Alice Walker's Africa: Globalization and the province of fiction

Comparative Literature, Fall 2001 by George, Olakunle

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.1 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."2 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, as well as 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.3 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.4 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 (Gilman; see also Ann duCille 54-56).

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.5 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.6 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.7 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.8 I want to suggest, however, that Possessing the Secret of Joy tells us more about subjectivity and female agency than Walker appears to intend.