ALICE WALKER'S AFRICA: GLOBALIZATION AND THE PROVINCE OF FICTION
THE
PRACTICE OF FEMALE genital mutilation has lately been very much in the news.
Drawing the attention of concerned experts and groups ranging from
anthropologists to political activists and health organizations, the practice
foregrounds a number of issues of cultural, medical, and legal importance.
Alice Walker’s novel Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) launches an
uncompromising attack on both the practice and the tendency—rooted sometimes
in weak relativism, at other times in plain sexist culturalism—to justify the
oppression of women by resorting to the alibi of “tradition.” In the
novel Walker raises crucial questions about nationalism and the intersection of,
or tension between, cultural identity and gender. The novel stakes out a
universalist position that valorizes a basic, transcultural category of the
female body, especially as and when that body is subjected to disfigurement on
account of patriarchal ideologies. For her, the practice of genital mutilation
serves to contain women sexually and socially; above all, it is a violation of
each woman’s right to the integrity of her body. Consequently, the practice
should, in its various forms and cultural contexts, be held as a human rights
violation, one that can be repudiated on the grounds of a universal ethical
standard.
In a climate where the world has, as they say, become a village, Walker’s
position is bound to be controversial. If one has any doubts that the issue of
genital mutilation is topical and popular, a cursory trip on the world wide web
should settle the question. For instance, I did a quick search for the phrase
“female circumcision” using the Netscape search engine and turned up 581,830
websites. A similar search for the phrase “genital mutilation” yielded
23,090 websites. Contemporary discussions about genital mutilation often suggest
that the Western world is just now “waking up” to this “atrocity.” In
her campaign against the ritual Alice Walker gives this impression and has
turned to more than one forum to pursue her case. In addition to the novel, she
co-produced a documentary movie entitled Warrior Marks. Female Genital
Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women, a memoir/travelogue of the
experience of making the documentary. To be sure, Alice Walker’s efforts
derive from a sound ethical commitment, but it is also important to note that
the “West” has always been interested in this ritual. Ngugi wa
Thiong’o’s novel The River Between (1965), set in the first half of
the last century, explores the consequences of such interest, including a clash
between Christian missionaries and their converts on the one hand, and Gikuyu
traditionalists on the other. As Sander L. Gilman has shown in his work on
the case of Sarah Bartmann (also known as the “Hottentot Venus”), lurid
speculation about the African woman’s genitals is not unheard of in Western
pseudo-scientific or popular discourse—historically, or even now.
At the least, both the fascination with Sarah Bartmann at the turn of the
twentieth century and colonial interest in African tribes’ ritual of genital
cutting indicate that there hasn’t been a shortage of discourse—of voices
raised in judicious or opportunistic clamor—regarding the black woman’s
body. In the same way that poverty, disease, and primitive wars have become
signifiers of the Third World in the print and electronic media, genital
mutilation (like the purdah and the veil in the Arab world) persists as a sign
of the otherness of Third-World womanhood. In this instance, the social
processes we designate with the shorthand “globalization” do not portend
epochal transformations in human consciousness and our mechanisms of
intercultural understanding. Indeed, the resilience of familiar
orientalist presuppositions, even amidst unprecedented globalization in economic
interaction and intercultural information exchange, suggests that we may be more
open to new ways of doing business in the external, “worldly” domain
(transnational corporatism and the triumph of consumer culture) than we are to a
fundamental reordering of who we are at the level of the internal self—that
is, at the level of subjectivity and the psyche, where the innermost self
dwells, made dizzy by the onslaught of the external world. And so, whether in
exhibiting its fleshly extravagance (as in the case of Sarah Bartmann), or
easily denouncing its “primitive” brutalization and curtailment (as so often
happens in popular discourse around genital mutilation), we may in fact simply
be remanding in discourse the black woman’s body and sexuality. Some
commentators have accused Alice Walker of perpetuating this trend because of the
way she set about portraying Africa in the novel and the documentary. In
what follows, I take for granted the sound ethical basis of Walker’s stance
towards genital mutilation, although I am also persuaded that the explicit
ethical-universal stance of the novel and her documentaries on the subject come
with significant costs, one of which is the evacuation of the African woman’s
agency. I want to suggest, however, that Possessing the Secret of Joy
tells us more about subjectivity and female agency than Walker appears to
intend.
Walker’s novel raises questions such as the following: is it possible to
represent in fiction an “alien” cultural practice or belief system without
violating the inner logic—the self-understanding—of the culture itself? And
to what extent is it defensible to represent a cultural practice as simply cruel
and misogynistic over and beyond the way the culture itself understands and
rationalizes it? Set against such questions, Possessing the Secret of Joy may
elicit two opposing reactions. On the one hand, one may see the novel as a
replication of a discredited missionary arrogance—that is, as a case of the
enlightened Westerner saving poor black women from their husbands and
fathers. On the other hand, it is equally possible to defend the novel as
a laudable effort driven by a vision of female emancipation and community. Here,
the liberal-humanist—indeed, missionary —candor is its positive
contribution. What is so wrong, one may then ask, with liberals saving black
women from their husbands and fathers, or exposing the plight of such women, if
indeed their husbands and fathers mutilate them in the name of tradition?
I have set up the issues in these rather simplified terms in order to pose the
problematic of Possessing the Secret of Joy as starkly as possible. If
the controversy that surrounded The Color Purple or the recent removal of
some of her writing from high school reading lists indicate that this prolific
author is not new to the sorts of hostile reception that amount to censorship,
Possessing raises her status as taboo-breaker (or insensitive scribbler) even
higher. What I wish to do is to engage the novel she has written in order
to abstract lessons from it that both admit and transcend her overt authorial
claims. In his essay on the novel, Ikenna Dieke has remarked that the
controversies that have surrounded Walker’s writing may distract us from
reading Possessing as closely as the text demands (“Fractured”). I agree
with Dieke, and one of my aims in this article is to read Possessing with due
respect to the specificity of the novel as a genre with compositional pressures.
These generic pressures account for certain aspects of the novel that complicate
the terms of the novelist’s straightforward demonization of the perpetrators
of genital mutilation. The overt moral conviction of the novel is neither
questioned nor diminished by the reading I pursue in this essay. Rather, it is
more complexly nuanced, that is to say, enriched.