Between Rites and Rights: Excision in Women’s Experiential Texts and Human Contexts (review)

Chantal Zabus is Professor of Comparative and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Paris 13, France. She is the author of two other important works, namely, Tempests after Shakespeare (2002) and The African Palimpsest (1991, reedited in 2006). In this one, she approaches the topic of female genital mutilations in an original manner not used previously by analysts of this issue that has been much written about in the last few years (see my review of Elizabeth Heger Boyle’s Female Genital Cutting: Cultural Conflict in the Global Community (Johns Hopkins UP, 2002) for H-Gender-MidEast (2004) as an example, as well as the bibliographies provided by these two authors). She considers the new autobiographical discourse from African women writers over the past five decades and over three generations, claiming that their experience of excision brings nuances to the female genital mutilation debates. She successfully and very thoroughly analyzes a body of literature in English, French, and Arabic, showing how it reflects a vision that goes much beyond the traditional topics of universalism and cultural relativism in that the female body becomes the focus of struggle between Europeans and Africans, customs and human rights; hence her title: Between Rites and Rights!

Zabus correctly observes that the body of literature, or what she calls “experiential texts,” has not been analyzed yet. Looking at these texts allows one to break out of the insider/outsider debates and better understand what is really at stake. Her research covers not only four decades (1960 to 2006) with references to colonial Africa, sixteenth-century European medical discourse, and even classical antiquity, but a large geographical space going from Senegal to Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Mali, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Togo, Egypt, Somalia, and Kenya, as well as providing references to the Maghreb, Sudan, and the Middle East.

The book is organized around three axes: part one covers African women running away from cultural surveillance; part two, their breaking away from religious and patriarchal restrictions; and part three, their present physical flight through exile or asylum in the West, with some returning “home” seeking empowerment.

Zabus claims that before women writers started taking the pen to express their feelings and experiences with excision, a body of male writers had expressed their sympathy for the eradication of the practice. While the study does take into account some of those texts, its overall aim is to trace the development of the female voice.

Some of the most interesting aspects of this book are the analysis of pain in its role as a powerful tool in shaping writing out of trauma or the experience of excision seen as a politico-cultural journey, or the body as a site for various patriarchal interpretations, or the comparison with male circumcision or various forms of body piercing that we see so prevalent in many of today’s societies.

Zabus’s analysis certainly helps us better understand how our contemporary world is shaken and shaped by such practices. Her thorough and sensitive analysis of literary texts enlightens us not only on the complexity of such issues but on the importance of literature and of writing. It is a must for students and teachers of literature, sociology, anthropology, postcolonial studies, and women’s studies.