by Waris Dirie

By

Despoina Anastasiadou

Submitted to the Department of English Literature and Culture

and the Department of American Literature and Culture

School of English

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Supervisor: Dr. Domna Pastourmatzi

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

February 2020

Anastasiadou 2

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………….…...3

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………..4

INTRODUCTION…..……………………………………………………………...5

CHAPTER ONE: Infibulation and its Aftereffects

in Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy…………………………...17

CHAPTER TWO: Pharaonic Circumcision and its Impact

in Desert Flower by Waris Dirie………...... ………………………...... 43

EPILOGUE………………………………………………………………………..58

WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………………..63

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my professor and supervisor, Dr. Domna Pastourmatzi for her guidance through each stage of my research project and for inspiring me to work in the field of gender studies. Further, I wish to acknowledge my family for supporting me throughout the challenging journey of postgraduate studies.

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ABSTRACT

The main concern of my thesis focuses on the cruel practice of female genital mutilation (FGM), through the critical analysis of the novel, Possessing the Secret of

Joy (1992) by Alice Walker and of the autobiography, Desert Flower (1998) by Waris

Dirie. Precisely, the cultural ritual of infibulation will constitute the axis around which both life stories of the heroines (Tashi and Waris respectively), will be unraveled. My objective is to scrutinize the kinds of torment, which veritably shape the lives of

African women and the excruciating suffering females endure as the outcome of female genital cutting. Although literary dramatizations of the traditional ritualized practice of FGM, these two narratives offer readers essential details from the lives of

African girls who undergo infibulation. They explore and expose the horrendous ramifications of infibulation on the physical, mental, and psychic health of African females. Both books deal with the tremendous consequences of this practice and expose the deception and exploitation of females, their physical suffering and mental incarceration, as well as the deterioration of their health and the damage to their sexuality. Besides the tradition of female circumcision, the patriarchal social order in both the Olinka and Somali tribes further dictates the permissible areas of female activity, which are limited to the domestic sphere, to certain communal areas, and to farms where women tend their crops. The male elders who determine the destiny of the female members keep girls and women powerless and ignorant. In fact, in both the

Olinka and Somali cultures, the father figures are deceitful and reticent about the customs and traditions that regulate the life of tribe and try to the sustain their power at any expense.

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INTRODUCTION

The cruel practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) is the main concern of this thesis. The objective is to scrutinize the kinds of torment which shape the lives of

African women and pin down the excruciating suffering they endure as the outcome of female genital cutting, through the critical analysis of Alice Walker’s novel,

Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) and Waris Dirie’s autobiography Desert Flower

(1998). Precisely, the culturally ritualized act of infibulation will constitute the axis around which both life stories of the protagonists (Tashi and Waris respectively), will be unraveled. These two narratives expose the horrendous ramifications of female genital mutilation and infibulation, which affect African women’s physical and mental health and plunge them into psychic turmoil. Because of the patriarchal social order that governs both the Olinka and the Somali tribes, the permissible areas of female activity are limited to the domestic sphere (to take care of the household chores, serve their husbands and raise children), to certain communal areas (such as the huts where the circumcision of young girls takes place collectively), and to farms where women tend their crops. African tribal women have to submit first to the authority of their fathers and then to that of their husbands. The male elders who determine the destiny of females impose marriage contracts on them or make them the objects of financial exchanges and keep the women powerless and ignorant.

In her address to the reader, included in her novel, Alice Walker provides some statistics from the 1980s. She states that“[i]t is estimated that from ninety to one hundred million women and girls living today in African, Far Eastern and middle

Eastern countries have suffered some form of genital mutilation” (283). She also informs us that the practice of female circumcision has spread in the United States and

Anastasiadou 6 in Europe, “among immigrants from countries where it is part of the culture” (283).

Christine J. Walley confirms that the initiation ceremony, which includes clitoridectomies and infibulations, is not only a North African and sub-Saharan

African concern, but also a European and an American social problem because it has been exported via immigration (405). Furthermore, as Walley notes, genital operations challenge “fundamental understandings of body, self, sexuality, family, and morality” and play “upon tensions relating to the cultural difference, the relationship between women and ‘tradition,’ and the legacy of colonial-era depictions of gender relations in non-Western countries” (406). It is beyond doubt that female circumcision violates women’s individuality and their human rights. The World

Health Organization states that “‘female genital mutilation is universally unacceptable because it is an infringement on the physical and psychosexual integrity of women and girls and it is a form of violence against them’” (qtd. in Bell 130). Rahman and

Toubia also take the position that “the cutting of healthy genital organs for non- medical reasons—is at its essence a basic violation of girls’ and women’s right to physical integrity” (qtd. in Bell 130). Referring to female excision as an operation and being concerned about the issue of informed consent, feminist scholar, Fran Hosken argues that “[a]ny violation of the physical nature of the human person, for any reason whatsoever, without the informed consent of the person involved, is a violation of human rights” (qtd. in Bell 130). However, African girls are cut at such an early age that they cannot understand what informed consent means let alone give their approval.

In 1988, feminist scholar, Christine J. Walley, visited the village of Kikhome, in Kenya to witness first-hand the local custom of circumcision. As she says, this village was remote and difficult to reach by transportation. There she found two

Anastasiadou 7 tribes: the Bukusu who lived in the valley and the Sabaot who farmed the hills. Soon after her arrival, the high school students “began telling [her] with boisterous pride about their circumcision ceremonies” (409). The Bukusu circumcised only boys, whereas the Sabaot both sexes. Because the Bukusu ceremonies were already over when she arrived, Walley was assured that she would be able to witness the Sabaot ceremonies “over the December school holidays” (409). Such rituals were a communal affair and were attended by crowds of people of all ages; the teenagers trained “for several months to learn the necessary songs and dances under the guidance of their sponsors” and then went around to invite their friends and relatives

(410). The young people were warned by their mothers “not to disgrace their relatives, living or dead, by showing cowardice” (410). The significance of this ritual was tied not only to the initiation of boys into manhood and girls into womanhood, but also to the enforced code of bravery and to the repression of pain. As Walley reports:

The cutting was public and demonstrated to the community the bravery of

the initiated. The boys were cut by a male circumcisor while standing; the

girls were excised by a woman as they sat with legs spread on the ground,

their backs supported by their sponsors. The crucial test was for the

initiate to show no pain, to neither change expression nor even blink,

during the cutting. Remarkably enough to my friend and I, the initiates

remained utterly stoic and expressionless throughout. We were told it is

this ability to withstand the ordeal that confers adulthood, that allows one

to marry and have children, and that binds one's age-mates. (410)

What westerners learn by observing such tribal rituals is that the practice of excision for some African tribes is an occasion for celebration. No member of the tribe dares to

Anastasiadou 8 criticize or reject it because they will either be accused of cowardice or face social ostracism, as Walley reports. Unfortunately, some African tribal women collude with patriarchal culture’s deceptive teachings, which reinforce anachronistic power relations between the two genders. “They believe FGM ‘saves and protects’ women.

Instead, it maintains the balance of power in favor of unmutilated men” (Maher 15).

The range of countries involved and the statistics referring to the number of genitally circumcised girls and women are alarming. Excision has afflicted approximately 80 to 120 million girls and women around the world (Maher 12).

Accordingly, the number of females living with any type of female genital mutilation is approximately 100-130 million, while two million women and girls are in jeopardy of getting cut (Slanger, et. al. 174). Circumcisions are performed chiefly in Africa (in

26 countries); precisely in North-Eastern, Eastern, and Western Africa. Almost 80 million girls and women in Africa have been cut (Gordon 25). The practice of female excisions can be located in places, such as “Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Egypt, Kenya,

Tanzania, Nigeria, Togo, Senegal, and Mali” and among different religions, such as

Islam, Christianity, Falasha Judaism and others (Walley 407). According to the World

Health Organization, over 90% of women in Egypt, Sudan, Somalia and Djibouti have been genitally mutilated (The Cutting Tradition). Other parts of the world that have to deal with this practice are Middle-East, South-East Asia and European countries, hosting African immigrants. In addition, “Malaysia, Indonesia, the southern parts of the Arab Peninsula, Pakistan, Russia, Peru, Brazil, Eastern Mexico, …

Sweden, [and] Germany entail some of the over forty countries that embrace the

2,500 years dated ceremony of female circumcision” (Gordon 25). This information makes clear that FGM is a global phenomenon with deep cultural roots and thus very difficult to eradicate. Ironically, whereas on the continent of Africa there seems to be

Anastasiadou 9 some indications of current decline, the practice has been exported by African immigration to several countries of the West. “Global Citizen” is an online platform of united, diligent, and active citizens. Drawing on a research published in the British

Medical Journal, it informs us that “71% of all girls in East Africa were circumcised in 1995. But in 2017, the rate of circumcision among girls under the age of 14 dropped to 8%. In West Africa, the rate fell in the last 20 years from 73% to 25%, and in North Africa from 57% to 14%.” This research further indicates the rising number of female genital mutilations in European countries, such as Great Britain and France, as well as in the United States, Canada and Australia, as an outcome of immigrants carrying their values and traditions to new places. Alice Walker herself testifies to the fact that the West is not exempt from the practice of maiming female bodies or shaping them to fulfill male fantasies. Specifically, she refers to the fact that genital cutting is practiced in African communities in the West (in Holland, in Britain, and in the United States). Approximately 13,000 girls in America run the risk of getting mutilated (qtd. in Hamilton 14-15). This development is discouraging. It implies that a large number of females are still deprived of the right to control their own bodies.

The practice of female circumcision has its roots in Egypt, as clues of excised mummies indicate. Female genital cutting precedes the establishment of religions and comprises a traditional initiation for both genders, either to womanhood or to manhood (Gordon 25). It was done mostly before adolescence, commonly ranging from the age of four to eight for girls, but currently it has been excessively practiced on infants. This ritualized practice pertains the excision of some parts or the total evacuation of all the genitalia. The kind of female genital mutilation deviates in proportion to the cultural background (Hamilton 3). The World Health Organization recognizes several categories. Circumcision, or Sunna-circumcision, or

Anastasiadou 10 clitoridectomy, details the more gentle type of them all, with the isolation of the clitoris’ hood or prepuce. “The term Sunna suggests that the practice is acceptable, or even recommended or required for Muslims, although most Islamic theologians consider it to be either optional or discouraged by Islam” (Gruenbaum 458). This type comprises the most probable one and is connected to an infrequent use of anesthetic

(Maher 13). During excision, the clitoris prepuce, the clitoris, the inner lips or parts of them are cut off. Infibulation or pharaonic circumcision pertains to the excision of the clitoris, labia minora, the inner walls of labia majora with “the raw edges of the vulva pinned or sewn together by silk or catgut sutures, or held against each other with acacia tree thorns, closing up the entire area leaving only a tiny opening, roughly the size of a match stick to allow for the passage of urine and menstrual flow” (Gordon

25). The word infibulation comes from the time of the ancient Romans, who used to pierce the female slaves’ genitals with pins or a fibula (Walley 407). As a traditional practice, infibulation served the cultural order and social compulsions. Since female genital mutilation was actually practiced before the formation of religions, such as

Christianity or Islam, we understand that it constituted a cultural construct, established by the ruling male class. As we will see in the analysis of Walker’s novel and Dirie’s autobiography that follows, the protagonists, Tashi and Waris, are subjected to infibulation. Another type of FGM pertains to any intervening act that injures the female genitalia, such as piercing, pricking, stretching the clitoris or labia, burning or scarring the genitals, ripping of the vaginal opening, or introducing corrosive herbs and substances to tighten the vagina. Natasha M. Gordon further remarks, regarding the circumcisers’ instruments, that ordinary “razor blades, knifes, stones [and] sharp glass” were employed, with the exception of some domains, where the “midwife or ‘daya’s’ teeth” functioned as a cutting tool (25). Concisely, female

Anastasiadou 11 genital mutilation (as a general term) refers to dissimilar types, varying in proportion according to the specific culture that demands it. Women are expected to withstand pain as the price that secures them entrance into adulthood. “This pain is intrinsic to tradition that most regard as part and parcel of womanhood and morality” (Johansen

319). In my opinion, such operations on the female genitals as described above constitute a carefully designed, cultural mission to destroy the female body. Besides writing the novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy, Alice Walker, along with the filmmaker Pratibha Parmar, created a documentary called Warrior Marks. Discussing it in her essay, Amy Hamilton provides the details of the ritual given in Walker’s and

Parmar’s film. The girls form a circle seated with spread legs and the jollification begins. A chicken is slaughtered, foreshadowing the girls’ approaching cutting out and the subsequent hemorrhage. Concurrently with the ritual, the girls receive womanhood allocations, which are not seen in the film, but are rather conveyed via the interviews. Circumcisers are appreciated culture members and may be midwives, healers, or rarely trained nurses or doctors. Egypt designates one of the rare instances, where men are performing the circumcisions. The circumciser informs Alice Walker of the girls’ devotion and decision never to speak of the process of female genital mutilation, out of obeisance to tradition, “even if you put a knife on their throat.” In fact, two of the girls interviewed in the film respond, “it’s a happy day for us”

(Hamilton 14). In addition, patriarchal culture dictates that (infibulated) women can be exploited and utilized in the markets for the economic benefit of men. They are expected to contribute to “farming, herding, food processing, and other economic enterprises all [of which] enhance men’s health” (Gruenbaum 461). Before and after infibulation, the quality of a woman’s life is determined by father figures, in the sense that women provide both domestic and reproductive work.

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In her essay, “African Female Circumcision and the Missionary Mentality,”

Joyce Russel-Robinson includes an interview with a woman from an African country, to whom she refers with the name of Af-rica. From the interview we learn that one of the cultural directions is never to talk about one’s circumcision to anybody and that

African women, only after residing in the West realize that this is an unnecessary practice:

jr-r: I know that your mother is in Africa, but will you tell her that you have talked with me about your circumcision?

Af-rica: No. Never. When we were taken to the bush and circumcised, we were warned not to tell anybody about it. If we tell, they say our stomachs will swell and we could die.

……………………………………………………………………………...

jr-r: Should circumcision be discontinued?

Af-rica: Yes. It is too much. If I have daughters, they will not be circumcised. Now that I have lived in the West, I know it is unnecessary” (Russel-Robinson 56).

Patriarchal culture’s taboo of silence and the incitement of fear are instrumental factors in the application of the ritualized circumcision. Moreover, culture relies on the natural compulsion for security in membership. According to sociological theories of identity formation, “adolescents seek to form opinions that coincide with those of people who are important to them’’ (Rajkotia 233-34). When female genital mutilation is directly tied to “a society’s expression of its beliefs and values” (Maher

14), then it is of no surprise that youngsters tend to adopt their society’s beliefs and values. In other words, female genital mutilation is a traditional ritual tightly linked to social conformity and cultural loyalty.

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Scholars who investigate the controversial practice of genital mutilation are also interested in pointing out the substantial physical and psychic health aftereffects.

Clitoridectomies may cause “hemorrhage and infection, and in the case of infibulation, they include difficulties with urination, intercourse, and childbirth; fluid retention; and cyst formation” (Walley 422). Amy Hamilton detects and documents five central health consequences. Besides being negatively surprised, when they are confronted with the cruel practice, girls are psychologically wounded afterwards.

Further, genitally mutilated victims deal with vaginal infections, due to the small opening, which leaves no space for urine and menstrual blood to flow and potentially can have sterilization effects. Additionally, copulation becomes agonizing and grinding. Parturition constitutes another field of struggle and complexity for the circumcised woman (3). Lastly, unsterilized razors used by the circumcisers are vehicles for AIDS transmission. In territories were female genital mutilation occurs, the rates of mothers’ and children’s mortality are significantly elevated (Maher 13).

Excessive hemorrhage, tetanus, bladder numbness, blood poisoning, HIV infections via the unsanitary tools, abscesses, bladder infections, debauchery, or death are some other health repercussions of the practice. Sitting and walking become challenging acts, hazardous of re-opening the scarred tissue. The victims have to be prone to dismiss the sexual discomfort. In reference to child labor, caesarean sections are the usual choice, otherwise the bleeding may be alarming. The pain that some women experience during sexual intercourse approximates the pain a woman feels while being raped. Nonetheless, they have to endure it when the husband insists on his

“marital rights” (Johansen 317). A woman named Jamila states: “Often I had to throw up and I cried from the pain…. But I had to do it. I was my husband’s wife”

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(Johansen 318). Beyond doubt, traditional female circumcisions produce exclusively negative physical and mental aftereffects on women.

Female genital mutilation is also regarded as an instrumental force of the patriarchal system that wants to control, regulate and repress woman’s sexuality.

Walley points to the fact that “European and American doctors used clitoridectomy as a cure for masturbation and so-called nymphomania” (407). Joyce Russel-Robinson refers to the belief that the practice “curbs the potentially excessive sexuality of females” (55). In tribes where polygamy is allowed for men, women have to be infibulated and to be positioned at the bottom of the social and human ladder. The

World Health Organization accepts that such mutilations demolish the sexuality of women (Bell 130). Moreover, operations on female genitalia are culturally grounded in a number of rationales. Religion provides fundamental patriarchal arguments for the continuation of the practice, even though there is no actual reference to mutilation in the Koran. Illiteracy serves as a further perpetuating factor. It cannot be denied that any invasive procedure on a woman’s body “maintain[s] the balance of power in favor of unmutilated men” (Maher 15). In short, female excision is justified for the sake of the purity of the female body, in order to control a woman’s alleged excessive sexuality, to honor religious teachings, but above all to ensure male domination over women, making it a wider concern of gender power politics. These days, female genital mutilation is prosecuted by law in Australia, Canada, Norway, Sweden,

Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the

United States and in New Zealand. In these countries “general criminal and/or child protection laws have been applied” (Rajkotia 225). In 1999, Greou’s case (exciseuse) was one of the biggest in the history of genital mutilation. She was convicted for 48 female circumcisions; 23 mothers and 3 fathers were castigated as well (Rajkotia

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225). Consequently, it is essential that women around the world receive relevant education, break the taboo of silence, and understand the gender power politics that continue to support this abhorrent practice.

The aforementioned information is vital if one is to understand the various aspects of this controversial practice. Possessing the Secret of Joy and Desert Flower are literary dramatizations of the traditional ritualized practice of FGM and offer the readers (through the fictionalized life stories of Tashi and Waris respectively), essential details regarding infibulation. Both books deal with the tremendous consequences of this practice and expose the deception and exploitation of females, their physical suffering and mental incarceration, as well as the deterioration of their health and the damage to their sexuality.

Chapter One examines the repercussions of infibulation as presented in Alice

Walker’s novel. It argues that Walker creates a narrative which reports the horrible life experiences of the heroine and designates the construction of her multiple identities, via the various combinations of her first and last names, as a way to come to terms with her mental confusion. Tashi is caught in the existential condition of in- betweenness; she is torn between the First World (North America) and the Third

World (East Africa, the Olinka tribe). To prove her loyalty to her land of origin, Tashi decides to undergo both scarification and circumcision. The bodily marks aim to demonstrate that she takes the side of her colonized tribe and struggles to maintain her cultural identity during the times of white imperialism. Unfortunately, she descents into a psychological abyss and struggles with a mental collapse, because besides the many physical discomforts and loss of her sexuality, she is burdened by a marriage plagued with infidelity, by a problematic pregnancy (resulting in the birth of a retarded boy), and by the repressed traumatic memories she dares not to divulge. In

Anastasiadou 16 the end, she is punished for the murder of the female tsunga, that is, the tribal circumcisor who killed her sister and damaged herself by performing the hideous ritual. The novel examines gender power relations, female sexuality, black women’s abusive treatment, sexist tribal customs, and cultural dissimilarities.

Chapter Two investigates the physical and psychological aftereffects of pharaonic circumcision in Waris Dirie’s Desert Flower. Dirie recounts the horrible circumstances she was faced with as a victim of infibulation, talks about the patriarchal tyranny over African women’s lives, shows the entrapment of females in the domain of the household, exposes marriage as a financial exchange between men, and condemns the reduction of women’s bodies to mere reproductive organs. Dirie’s political message in the autobiography is that the barbaric cultural practice of mutilating women’s bodies must be resisted because it robs African women of their womanhood and leaves many of them cripple.

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CHAPTER ONE

Infibulation and its Aftereffects in Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy

In Alice Walker’s novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy, tribal culture dictates the life of the female population. Western colonization has exposed the Olinka women to a foreign lifestyle. During this tension between Western and African customs, the Olinkas continue two tribal practices, scarification and female genital mutilation, in order to demonstrate the superiority of their culture. Before the novel begins, Walker includes an excerpt from The Color Purple (1982) in which the Black

American character called Olivia, explains the reason why the Olinka young girl named Tashi wants to scar her face: “It is a way the Olinka can show they still have their own ways … even though the white man has taken everything else’’ (Walker n.p.). The Olinkas expect their young girls to endure the rituals of scarification and genital mutilation because they believe that Olinka females must endure these bodily wounds if they are “to achieve the status and joys of womanhood: getting married, pleasing a husband and having children” (Gruenbaum 462). Through female genital cutting, the Africans tried to prove that they were different from the white people, and that the Olinka women possessed endurance, strength and courage. Ultimately, the

Africans managed to reinforce the comments they received from the white people, that they were barbarians with cruel customs. Indeed, African father figures reacted to white oppression by perpetuating the unequal gender power relations, targeting women, a culturally more vulnerable group. Dominated by the Western colonizers, the Olinkas felt powerless. They were dispossessed of their land. Tashi says to her black American friend, Olivia: “We who had once owned our village and hectares and hectares of land now owned nothing” (Walker 22). And she adds, “We had been stripped of everything but our black skins” (Walker 24). According to Tashi, the tribal

Anastasiadou 18 marks on the cheeks of young women, after scarification, were meant to be signs of courage and defiance. That is why Tashi wants such marks for herself. Coming from a patriarchal culture, Tashi, like other Olinka women, is unable to see that the African custom of bodily mutilation is dangerous and misogynistic. She is reluctant to abandon her tribe’s customs. When the missionaries make “a big campaign against what they called the scarring of our faces” (Walker 118), Tashi rejects their objections because she remembers that the Olinka Leader has the same markings and is proud of them. When the missionaries tell her that nobody in America or Europe cuts off pieces of themselves, she tries to defend the Olinka way by saying, “Who are you and your people never to accept us as we are? Never to imitate any of our ways? It is always we who have to change” (Walker 23). Tashi refuses to adopt the foreigners’ perspective and ways of living. She resents Olivia’s attempt to dissuade her from joining the camp of the rebellious Mbeles who are fighting the troops of the white government. Proud of her “ebony” skin and her African heritage, Tashi talks to her childhood friend with hatred and contempt: “You want to change us … so that we are like you” (Walker 23). She refuses to be Americanized even though she eventually marries Adam, a Black American young man with whom she has been close friends from her childhood. Ironically, in America Tashi’s identity is changed because she is renamed “Evelyn” Johnson.

Apparently, young Tashi naively embraces Olinka cultural directives regarding the female initiation ceremony, because she personally despises Western imperialism and the efforts of Western missionaries to alter the way her people live and think. As Pratibha Parmar points out genitally mutilated women are “wounded by traditions” (qtd. in Walley 420). Walker makes clear in her novel that there is an

“enduring division between “us” and “them,” between the First and Third World

Anastasiadou 19 perspectives. Walley correctly observes that “the dysfunctional sex life, intensely painful childbirth, deformed child, troubled marriage, and tortured soul of the main character, Tashi, are all attributed to ‘circumcision’” (423). In several African countries, infibulation serves as a cultural marker of distinction. “The practice of pharaonic circumcision also serves ethnic group and class superiority because it functions as an ideological marker of superior morality. . .” (Gruenbaum 461-62).

Such a practice functions as a “binary distinction between a rational West and an overly traditional and cultured ‘rest’” (Walley 421). Racial and cultural differences determine a woman’s condition regarding her bodily integrity. One cultural difference between America and the African tribe of the Olinka that Walker points out is the things that females do to their bodies in order to be socially accepted. While the

Olinka culture associates the razor with the beards of men, in the United States, Tashi learns that there is another use for the razor. Specifically, Tashi says, “Until I went to

America it would never have occurred to me to pick one up, to shave my legs and underarms with it” (Walker 36). Tashi’s ignorance regarding this feminine but harmless cultural practice of hair removal is compared to Raye’s (a middle-aged

African American woman who becomes Tashi’s shrink) ignorance of circumcision as a form of female initiation into womanhood for African females. As Tashi explains to

Raye, the Olinka culture had many taboos regarding the female body and sexuality and kept young girls from actually learning about their body and its functions. Tashi says that the Olinka patriarchal culture kept young women in the dark and that she only learned about her sexual organs only after she came to America:

My own body was a mystery to me, as was the female body, beyond the functions of the breasts, to almost everyone I knew. From prison our Leader said, we must keep ourselves clean and pure as we had been since time immemorial—by cutting out unclean parts of our bodies. Everyone

Anastasiadou 20

knew that if a woman was not circumcised her unclean parts would grow so long they’d soon touch her thighs; she’d become masculine and arouse herself. No man could enter her because her own erection would be in his way. (Walker 121)

Persuading African women that an “uncircumcised vagina” was “a monstrosity”

(Walker 121), the Olinka patriarchal culture colonized the minds of every one of its members and made the elders willing accomplices to female subjugation and mutilation. Ignorance compounded by peer pressure added an extra burden to the uncircumcised females. Tashi reveals that all her friends “jeered” at her and thought she was “odd” (Walker 121). So to be accepted as “a real woman by the Olinka people” and not to be considered “a thing,” to stop them from jeering at her, and to prove to them that she is not a “traitor” to her culture and that she honors “the old ways” (the Olinka tradition), Tashi accepts to be circumcised. Walker makes clear that Tashi’s surrender to cultural pressure is due to her ignorance (because circumcision is a taboo that is never discussed by the Olinka) and her powerlessness.

She is under the delusion that circumcision means becoming “Completely woman.

Completely African. Completely Olinka” (Walker 64).

Regardless of their skin color, women from different African countries, particularly those coming from “mutilating cultures” (Walker 180) have suffered female genital mutilation and/or infibulation because they had uncritically absorbed the masculine ideology that “a woman’s vagina” has to be tight and that no African man would marry a woman who has not been through such an operation. Whereas the proper age to undergo circumcision was either “shortly after birth, or at the age of five or six but certainly by the onset of puberty, ten or eleven” (Walker 64), Walker’s heroine, Tashi, is a grownup when she decides to have the operation, seeing it as “the only remaining definitive stamp of Olinka tradition” (Walker 64). In her mind,

Anastasiadou 21 mutilation did not mean enslavement nor the conquest of the female body for men’s pleasure, but an honorable way to adhere to the ancient customs and traditions of the

Olinka and to join all the women “whom she envisioned as strong, invincible”

(Walker 64). It becomes apparent that African patriarchal cultures supersede women’s human rights. Because of the taboo of silence, the Olinka female children and mothers are not allowed to talk about the lethal consequences of genital mutilation. Tashi informs the readers that circumcision is never discussed even if it is enforced by the chiefs. Tashi’s sister, Dura, “had bled to death” (Walker 8) but as a little girl Tashi was obliged to control her emotions and never to refer to her favorite sister. Although

Tashi hiding in the grass had heard her sister’s “howls of pain and terror” (Walker 75) while Dura was held down and being tortured inside a hut, she was too young to do anything about it and was forced to suppress the truth of Dura’s murder for many years.

By presenting an African woman’s experience of female genital mutilation and its effects on her body, mind and soul, Walker tries to make the readers to come to terms with the realization that this cruel African ritual of initiation is “not fiction but cultural hermeneutics” (Russell-Robinson 54). The “ritual” of the excision of the clitoris or the removal of the entire female genitals signals “a symptom of mere tradition, conformity and cultural maladjustment” (Russell-Robinson 54). Although such customs have ancient cultural roots, besides being barbaric acts they also bring many health hazards. However, it seems that many African women are unable to resist the ideological socialization of their childhood and voluntarily conform to the tribal rituals because they seem to offer cultural rewards, such as status and marriageability. A comparable but also questionable ritual is the one in East African nations, where parents reject to remove the flies on their children eyes, even if they

Anastasiadou 22 run the risk of health problems, merely because they relate them to the feces of cattle, which function as a prosperity symbol (Russell- Robinson 54). In her novel, Walker refers to an old cultural belief which assumed that “the blood of woman was sacred” so both female and male priests “smeared [it] on their faces until they looked as they had at birth” in order to symbolize their “rebirth: the birth of the spirit” (207). But women’s “blood power” was eliminated after the rise of patriarchal religions and masculine cultural customs and “woman’s blood” was replaced by baptismal “water.”

When the Olinka became a people they instituted the role of the tsunga, that is the woman who circumcises little girls. This culturally assigned female role passed on from grandmother, to mother, to daughter, demonstrating the complicity of the

African women to such misogynistic rituals. As Walker’s fictional tsunga named

M’Lissa says, the women did it in “service to tradition, to what makes us a people. In service to country and what makes us who we are” (Walker 226). Linking the Olinka tribal identity to the custom of circumcision, M’Lissa attests to the fact that patriarchal cultures can tolerate neither female autonomy and power, nor any masculine features (like the “masculine” clitoris) on the female body. Because of his

“lust for her conquest” and his “jealousy of woman’s pleasure” and because “she does not require him to achieve it” (Walker 182), as the fictional character Pierre claims,

Man orders the mutilation of the female body.

In the final analysis, the practice of female genital cutting reinforces misogynistic views and traditions, treating women as disembodied flesh and cultural pawns. Banking on the human need to belong to a group, to be accepted as a member of a wider whole, certain African societies exploit a fertile ground to impose patriarchal power relations and gender politics, especially in secluded, uncultivated territories. Walker likens mutilation to slavery, maintaining that African women are

Anastasiadou 23 treated as the colony of men. Specifically, in Possessing the Secret of Joy, Walker, demonstrates that colonizing the female body and soul is the only weapon with which the African male community tries to prove its superiority over the Western culture. As

Walker states, “People customarily do these things just as they customarily enslaved people, but slavery is not culture, nor is mutilation” (qtd. in Hamilton 2). In Walker’s novel, the heroine Tashi is subjected to a cruel form of genital removal, after her conscious decision to go through this practice at a comparably advanced age. The

Olinka women who made their living as tsungas also had to undergo the same procedure. Walker presents the experience of M’Lissa, who was left lame and “when walking she had to drag her left leg” (217). While telling her life story, M’Lissa, reveals that her own mother had to perform the circumcision. As M’Lissa informs us,

And when my turn came she tried to get away with cutting lightly. Of

course she took the outer lips, because four strong eagle-eyed women held

me down; and of course the inner lips too. But she tried to leave me a nub,

down there where the charge I had felt with the little statuette had seemed

to be heading. She barely nicked me there. But the other women saw.’’

(Walker 221)

Despite the fact that M’Lissa’s mother tried to be gentle with her daughter’s body, she could not escape the judgmental looks of the other women who expected her to obey the Olinka tradition. What the mother could not complete, the male witchdoctor finished by showing no mercy and by using a “razor sharp stone” (Walker 222) to cut into the girl’s genitals. With this narrated episode, Walker shows the power men exercise over the female body and sexuality; she also denotes the patriarchal culture’s refusal to allow powerful women (witches who taught the witchdoctor about the healing and cures after the operation) to escape being circumcised. Because they

Anastasiadou 24 refused, the witches were put to death (Walker 221). Pointing out the devastating effects on M’Lissa’s life, Walker, through Tashi’s narration, describes her as a callous, sad, and an emotionally dead woman: “She was like someone beaten into insensibility. Bitter, but otherwise emotionally inert” (Walker 223). The inhumanity of the ritual lies primarily on the serious health repercussions it entails. The girl who survives the initiation procedure is considered lucky. But not all African girls escape death. As we have seen, Dura, Tashi’s sister, “bled to death after a botched circumcision” (Walker 275), leaving the protagonist haunted by the sight of her own blood and burdening her with a traumatic loss.

Walker presents two different attitudes toward the Olinka tribal customs and pinpoints the depreciation of the gender role of the tsunga as the result of the contact of African culture with Western culture. The tsunga (midwife and healer) continues to be esteemed by the traditional Olinka women who refuse to adopt the Western lifestyle and to convert to Christianity. The Christianized African women turn to

Western medicine and shun the tsunga. Unlike her mother Catherine, who had gone

Christian and ignored M’Lissa’s plea to have her daughter circumcised at a young age, Tashi voluntarily goes to the Mbele camp to be initiated into womanhood because she mistakenly and naively considers the rituals of scarification and mutilation as markers of her African identity. At the Mbele military camp she finds

M’Lissa, the Olinka tsunga, who performs the operation and then tries to heal Tashi’s scarred body. Because the Mbele rebels are at war with the white government’s troops and because the Olinka (hated by other black tribes) have become either captives or refugees, the conditions under which Tashi’s initiation takes place have deteriorated.

It is M’Lissa who compares the current situation and Tashi’s operation with “the old days” when nothing was lacking and when genital excision was a communal affair

Anastasiadou 25 with many girls being cut simultaneously and then taken care by their female relatives. The infibulated women were treated as convalesced patients of a major surgery:

M’Lissa grumbled about the lack of everything. In the old days, she said,

Tashi would have wanted for nothing. There would have been a score of

maidens initiated with her, and their mothers, aunts and older sisters

would have taken charge of the cooking (important because there were

special foods one ate at such a time that kept the stools soft, thus

eliminating some of the pain of evacuation), the cleaning of the house, the

washing, oiling and perfuming of Tashi’s body. (Walker 62)

During her stay at the Mbele camp, M’Lissa reports that her job had become a risk and a burden because “she’d had nothing beyond her two hands to work. There had been no herbs, no oils, no antiseptics, not even water at times” (Walker 63).

Therefore, Tashi’s initiation to womanhood takes place under such unsafe and unsanitary conditions with serious bodily and psychic consequences.

In a conversation between Tashi and M’Lissa, Walker refers to the power that patriarchal tribal culture exerts over the lives and bodies of African women, who are treated as sex objects by African men. Their assigned gender role requires the sons “to break into the woman’s body. They often hurt themselves trying” (245). Although the

“the sons know nothing of what is done to women,” they are socialized to believe that men should “like it tight” (245). The same lesson is learned by the African young girls, who, even when they become wives and mothers, continue to voluntarily seek the services of a tsunga in order to be sewn tighter. As M’Lissa informs Tashi, “there are women walking around today who’ve paid the tsungas to make them tighter than

Anastasiadou 26 that! After each birth of a child they do it. More than once, more than twice, more than three times, they’ve had it done. Each time tighter than before” (Walker 245). It seems that African culture and traditional customs have absolute control over the minds and lives of some African women, who are willing to mutilate their bodies and endure painful procedures only to prove to men that they are desirable, obedient women.

While in prison, waiting for her execution because she killed M’Lissa the tsunga, Tashi joins Olivia to tend African patients suffering from AIDS. The African culture continues to influence negatively the lives of the Olinkas because it still enforces the taboo of silence and keeps the patients ignorant of their condition. “No one has any idea why he or she is sick” (Walker 249). Furthermore, “[a]mong the wealthy Olinkas there is widespread denial that anything is wrong. They keep their dying relatives at home” (Walker 250). Only the poor ones are visible. While trying to understand why all these Africans are dying, Tashi links the deaths of African females to her own experience of circumcision and to the unsanitary conditions that characterize the procedure: “Tashi is convinced that the little girls who are dying, and the women too, are infected by the unwashed, unsterilized sharp stones, tin tops, bits of glass, rusty razors and grungy knives used by the tsunga. Who might mutilate twenty children without cleaning her instrument” (Walker 251). Lacking proper medical services, knowing there is no cure, and speculating that they have been deliberately infected by scientists, these dying Africans symbolize what Tashi scornfully calls “the assigned role of the African: to suffer, to die, and not know why”

(Walker 250).

In Possessing the Secret of Joy, Walker also describes the physical harms infibulation burdens a woman with. As we are told, an infibulated woman like Tashi

Anastasiadou 27 faces many problems because after the operation her body does not function normally.

Tashi had to come to terms with pain, cramps and the bad odor of the rotten blood stuck in her sewn genitals. She has difficulty urinating: “It now took her a quarter of an hour for her to pee” (Walker 65). Her menstrual cycle is affected: “her menstrual periods lasted ten days. She was incapacitated by cramps nearly half the month”

(Walker 65). Because only a tiny aperture is left, the residual flow of blood cannot be discarded from her tight vagina, so she suffers from cramps. Moreover, the fact that

Tashi cannot get rid of the bad smell while in Africa makes her hide and avoid human interaction. As Olivia remarks, “In America, we solved the problem of cleaning behind the scar by using a medical syringe that looked like a small turkey baster, and this relieved Tashi of an embarrassment so complete she had taken to spending half the month completely hidden from human contact, virtually buried” (Walker 67). In short, because Tashi was infibulated at a later age than usual and under unhealthy conditions, this resulted in numerous bodily and health complications.

The African practice of female genital mutilation affected women on multiple levels. One of these has to do with their sexuality and erotic activities. Before the operation, Tashi was a healthy, lively, sexually active young girl who broke the

Olinka society’s “strongest taboo” by engaging in sexual intercourse in the fields. We are told that “[s]o strong was this taboo that no one in living memory had broken it”

(Walker 27). It was considered a social offense since the Olinka believed that

“lovemaking in the fields jeopardized the crops” (Walker 27). However, this cultural bias was proven wrong since no harm came to the fields and the harvest after Tashi’s lovemaking to Adam. Expressing freely her sexuality, the uncircumcised and unmarried Tashi derives sexual pleasure from her secret liaison with Adam and seems to have a normal and vigorous sex drive. As Adam says, “[e]ach time we made love,

Anastasiadou 28 she’d wanted me as much as I’d wanted her. She had engineered most of our meetings. Whenever we held each other she was breathless in anticipation. Once, she claimed her heart nearly stopped. Such pleasure as ours was difficult for us to believe’’ (Walker 32). Adam remembers the mature sexual liveliness of Tashi, when he performed cunnilingus, which was also considered to be a taboo by the Olinka tribe. After Tashi’s infibulation, sexual intercourse becomes very painful. During her marriage, Tashi tries to derive some sexual pleasure but the only thing she experiences is pain: “After three months of trying he had failed to penetrate me. Each time he touched me I bled. Each time he moved against me I winced. There was nothing he could do to me that did not hurt” (Walker 60). Although Tashi’s spouse acknowledges her pain, he sees her condition only as a traumatic incident, failing to realize the extent of the damage done to his wife’s body and sexual organs.

Nagueyalti Warren and Sally Wolff observe that “[h]e knows her sexually before the circumcision … but he does not internalize the memories she has repressed, nor the pain she will endure. Such events and horrors are, for him, ‘other’” (10).

Conclusively, Tashi’s sexuality becomes another field of struggle for her. The infibulated woman is doomed to live with pain and to suffer.

The damage done to a woman’s body with the practice of genital mutilation and the subsequent tightening of her vagina becomes clearer when she gives birth to children. The experience of giving birth multiples her pain and suffering. Tashi has a problematic parturition; because the opening of her vagina is not large enough, the doctor cuts her using a scalpel and a pair of scissors. Once again her body is ripped open and then is sewed up to prevent it from having “a yawning unhealable wound”

(Walker 61). The only difference this time, Tashi’s “hole” had to be sewed up for health reasons. And the doctor was careful enough to leave “room for pee and

Anastasiadou 29 menstrual blood more easily to pass” (Walker 61). When Tashi gets pregnant a second time, she is forced to abort her daughter out of fear. She probably cannot stand to go through again the pain of parturition. She rejects the aborting doctor’s suggestion to have a “caesarean section” because as she confesses she was not willing to have her body to be chopped up one more time: “But I knew I could not bear being held down and cut open. The thought of it had sent me reeling off into the shadows of my mind; where I’d hidden out for months” (Walker 224). For infibulated women, the choice of caesarian section was supposedly less arduous. Infibulated African women were also compared to “termite queens” or in other words to “sacrificial breeder[s]” (Moore

115), because the role of the Queen is to give birth to generations of offspring (termite workers), “only at the end to die, and be devoured by those” (Walker 233) to whom she has given birth. Thus, infibulated African woman are expected to give birth to oblivious descendants who will be heirs of the existing tyrannical societal structure.

Besides damaging her body and complicating her marital and sexual life, the practice of infibulation affects negatively the African women’s personality and psychic health. Tashi returns from the Mbele camp where she was cut, having lost her

“graceful movements” and having acquired “the classic Olinka woman’s walk” because “the hidden scar” (Walker 66) between her legs forces her to drag her feet.

She is “[n]o longer cheerful, or impish” but “passive” (Walker 66). She rarely smiles.

In addition, she has lost “the liveliness of her personality”; in her eyes anyone can see that “her soul had been dealt a mortal blow” (Walker 66). Because of this horrible experience and the Olinka taboo of silence, Tashi becomes withdrawn and has difficulty expressing her feelings and fears. She lives in her mind and finds it hard to communicate with the male psychiatrist (recommended to her by Olivia) who is interested in an African woman’s psychosis. She does not seem to make any progress

Anastasiadou 30 because “she does not take easily to doctors of any sort” (Walker 76). While seeing a

French retired “doctor of the soul” (Walker 49), Tashi has an episode of mental delirium, becomes wild, ill, and distraught, almost lapses into insanity. The painful memories and the profound emotional trauma she hides even from herself surge and overwhelm her. Besides having to deal with her traumatic memories, Tashi has also to face her husband’s infidelity. She feels neglected, unloved and lonesome. While

Lisette, her husband’s lover, is visiting them in California, Tashi has to be sedated.

She also voluntarily checks herself in a psychiatric hospital. When Tashi finds out that her husband has a son with the Frenchwoman Lisette, she lapses into depression and tries to kill herself. Only when Tashi begins to visit a middle-aged African American female psychologist named Raye does she begin to talk about her emotional scars and her psychic condition. One of the ways Tashi deals with the horrible things that has happened to her is to indulge in a “lifelong tendency to escape from reality into the realm of fantasy and storytelling” (Walker 132).

In Possessing the Secret of Joy, readers discover an African female community subjugated by the authority and power of elderly men, who justify their sexist attitudes by invoking patriarchal religions and ancient traditions. Through

Tashi’s life story, Walker tries to expose some cruel truths and to convey the suffering of African females who grow up in tradition-rooted tribal societies. In the words of

Tashi, “the tsunga was to the traditional elders merely a witch they could control, an extension of their own dominating power” (Walker 277). And the cruel truth is that

“in some African countries is not ‘son of a bitch’ but ‘son an uncircumcised mother’” which is the greatest curse (Walker 277). Besides the main story which describes the dreadful consequences of genital mutilation, Walker includes in the narrative brief stories about other African women who died in childbirth from infection, who ran

Anastasiadou 31 away from their abusive husbands, and who chose suicide instead of a life of enslavement. Characteristic of the misogyny and abuse African women face is the case of one of Torabe’s wives, who could not endure his torture. We learn that Torabe

“had cut her open with a hunting knife on their wedding night, and gave her no opportunity to heal. She hated him” (Walker 138). When she ran to her parents for help, the woman receives neither compassion nor support. Even her own mother, following the orders of the father, tells her daughter that her “duty” was to be with her husband. She advises her runaway girl to return to her husband and follow her own example, saying that “the bleeding would stop and that when she herself was cut open she bled for a year. She had also cried and run away. Never had she gotten beyond the territory of men who returned her to her tribe. She had given up, and endured”

(Walker 138). It is evident from such stories that men rule and ruin women’s lives despite being ignorant and illiterate. Although African wives are said to despise their husbands and are obliged to live in their shadow, they seem to accept the patriarchal gender roles imposed on them and do not defy their village’s customs because they are convinced that any transgression would threaten “the fabric of the web of the life”

(Walker 139). Their horrible fate is captured by the punishment given to Torabe’s runaway wife who “was dragged from the river and left to rot, her body food for vultures and rodents” (Walker 139). It becomes clear that before and after their mutilation African females are forced to lead a socially structured and painful life, without an opportunity to escape, being helpless under the patriarchal control of men.

They wait for death to liberate them. Walker manages to make the reader see “the connection between mutilation and enslavement that is at the root of domination of women in the world” (139). African women are deprived of a healthy life and a free mentality, which are fundamental human rights and should be taken for granted. As

Anastasiadou 32 prisoners of men, they either harm themselves, commit suicide, or face death, indicating the lethal consequences of the practice.

The misogynistic ideology that controls African women’s bodies is further reinforced by antiquated religious beliefs which brand the clitoris as masculine and the sexually active women as evil. The character Pierre, who studies anthropology, reads from a book by a French anthropologist Marcel Griaule, titled Conversations with Ogotemmeli. In the section that explains the nature of human beings, we learn that when humans were created they were “endowed with two souls of different sex, or rather with two principles corresponding to two distinct persons. In the man the female soul was located in the prepuce; in the woman the male soul was in the clitoris” (Walker 175). However, because ancient men could not sustain this sexual duality and an androgynous identity, they came up with the perfect solution: “the man is circumcised to rid him of his femininity; the woman is excised to rid her of her masculinity” (Walker 175-76). This practice affected women as far back as Cleopatra and Nefertiti, who were circumcised as well. It spread from central to northern Africa.

Thus genital mutilation has deep roots in antiquity. In the Dogon civilization, for which Griaule’s book provides information it was “the elders who were the guardians of the knowledge of the beginning of man” (Walker 234). Their patriarchal mindset is evident in the way they explained God’s relationship to the clitoris:

God wanted to have intercourse with the woman, I say. And the woman

fought him. Her clitoris was a termite hill, rising up and barring his way.

… When the clitoris rose, I continue, God thought it looked masculine.

Since it was ‘masculine’ for a clitoris to rise, God could be excused for

cutting it down. Which he did.” (Walker 234)

Anastasiadou 33

In this ancient tribal creation story God is presented as a mutilator and a rapist. It seems that any part of woman’s anatomy that was thought to be masculine threatened both God’s and man’s masculinity and authority, and therefore had to be removed.

Geneva Cobb Moore correctly observes that “God, as presented in sacred African tribal lore” is threatened by an “erect clitoris” that resembles an erect phallus and is not satisfied until he excises it and then fucks “the hole that was left” (119.) In order to latch its uniqueness, domination, and masculinity God’s cock, or rather man’s, eliminated anything that could usurp its power and complicate men’s ultimate sexual pleasure. By tapering with the female genitals, men managed to make their penis feel

“big.” Female genital mutilation guarantees female virginity and prevents masturbation; it provides the maximum sexual pleasure for men and the greatness of their penis, because of the tight opening of the infibulated vagina. Masculine social order and religious teachings conspire so the Olinka tribe can practice both female slavery and infibulation. Through the comment of the African American character

Raye, Walker implicates tribal religion as a collaborator to patriarchy’s subjugation of women: “Religion is an elaborate excuse for what man has done to women and to the earth” (Walker 235).

The practice of circumcision continued through the later centuries; many

African women were “sold into bondage because they refused to be circumcised, but many of them sold into bondage circumcised and infibulated” (Walker 188).

Unfortunately, “[e]ven today there are villages where an uncircumcised woman is not permitted to live. The chiefs enforce this” (Walker 233). Much progress has not been made even in modern times because the sexual double standard remains. As the character Pierre states, if we look in the dictionary we will find the double standard that controls the sexual life of people: “A woman who is sexually ‘unrestrained,’ … is

Anastasiadou 34 by definition ‘lascivious, wanton and loose’…. A man who is sexually unrestrained is simply a man” (Walker 175). This anachronistic prejudice is still valid, reinforcing the stereotypical and antiquated gender power relations.

The marriage market reinforces further the socio-cultural and gender structures that enslave genitally mutilated African women. In order to get married and have children, women have to accept a predetermined life path, specific duties and restrictive roles. Genital mutilation is a requirement for social acceptance. Hence, the entire lifespan of infibulated women could be characterized as a continuum of pain and terror which sculpt the woman’s mental and psychological health. Women are obliged to function as desexed reproductive organs but are not given any clear reasons why things have to be that way; they are expected to trust the tribal elders: “Not told you directly that you, as a woman, were expected to reproduce as helplessly and inertly as a white ant; but in a culture in which it is mandatory that every single female be systematically desexed, there would have to be some coded, mythological reason given for it, used secretly among the village elders” (Walker 233). Pregnancy is another way tribal patriarchy controls and enslaves women and imprisons them in their body. Again religious belief underlies impregnation, intervening in the process only to assist male domination. Tashi remembers a conversation she heard among the elder men of her village: “Number one: Man is God’s cock. Number two: It scratches the furrow. Number three: It drops the seed.… Number two: the tsunga’s stitch helps the cock to know his crop…. All: Which after all belongs to God” (Walker 236). With this conversation, Walker signals that the male elders determine the life of all the females in their village; because they knew that their conversation would not be understood by their ignorant women they did not care if any female child overheard them.

Anastasiadou 35

In order to expose the reluctance of men of God (Christian ministers) to address openly the suffering of African women, Walker registers the denial of Tashi’s husband, Adam, to make his wife’s suffering the subject of a sermon. As Warren and

Wolff accurately point out, “While Adam claims to detest the practice of excision and infibulation, his protestations are hollow, for he refuses Tashi’s request to use his ministry to preach against the practice, with the excuse that his congregation would be too embarrassed. Tashi construes his refusal as further evidence that he is just another cog in the patriarchal system that perpetuates her suffering” (13). As a minister, Adam prefers to talk about the suffering of Jesus rather than the suffering of African little girls and women. He seems to be another pretentious father figure without genuine empathy for his wife’s ordeal when he claims to be ashamed to open a discussion about such a private matter. He supports communal prudery and the taboo of silence.

Tashi feels disappointed because she has been a supportive wife who has helped

Adam to start his ministry. As she reveals to the reader, she has been very patient with husband:

I sat there in our church every Sunday for five years listening to Adam

spread the word of Brotherly Love, which had its foundation in God’s

love of his son, Jesus Christ. I grew agitated each time he touched on the

suffering of Jesus. For a long time my agitation confused me. I am a great

lover of Jesus, and always had been. Still, I began to see how the constant

focus on the suffering of Jesus alone excludes the suffering of others from

one’s view. (Walker 275)

By pointing out their exclusive focus on the martyrdom of Jesus, Tashi exposes the myopic and androcentric perspective of Christian ministers like her husband. By asking whether women have not been “crucified” and continue to be “daily, in many

Anastasiadou 36 lands on earth” (Walker 276), Tashi makes the reader reflect over the historical roots of circumcision and ponder why this practice, although it continues to affect many

African women in modern times, is systematically covered with silence.

To recapitulate, Tashi’s life is determined by the trauma of her sister’s death

(due to hemorrhage after being cut), by her own infibulation, by the serious health ramifications, by her lack of sexual pleasure, by her troubled marriage with Adam due to his love affair with Lisette, by her painful childbirth (she gave birth to a mentally retarded son), by her abortion, and by all the terrors inflicted upon her by the oppressive tribal customs; all these collectively lead to her psychological and mental collapse. Since she was a child, Tashi has developed a blood phobia and “fell into panic” every time she saw her own blood. She could never overcome her grief or deal openly with her buried memories, and could never express her fears which gnawed the serenity of her mind, until later in her adulthood when she found a black female psychologist to whom she can divulge the hidden pain of her heart. Tashi’s post- traumatic disorder reveals itself in terrifying ways involving numerous senses. When she has one of her nightmares in which she sees herself imprisoned in the dark and cold depths of a tower, she claims that she hears “an endless repetitive sound that is like the faint scratch of a baby’s fingernails on paper. And there are millions of things moving about in the dark” but she “cannot see them” (Walker 26-27). At a later time, she refers to the “odor of unwashed fear” (55) which she associates with her life in the

African village. This is an allusion to the strong smell of the blood that is trapped in her vagina because she can neither discard it nor clean it due to the fact that her genitals were sewed tightly after infibulation. Ironically, in prison, while waiting “the date of her execution” (because she killed M’Lissa, the tsunga, who had murdered not only her sister, but countless other young girls via infibulation), Tashi is treated “less

Anastasiadou 37 like a condemned murderer and more like an honored guest. Within the prison she is permitted freedom” (Walker 249), more than she ever had while living in her village as a young woman.

In her essay, “Embodied Memory, Transcendence, and Telling,” Roberta

Culbertson presents an intriguing discussion on memory and trauma as enduring re- enactments of the past. As Culbertson notices, Tashi is unable to recollect “proto- memory,” muting any signs of sincere anamnesis; she rather indulges in “legitimate memory” which is linked to cultural propriety. In my view, because she is not allowed to express openly the pain stemming from Dura’s murder and from her own infibulation, Tashi becomes mute regarding circumcision. Only when she gradually repossesses her Self does she also repossess her memory. For me, there is a mutual relationship between Tashi’s Self and her memory. After becoming an American citizen, Tashi has the opportunity to visit male psychologists who try to make her talk about her life experiences and her dreams. But Tashi is reluctant to talk to these men.

However, through her private ruminations, the readers have a glimpse inside Tashi’s mind. The memories become more coherent as Tashi tries to express them through paintings or storytelling. Along with the information provided by other characters the terrifying details of her painful experiences are illuminated. When finally Tashi begins to trust the African America female shrink, named Raye, she is able to bond with her and to finally talk about her hidden pain, to express her grief and to recollect the truth. Indeed, Tashi’s “madness … is simply the unbidden arrival of memories”

(Culbertson 180). She struggles with cultural bias that made “the telling of suffering itself taboo” (Walker 165), and forced African female children and women to repress their traumatic memories. When a child is not allowed to express her intense emotions so as not to damage the tribe’s pride and bring bad luck with her tears, naturally, she

Anastasiadou 38 would bury her grief and end up with distorted memories. Tashi struggles with abrupt re-enactments of her memories. As Adam her husband states, “My wife is hurt…

Wounded. Broken. Not mad” (Walker 167). In order to regain her true Self, Tashi distances herself socially. According to Culbertson, “the destruction of the self is a social act, most fundamentally pushing the self back to its cellular, nonsocial, surviving self” (179). Only after healing the self, by understanding what has been done to her, is Tashi finally able to restore her relationships with the people she cares for and to find internal peace.

The possession of a unified self is a crucial issue. When Tashi resolves to get infibulated in her attempt to befit the Olinka tribe and acquire the specific marks of a cultural identity, she surrenders the Self to the tsunga and to the powerful social structures. Tashi’s mental and psychological condition (after her mutilation in conjunction with the traumatic memory of her sister’s death), “has placed her in a state much like that of an infant in the premirror stage” (Pifer and Slusser 49). She is deprived of her ability to communicate through language. Thus, her condition

“resembles the premirror stage” in that she “watches and listens to the world around

[her]” (Pifer and Slusser 50) and does not engage with it. Forced to never talk about her grief she becomes withdrawn and loses her voice; she is not allowed to grieve the loss of Dura, remaining silent out of fear. Lacking the courage to express herself, she

“acts as an observer rather than a participant in life” (Pifer and Slusser 50). I would say that her voice is ‘cut’ just like her clitoris is. Tashi enters a bodiless state, since psychologically and mentally she seems to be fragmented; she escapes from the painful realities of the actual world by plunging herself into the imaginary realm; the only way to deal with her distress is to indulge in storytelling. Tashi displays her fragmentation and alienation when she identifies with Lara, a beautiful young panther,

Anastasiadou 39 who was “unhappy” because she was the unwanted, unloved co-wife of a panther couple in love. We are told that “being nice to her [Lara] was merely a duty panther society imposed on them” (Walker 3). Alone and dejected, pregnant and ill, Lara was devastated. “Days went by when the only voice she heard was her inner one” (Walker

4). Like Lara, Tashi has similar life experiences and listens only to her inner voice;

Tashi understands why, after being rejected, Lara “leaned over and kissed her own serene reflection in the water, and held the kiss all the way to the bottom of the stream” (Walker 5). Tashi’s journey to repossessing the self is long and painful.

Among Tashi’s most excruciating memories is the one that has to do with her sister’s circumcision. Hidden in the grass close to the hut where the cutting was taking place,

Tashi heard the “howls” and “inhuman shrieks” and immediately understood that her sister Dura was being “tortured inside the hut” (Walker 75). What horrified her the most was the fact that M’Lissa, the tsunga, carried her sister’s tiny clitoris “between her toes” and flung it to the ground to be eaten by a hen.

Recalling the repressed traumatic memory of her sister’s ceremonial death and calling it “murder” frees Tashi from the tribal injunction of silence and removes the “boulder” from her throat. This is the first step that allows Tashi to reunify her emotions and the knowledge she has buried inside her mind. As she says, “I felt a painful stitch throughout my body that I knew stitched my tears to my soul. No longer would my weeping be separate from what I knew. I began to wail…” (Joy 83; emphasis in the original). Consequently, Tashi discerns that the remedy exists in the place of poison. From the perspective of the Lacanian theory, we may say that Tashi enters the post-mirror stage, when she regains the ability of verbal articulation (Pifer and Slusser 54). Language enables her to counterbalance the discomfort of the tribal command, “You mustn’t cry!” (Walker 15; emphasis in the original) and you must

Anastasiadou 40 refrain from speaking about of your sister. Geneva Cobb Moore refers to Carl Jung’s theory, specifically to the “individuation process” whose target is to bring “the questing individual to a state of spiritual maturity and peace” (111). Tashi’s trauma becomes the stimulus for this process. She has first to confront her shadows and her fears, before she can heal her split self and overcome the loss and pain nestled in her soul. Concisely, the journey from fragmentation to wholeness includes the acceptance of her scarred body and her traumatized self accompanied by the abandonment of ancient religious lore and a blind faith in tribal culture. Tashi overcomes her need for cultural belonging, only to reunite with herself.

Regarding Tashi’s dichotomized self and double cultural consciousness,

Angeletta Gourdine reminds us of W.E.B. Du Bois’s conceptualization of “two souls, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body” (237). She highlights the fact that Tashi is caught between the Olinkan and the American culture, and oscillates between the two. In her mind, Tashi associates the United States with utopia and sees it as a fecund land where warmth, cleanliness, and safety reign. As she says, “I love it deeply and miss it terribly, much to the annoyance of some people I know.” And she adds, “in the night of my dreams there are lighted windows way above the street; and behind these windows I know people are warm and squeaky clean and eating meat. Safe” (Walker 55). On the contrary, Tashi associates the

Olinkan culture with “unwashed fear,” with torture, and the odor “of soured blood”

(Walker 55, 65). It is the African culture and its anachronistic traditions that contribute to the decline of Tashi’s physical and mental health. Despite this fact,

Tashi tries to be loyal to her African identity, to be part of her people’s struggle against the colonizers. That is why she distinguishes two types of blackness: Olivia’s

“foreign” blackness and her own genuine black skin. She tells her American friend:

Anastasiadou 41

“You are a foreigner. Any day you like, you and your family can ship yourselves back home” (Walker 22). And adds, “You are black, but you are not like us. We look at you and your people with pity…. You barely have your own black skin, and it is fading” (Walker 23). Trying hard to identify with the Olinkan heritage, Tashi spits on the ground to express her contempt at all things foreign.

What makes more visible Tashi’s schizoid self is the various names Walker chooses to refer to Tashi. Geneva Cobb Moore counts the six different names corresponding to different periods in Tashi’s life. Thus, we come across Tashi, the

African child and later young girl, who is victimized by Olinka traditions of scarification and infibulation. In other chapters, Walker labels this character as

Evelyn, which is Tashi’s American name and is connected to her marriage with

Adam, the black American man. The third variation is Tashi-Evelyn and stands for her bicultural identity, and is linked to her ill mental health. Evelyn-Tashi is used to declare indirectly her current status and identity as the “Wounded American” and is connected to specific experiences while living in the United States. Tashi-Evelyn-

Mrs. Johnson signals Tashi’s reconciliation with her husband’s act of infidelity and the birth of his illegitimate child. Last but not least, the last name Walker gives to her heroine is Tashi Evelyn Johnson Soul, indicating that all the fragments of the self and soul are united together (Moore 114). For me the last name, together with Tashi’s acceptance of the death penalty, is a sign of mental balance and psychic tranquility.

Tashi is punished for the murder of M’Lissa, but very few realize that this act is her protest against “patriarchal social order,” as Geneva Cobb Moore remarks (114).

Contrary to the assumption of “a white colonialist author” who assumed that Africans can survive “the suffering and humiliation inflicted upon them” because “they possess the secret of joy” (Walker 271), Tashi’s final words set the record straight;

Anastasiadou 42 contradicting such racist views Tashi claims that “resistance” is the secret of joy.

Before her life ends, Tashi achieves the unity of her true self, putting all the different fragments of her psyche together. “Rather than signifying herself with a single name,” she refers to herself with alternative designations, as Tashi-Evelyn-Mrs. Johnson or as

Tashi-Evelyn-Johnson Soul, thus “freeing herself from the constraints of punctuation and social titles” (Pifer and Slusser 55-56.)While facing the firing squad for killing the tsunga, Tashi refuses to be blindfolded and makes her last rebellious stand against a culture that victimizes African women; Tashi is finally liberated from the cultural constrains and feels reborn.

Anastasiadou 43

CHAPTER TWO

Pharaonic Circumcision and its Impact in Desert Flower by Waris Dirie

Desert Flower deals with the physical and psychological repercussions of infibulation, however, not to the extent that Walker examines it. It is an autobiographical narrative, which in my opinion, provides a more detailed account on the practice, adding an activist dimension. It engages the readers with violent scenes, with acts of sexual harassment, with the maltreatment of Dirie from a very young age.

It also describes the effects of infibulation on Waris’s sexuality.

The threat to the protagonist’s sexuality begins as early as four years old, when Waris is sexually abused by one of her father’s good friends, named Guban.

While alone with him, the man begins to take advantage of the little girl with the pretense that he will tell her a story. Unexpectedly, the man drags her down, and as

Waris reports, “he squatted between my legs and yanked up the little scarf wrapped around my waist. Next I feel something hard and wet pressing against my vagina. …

The pressure intensified until it became a sharp pain. … Suddenly I was flooded with a warm liquid and a sickening acrid odor permeated the night air’’ (Dirie 22-23).

Fortunately, Waris finds the strength to escape from her offender. However, she does not possess either the vocabulary or the knowledge to tell what she had just been through. At the age of thirteen, Waris decides to run away from her tribe of nomads living in the Somalian desert, when she finds out that her father has arranged to marry her to an old man. On her way to Mogadishu, Waris is confronted with perilous circumstances. She faces sexual provocations from men and violence. Specifically, in a scene in which she gets a ride in a truck with two strange men, she is nearly raped by one of them. As she confesses, “I will never forget his face leering at me. … His

Anastasiadou 44 erect penis bobbed at me as he grabbed my legs and tried to force them apart” (Dirie

7). Because Waris resists him, the man slaps her across the face and shouts “‘OPEN

YOUR FUCKING LEGS!’” (Dirie 8; capitals in the original) and continues to exert violence against her. Waris does not maintain a passive stance; she hits him back and runs away to save her life. Next time Waris is sexually assaulted is by an African man, who promises to take her to her uncle’s house. Instead, he takes her to his house with the excuse to give her some food and then tries to make her to have a nap with him. He presses her verbally and then hits her for not obeying him: “‘Look little girl,’ he said in an angry tone, ‘if you want me to take you to find your uncle, you better lie down and have a nap” (Dirie 62). Once again, Waris resists the man’s sexual advances and meets with violence. As she says, “[w]hen I struggled and turned away from him, he slapped the back of my head” (Dirie 62). When the opportunity arises, she finally escapes from his house without being raped. While living in London at the house of her Uncle Abdullah, Waris is repeatedly harassed by her twenty-four-year- old cousin Haji. One night he comes home drunk and enters her room with the intent to touch her genitals. As we are informed, “Haji groped around until he found the bottom hem of the covers, and pushed his hand underneath and across the mattress to my leg. Sliding his palm up my thigh, he was going all the way to my knickers, my underwear” (Dirie 104-05). As in the case of Tashi, Waris is treated as a sex object and is expected to cater to the sexual pleasure of men. It is the unequal gender power relations that subordinate African women’s sexuality to male whims. Sexual assault is covered by the taboo of silence so as not to threaten men’s authority.

Besides facing sexual harassment, Waris has to deal with male violence as well. In a scene in which Waris asks her second husband, Nigel, for a divorce she faces both verbal and physical violence. Angrily, he tells her: “‘You are married to me

Anastasiadou 45 and I’ll never let you go, Waris.” And he inflicts emotional terror upon her: “‘Well, if

I don’t have you, I have nothing. I’ll kill you, then kill myself’” (Dirie 207). Terrified

Waris bents over to pick her bag from the floor in order to leave his house. He shoves her from behind violently. She tells us, “I went crashing into the stereo face first, then rolled off onto the hardwood floor, landing on my back. I just lay there, scared to move” (Dirie 207). Due to the physical force he exercises on her, Waris is petrified.

By recording such experiences, Dirie demonstrates the systematic assault (sexual or otherwise) she faced in the hands of men and her ability to survive. Her victimization generates an ambivalent attitude toward the opposite sex. On the one hand, she wants to casually socialize with men; on the other hand, she detects an inner fear, wondering if they expect her to fulfill her female duties. When she meets a man called William,

Waris wonders whether he would be disappointed of her unique condition (being an infibulated woman) or be sexually demanding. Since infibulation has been inflicted upon Waris at a very early age, her concern about her body’s ability to meet the demands of sexual intercourse is accentuated by memories of pain and violence. In fact, “[v]iolence is about survival, and the body is designed to take the lessons of violence seriously, … using whatever cues can be stored and maintained from before”

(Culbertson 175). Waris knows that her body has absorbed much violence and may not be able to withstand being ripped apart.

Coming from a patriarchal culture Waris, was obliged to go through infibulation, based on the social belief “that an uncircumcised daughter will not be capable of pleasing her husband sexually” (Gruenbaum 461).We must not forget that

“[i]n infibulating societies, narrowing of the vaginal opening with infibulation is believed to make intercourse more pleasurable for men. This belief reinforces women’s commitment to infibulation and reinfibulation after childbirth to keep

Anastasiadou 46 husbands sexually satisfied” (Gruenbaum 437). However, the adult Waris realizes that she lacks a healthy and spontaneous sexuality. She cannot connect erotically to a man without feeling debilitated. Waris ponders: “I will never know the pleasures of sex that have been denied me. I feel incomplete, crippled, and knowing that there’s nothing I can do to change that is the most hopeless feeling of all” (Dirie 214). The damage done to her sexuality is irreversible and has long-term effects. Scholarly studies have indicated that the logic behind African women’s female genital mutilation is to deprive them of the “male parts” of their bodies and mark them as

“more womanish” (Gruenbaum 435). However, Waris does not seem to feel more feminine but rather more like an impaired and incomplete person who will never have a satisfactory love life.

In her autobiography, Dirie provides explicit details of her initiation into womanhood, using raw imagery. Before and after the circumcision a functional ritual takes place in order for the experience to be less painful, regarding simple human needs like urination. Waris explains: “The night before my circumcision, Mama told me not to drink too much water or milk, so I wouldn’t have to pee-pee much” (Dirie

40). Additionally, circumcision is celebrated with a ceremony and rewards for the prospective victims. Waris informs us about the way she was treated before the purification event: “That evening the family made a special fuss over me and I got extra food at dinner” (Dirie 40). The details of the actual act of infibulation are depressing: “Mama grabbed a piece of root from an old tree, then positioned me on the rock. She sat behind me, and pulled my head back against her chest, her legs straddling my body. I circled my arms around her thighs. My mother placed the root between my teeth. ‘Bite on this’” (Dirie 41). The unsanitary conditions during the circumcision are highly alarming. We are told: “She … fished out a broken razor

Anastasiadou 47 blade.… However, I saw dried blood on the jagged edge of the blade. She spat in it and wiped it against her dress” (Dirie 42). For anyone who has not experienced this cruel and savage practice, the emotional toll cannot be captured by words. Waris attests to this: “There’s no way in the world I can explain what it feels like. It’s like somebody is slicing through the meat of your thigh, or cutting off your arm, except this is the most sensitive part of your body.… I prayed, ‘Please, God, let it be over quickly.’ Soon it was, because I passed out” (Dirie 42). We learn that the circumciser sew her up using acacia tree thorns and left a tiny hole for her natural needs: “After the gypsy sewed me up, the only opening left for urine and menstrual blood was a minuscule hole the diameter of a matchstick” (Dirie 43). Waris then discovers that her genitals have been rearranged: “I discovered a patch of skin completely smooth except for a scar down the middle like a zipper” (Dirie 45). She also sees a gruesome spectacle: “I turned my head toward the rock; it was drenched with blood as if an animal had been slaughtered there. Pieces of my meat, my sex, lay on top, drying undisturbed in the sun” (Dirie 43). Ellen Gruenbaum correctly notes that this ghastly practice deprives a “minor child’s human right to bodily integrity” (430). Waris becomes painfully aware that this initiation into womanhood would have long-lasting effects on her life: “My genitals were sealed up like a brick wall that no man would be able to penetrate until my wedding night, when my husband would either cut me open with a knife or force his way in” (Dirie 45). With this disturbing description, Waris ends her narration of the cutting practice and turns to enumerate the health complications that followed.

Female genital mutilation results in poor health and actually never ceases to impact on a victim’s wellbeing throughout her lifetime. It complicates the bodily functions and makes difficult the fulfillment of everyday human needs. According to

Anastasiadou 48

Dirie’s autobiography, infibulated women remain for a while in a secluded hut underneath a tree to convalesce. Walking and urination becomes extremely painful, due to the tight stitches and the wound. Waris admits that “[t]he first drop came out and stung as if my skin were being eaten by acid” (Dirie 43). She is in such extreme pain that she loses her desire for life: “I simply lay on the hard ground like a log, oblivious to fear, numb with pain, unconcerned whether I would live or die. I couldn’t care less that everyone else was at home laughing by the fire while I lay alone in the dark” (Dirie 44). In order for the wound to heal, she had her legs tied for a month.

Waris also had to cope with an infection in the sensitive area and with fever.

Nevertheless, she was lucky because there were girls, who lost their lives during or after the practice of female genital mutilation, “from bleeding to death, shock, infection, or tetanus” (Dirie 46). One of them was Waris’s sister, Halemo. As the years went by, Waris still struggled with the aftereffects of infibulation, unlike other women she met. “I was amazed when they peed quickly in a heavy stream, whereas it took me about ten minutes to urinate. The tiny hole the circumciser had left me only permitted the urine to escape one drop at a time” (Dirie 141). During menstruation she felt excruciating pain and noticed that the span of her period lasted longer. In the last pages of Desert Flower, Dirie, through Waris’s voice, provides a long list of the health consequences after female genital mutilation:

The aftermath of infibulation includes the immediate complications of

shock, infection, damage to the urethra or anus, scar formation, tetanus,

bladder infections, septicemia, HIV, and hepatitis B. Long-term

complications include chronic and recurrent urinary and pelvic infections

that can lead to sterility, cysts and abscesses around the vulva, painful

Anastasiadou 49

neuromas, increasingly difficult urination, dysmenorrheal, the pooling of

menstrual blood in the abdomen, frigidity, depression, and death. (218)

Reading this list we can conclude that any infibulated woman goes through a very dangerous, unhealthy, and needless surgery that has serious health repercussions.

Waris was both expected and forced to go through this cruel procedure so as to ensure her right to be married and give birth to children. However, her desire to appeal to a boy she then liked hastened the occasion.

Regarding parturition and birth-labor, in Somalia circumcised women give birth to their children alone in the desert, in unsanitary and unsafe conditions. When it comes to the marriage institution, women are mainly treated as marketable items, sold for the prosperity of their families, usually sold for camels, like Waris was about to be. Circumcision is a prerequisite. Actually, the family has to pay a fee in order for the girls to live a life prearranged for them. We are told that “[p]aying for this procedure is one of the greatest expenses a household will undergo, but is still considered a good investment, since, without it, the daughters will not make it onto the marriage market. With their genitals intact, they are considered unfit for marriage, unclean sluts whom no man would consider taking as a wife” (Dirie 38-39). Most of the times, their spouses are men they do not even know; they have children as an outcome of rape. When Waris declares her denial to get married to an old man, her father warns her that if she does not obey, she will be expelled from the family.

When she sticks to her view, her father exercises physical violence on her. In reality, marriage for Waris is different from the one she dreamed of when she escaped from

Somalia. Waris got married twice, due to delays in getting her passport and legal papers, a fact that did not enable her stay in London or in America and work there as a model or even to travel. Her first spouse, Mr. O’Sullivan, was a penurious alcoholic.

Anastasiadou 50

Her second husband, called Nigel, at first glance, appeared to be a merciful, altruistic human being; however, in the long-run he turned out to be a repulsive, obsessive man, who did not hesitate to exercise physical and psychological violence on Waris. Until this point in her life, Waris experiences marriage as a necessity, as a means of survival; her marital life lacks love, compassion, and sexual desire. Her third spouse in paper is Dana. Waris’s relationship with him constitutes her first sincere act of love for a man; she wants to be married to him and have descendants. Eventually, she has a healthy son named Aleeke. It is important to mention that Waris had to go through an operation of reopening in London to overcome some of the consequences from her infibulation back in Somalia. Therefore, she feels blessed that she did not give birth to her son in the old condition.

With respect to Waris’s psychological condition following her infibulation, she seems to be a powerful female figure, but does not always deal with her infirmities successfully. Waris tries to cope with the hardships she faced in Somalia, including the strict patriarchal cultural environment, several incidents of sexual harassment, circumcision and unsanitary conditions, health complications, physical and psychological violence, as well as the lack of food and water in her native land.

We observe her mental collapse and dismissal of her desire to remain alive at two places in the autobiography. After her circumcision, lying alone in the desert she suffers so much pain that she does not care if she lives or dies. In addition, the fifteen- year-old Waris is possessed by suicidal thoughts, feeling hopeless and pessimistic for her life, after she has escaped from her family home in Somalia. While staying at

Auntie Maruim’s home in London, she learns that her brother, Old Man, and her sister, Aman, are dead. In shock, Waris tries to absorb the bad news that increase her suffering. The heroine becomes very depressed. The thought that she will never see

Anastasiadou 51 her brother and sister again makes her contemplate suicide: “I walked downstairs to the kitchen, opened a drawer, and removed a butcher knife. With the knife in my hand

I returned upstairs to my room. But as I lay there trying to get the courage to cut myself, I kept thinking of my mother” (Dirie 95). Despite the ordeal of infibulation and the various attempts of men to exploit her sexually during her journey to freedom,

Waris’s mental condition is characterized by stability, equanimity and intrepidity. She does have short but accountable weak moments which affect her psychologically, like the above mentioned incident in her aunt’s home, but she manages to overcome them.

The heroine remains collected through numerous hardships and perilous events; she is a survivor.

In her essay, “Socio-cultural Dynamics of Female Genital Cutting,” Ellen

Gruenbaum introduces the readers to the general context and the two central excuses behind the practice: virginity and marriageability. The Somali cultural environment

(in which Waris grows up) considers these two conditions assets. Virginity is connected to religion and more concretely to “Judeo-Christian-Islamic teachings against pre-marital sex” (Gruenbaum 436). Thus, there is a vigorous bond and bidirectional relationship held between virginity, religion and marriage. Further, “For infibulated societies, infibulations establishes both a girl’s reputation for morality and the family’s honour in protecting her morality” (Gruenbaum 436). Accordingly, one could assume that a girl or a woman is moral, worthy, and of great value due to her virginity, regardless of other acts, such as murder, to take the point to its extreme.

“Virginity is a prerequisite for marriage for women” (Gruenbaum 436), and the community of elders is more than eager to facilitate this, through infibulation, as in case of Waris. Inevitably, in cultural environments like the one in Somalia, where marriage is considered a life goal and the precondition for this contract is female

Anastasiadou 52 virginity, genital mutilation has high significance for the people, with women constituting the tradition’s scapegoats.

Apropos of the justification of female genital mutilation in Somalia, examined via the narrative of Desert Flower, we become aware that its logic lies between sincerity and concealed authority. Zabus detects the idea of “culture” as a “mindless tradition,” where the body is “both fixed in nature and open to inscription of culture”

(qtd. in Gruenbaum 427). Infibulation constitutes a part of the vacuous traditional teachings, which through beautification rituals and celebrations, aim only at the control of female sexuality by father figures. Infibulation is treated by the people in such a manner as to be ritualized. Women who have been through circumcision are not allowed to discuss openly the cruelty of the practice, and so it remains a privilege of the male community to promulgate the felicity of the ceremony. Its vulgarity is considered a taboo topic. On the other hand, women anticipate their initiation. The female community has been nourished with the illusion that the ideal life for a woman encompasses household chores, heterosexual marriage, childbirth, and sexual duties but no autonomous sexuality. In order for a woman to enter into womanhood, she is required to be genitally mutilated and infibulated, which is the most severe form of circumcision. In this manner, a woman becomes worthy, as she acquires the purity and virginity that her genitals have deprived her of. “The mothers comply by circumcising their daughters, for fear their daughters will have no husbands. An uncircumcised woman is regarded as dirty, oversexed, and unmarriageable, … so mothers feel it is their duty to make sure their daughters have the best possible opportunity—much as a Western family might feel it’s their duty to send their daughters to good schools” (Dirie 220). In actuality, this practice guarantees the perpetuation of male authority in its most atrocious form. Female genital mutilation

Anastasiadou 53 constitutes a patriarchal weapon collaborating with distorted religious doctrines.

Religion exonerates female genital cutting, as it reinforces the teaching that premarital sex is forbidden. Hence, in cultures where the marriage contract is esteemed, virginity

(only for women) is a prerequisite for its actualization. Female genital operations are of course there to facilitate this. They are “practiced by Muslims, Christians, Jews,

Atheists and Animists” (Gordon 25). Waris shares her views regarding some of the root causes of the infibulation practice: “Many believe the Koran demands this ….

However, this is not the case; neither the Koran, nor the Bible makes any mention of cutting women to please God. The practice is simply promoted and demanded by men—ignorant, selfish men—who want to assure their ownership of their woman’s sexual favors” (Dirie 219). Superstition cultivates further the fear factor, convincing women that any transgression from tradition jeopardizes their chances to find a husband and renders them unfeminine. One argument that defends genital cutting stresses the dirtiness and impurity of the clitoris. In Possessing the Secret of Joy,

Tashi states that our “Leader said we must keep ourselves clean and pure as we have been since time immemorial—by cutting out unclean parts of our bodies. Everyone knew that if a woman was not circumcised her unclean parts would grow so long they’d soon touch her thighs; she’d become masculine and arouse herself. No man could enter her because her own erection would be in his way” (Walker 119). As a consequence, women become “tradition prisoners, dismissing evolution” (Gruenbaum

430). Circumcised women are sexually restricted and dominated. In fact, “90 percent of infibulated women experience no form of sexual pleasure” (Gordon 25). Further, the infibulated victims, get deinfibulated only to have intercourse with their spouses, give birth and get reinfibulated to guarantee their eternal fidelity. The results of this sexist mindset are visible on the infibulated women’s bad health, mental trauma, and

Anastasiadou 54 severe depression. They become incarcerated in their own bodies, deprived of sexual desire, and lacking the sense of wholeness. Throughout their lifespan, infibulated women exit one prison only to enter another. They leave their oppressive fathers, only to marry authoritarian husbands, who impregnate them solely to entrap them again and stitch them after childbirth to ensure their own sexual pleasure and their possession of the female body, heedless of women’s pain. I agree with Ellen

Gruenbaum, who argues that traditional ethics should be constantly challenged and reconsidered by a people, especially when we consider the serious health hazards that accompany such traditional ethics. Towards the end of her autobiography, Dirie confesses her sexual deprivation after infibulation, highlighting at the same time the irreversible nature of the practice. The excision induces serious health problems, such as hemorrhaging, the “formation of keloid scars, constant infections, damage to other vital organs, larger susceptibility to HIV because of bleeding, and incredibly painful menstrual periods” (Gordon 25). Furthermore, African women are exploited economically, doing all the household chores unpaid and being sold in exchange for camels, for the prosperity of the family. Securing through circumcision their virginity, men turn women into a pricey catch, capable of boosting the family’s assets. The more desirable the girl, the higher income for the father. “The traditional price for a bride is paid in camel,” says Waris (Dirie 11). Indeed, Waris nearly got sold to an old man for five camels, which was a lavish deal, if we take into consideration her father’s pride afterwards. Transmigration is a catalyst for Waris after her exodus from

Somalia in that she becomes aware of the abnormality of the practice of infibulation.

Briefly, cultural orders regarding female genital circumcision represent preposterous excuses to enhance male dominance and thwart female resistance.

Anastasiadou 55

Interested in the practice of infibulation among Somali immigrants in

Norway, Elise B. Johansen scrutinizes the infibulation experience of the sufferers, through the prism of emigration. In her central line of reasoning, Johansen distinguishes between “doxa’’ and “heterodoxy.” She observes that“[a]t some points, cultural models are taken as self-evident realities (doxa to borrow Bourdieu’s term), whereas in other situations they become objects of reflection” (314). Thus, the cultural reality that a woman is exposed to is challenged when she changes her living location and is exposed to alternative cultural norms and social order from the ones she has been nourished with. Similarly, Waris realizes her negative uniqueness only when she leaves Somalia and becomes first a European and then an American resident. Johansen points out that Dirie writes in a tone of “resistance, of questioning basic qualities of life and parental love and culture” (323). Comparing the cultural norms of Norway (where female circumcision is illegal) to that of Somalia, Johansen writes that whereas in Somalia the general perception regarding the clitoris marks it as a “male” or “dirty” organ that has to be excised to make a girl a “real” woman, in

Norway the clitoris is celebrated as the key to female erotic enjoyment and as an essential part of a woman’s entity (325). As I see it, this cultural ideology makes a great difference, if we consider the amount of physical and psychological pain Somali women are forced to endure during and after the ceremony of genital excision.

Depending on the cultural background, the pain and the suffering inflicted on women can either be intensified or alleviated, because the ritual of circumcision does not constitute simply a “cultural tradition,” but rather an “embodied and lived experience”

(Johansen 312). According to Johansen, a “feel-thinking” process is involved, since a woman’s body, sexuality and life are affected (313). Accordingly, excised immigrants

Anastasiadou 56 residing in foreign countries continue to endure pain, struggling with long-lasting physical and psychic scars.

In her essay, “Wild Bodies/Technobodies,” Susan Hawthorne notes that many women experience “disconnection of the self through rape, abuse, and economic exploitation” (54). In countries like Somalia, where women’s bodies are homogenized by the dehumanizing practice of infibulation, African women do not only become disconnected from their bodies but are objectified as well. The process of colonizing the female body has not ceased in the global village. The way patriarchal cultures perceive the female body has terrible consequences. Hawthorne proposes an alternative vision of bodies and uses “the term wild bodies” to represent “the notion of not interfered with by a man—and [she] means man” (62). The scholar defines the term “wild body” as primarily “a site of resistance to the homogenizing forces…”

(54). She states that “[w]ild bodies are bodies in revolt against … homogenizing forces” (63). The wild element manifests itself “by challenging assumptions, power blocs, and institutions” (Hawthorne 62). As far as I am concerned, these points can apply to Waris’s case, in the sense that she exhibits features of the “wild body” because she develops a mindset of resistance. Waris challenges the marriage contract imposed on her at a young age in Somalia, escapes from her oppressive patriarchal house, and struggles to survive through all the harshness of her journey. Before her infibulation, she does not challenge the customary ceremony, since patriarchal social order manages to silence Somali women and hides the cruelty of this despicable affair. When Waris is capable of envisioning what her life as a woman will be like in

Somalia, she rejects subjugation and obedience by abandoning her native land.

Afflicted with predetermined lives, even before birth, Somali women end up being treated as commodities and sex objects, deprived of all opportunities to form

Anastasiadou 57 individual personalities and unique identities. They end up being household maids, child breeders, nurturers and prisoners. The infibulated female body is not possessed by its owner, the woman, but rather it constitutes a cultural, patriarchal property.

Disconnection from one’s body affects a woman’s psychic unity, something that is pronounced in the life experiences of both Waris and Tashi, with the latter suffering at a higher degree. On the contrary, “[a]ttention to the self creates awareness, bodily intelligence, self-knowledge” (Hawthorne 55).

Anastasiadou 58

EPILOGUE

Comparing Walker’s novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy, to Dirie’s autobiography, Desert Flower, one notices several similarities. Both heroines, Tashi and Waris, are genitally mutilated, more precisely infibulated, with their mother’s acquiescence. Furthermore, both female protagonists witness the ritual of female genital mutilation before their own initiation. Both are traumatized by the loss of their sisters, Dura and Halemo respectively, due to hemorrhage after circumcision. As heterosexual women, they marry men and give birth to a son. In like manner, Tashi and Waris are deprived of their sexual drive after their genitals have been cut. In addition, both women are victims of the oppressive patriarchal and traditional cultural status quo. Likewise, they have to deal with the health repercussions of infibulation and their mental imbalance, as an aftermath of the process. The two victimized

African women are haunted by traumatic memories and have suicidal tendencies.

Specifically, Tashi thinks death as a deliverance. She tells her sister-in-law, Olivia, that “[t]here is nothing more of this life I need to see. What I have already experienced is more than enough. Besides, she says, soberly, maybe death is easier than life, as pregnancy is easier than birth” (Walker 249). Similarly, Waris considers harming herself but having a stronger character, she manages to resist and survive.

Both women, while living abroad (Tashi in America and Waris in London), realize that the tradition of female genital mutilation should fall into desuetude. During a discussion with her friend Marilyn, Waris claims, “‘Now I knew for certain that I was different. I didn’t wish my suffering on anyone else’” (Dirie 146-47). The two share a soul-shattering experience, that of infibulation, and have faced similar aftereffects on

Anastasiadou 59 their bodies and selves, which shaped their adult living experience in a specific manner.

Contrariwise, the two novels are different in several respects. Walker’s heroine, Tashi, is not circumcised at a young age, but rather goes to the tsunga to undergo infibulation voluntarily. Despite the fact that she is not actually forced to go through the ritual of initiation, she feels she has to be cut in order to remain connected with her roots. On the other hand, Waris has the surgery at the age of five, as an inevitable programmed appointment with patriarchal tradition. Waris is more descriptive concerning her infibulation, whereas Tashi takes a terse stance. Each woman uses dissimilar names for the circumciser. Tashi calls her “tsunga” whereas

Waris refers to her as the “Killer Woman.” Concerning marriage, Tashi has one spouse, Adam, but her marriage lacks love and empathy, and is marred by infidelity.

Waris uses marriage contracts as a means of surviving as an immigrant without legal papers. She gets married twice but lacks affection, until she meets her third and cherished husband with whom she has a healthy son. On the contrary, Tashi’s child is born brain-damaged, which may be a natural corollary of infibulation, or of her collapsed psychological balance. Finally, in reference to each novel’s ending,

Possessing the Secret of Joy ends with a redeeming yet depressing message of hope.

Tashi is convicted and faces the death penalty for murdering M’Lissa, the tsunga.

Shortly her life will be end; nonetheless she feels like she has finally possessed the secret of joy, which is resistance, by her murderous act. For me, Tashi’s story ends pessimistically, overshadowed by her mental imbalance and unrelieved psychological trauma. In contrast, Desert Flower has a promising and optimistic closure, since

Waris has fallen in love, has married a spouse she cherishes, and has given birth to a healthy son. Afterwards she leads a life of activism and not of passivity. These

Anastasiadou 60 dissimilarities are very interesting and point to the human uniqueness of each woman, who deals with her ordeal in a completely different manner, having been through the same traumatic experience, infibulation.

As a conclusion, I wish to draw some information from various documentaries, which appertain to the principal issue of contention examined in this research project, namely female genital mutilation. The controversy over traditional genital cutting practices does not stand as a self-contained subject, but is rather an intertwined field of concerns. Father figures in African cultures, such as the Olinkas in Walker’s novel and the Somalians in Dirie’s book, exploit ancient religious beliefs in order to substantially determine the women’s lives and control their activities. They decide which females are eligible for marriage, which wives deserve punishment for being disloyal, and what are women’s marital and sexual duties. Cultural inclusion for a woman nourished in an African tribe, as we read in Possessing the Secret of Joy and

Desert Flower, requires conformity to patriarchal rules and blind obedience to the dictates of fathers and elders, regarding the implementation of the custom of infibulation. African tribal women receive “proper” teachings about the most prosperous life scenario for them. They are instructed to be devoted to men’s needs, body and soul, whether he is their father, their spouse, their son or any other male member of their community. One lesson says: “You have to shed blood to link yourself with the ancestors or you cannot get blessing from the ancestors” (The Cut).

Another lesson expresses the masculine prejudice against women’s sexual organs:

“They believe that if you don’t get circumcised your clitoris will grow very long. It will sweep the ground” (The Cut). Hence, any part of the female body that resembles the male sexual organs has to be excised, so as not to threaten masculine sexuality and patriarchal rule. Along with it goes the right of women to control their own bodies and

Anastasiadou 61 lives. Circumcisers are expected to be meticulous concerning the vaginal opening, because its tightness affirms a woman’s virginity and does not disgrace her family

(True Story). It becomes obvious that traditional patriarchal African cultures have established some harsh prerequisites for women’s societal inclusion and have cultivated fear as a technique for the realization of women’s subordination. Western imperialism constituted a powerful force for African tribes to maintain their cultural mark and their women were the chosen to bear the albatross. Walker’s character,

Tashi, forthrightly responds to her tribal leader’s call to make visible her African identity. She even adopts a hostile attitude toward her American friend, Olivia, who is also black; the color of her skin does not prevent Tashi to treat her with contempt and call her a “foreigner.”

Through the ritual of infibulation, men regulate female sexuality; in men’s minds, the sexual desire is placated and the symptoms of female infidelity are contained (The Cutting Tradition). In the documentary, The Cut (2009), a circumciser exclaims that “uncut girls are too sexual.’’ For this reason, women have to be deprived of some feminine features, like their hair, before they undergo female genital mutilation. “Stripping a woman or a girl of her hair is a symbolic way of stripping them of their natural sexuality” (The Cut). Consequently, African women are shaped by men in accordance to the dictates of sexist customs and for the welfare of the male gender. The institution of marriage, further, works as a threshold for “getting into slavery’’ and parturition becomes a life threatening condition. “In our community we believe that if a mother is pregnant and she’s almost to deliver her grave is open” (I

Will Never be Cut). In uncultivated and male-dominated tribal communities, African women are sold either for camels, or for cows, or for money that finances their brothers’ education. (I Will Never be Cut). Gender was and still is a social construct

Anastasiadou 62 and men of power and authority take advantage of it. For me, feminist struggles, political movements and demonstrations have subverted this anachronistic patriarchal regime, but there is still plenty of room for the actual establishment of sincere equality and equity between the two genders.

Lastly, my thesis has scrutinized the controversial issue of female genital mutilation and infibulation in Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy and Waris

Dirie’s Desert Flower. Both novels share common ground, referring to the aftereffects of the practice, describing the psychic trauma and physical impediments as well as the health problems that result when the traditional practice of mutilation is forced upon powerless African girls and women. Marriage, pregnancy, and childbirth are painful experiences for most of them, but a few, like Waris Dirie, finally find liberation and take charge of their lives. Indeed, pharaonic circumcision does interfere with African women’s sexuality and damages their lives. It is a cultural construct enforced by father figures who exploit ancient mythologies, misogynistic religious beliefs, and the entrenched customs of African tribes such as the Olinka and the Somali.

Anastasiadou 63

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