Rising Anthills: African and African American Writing on Female Genital Excision, 1960–2000

Introduction: Writing Women’s Rites and Rights

Dissecting Anthills of Insurrection In the creation story of the Dogon of Mali, Amma, the male god of creation, tries to penetrate the female Earth he has just created. His attempt is thwarted by the Earth’s potent clitoris, which, in the shape of a termite hill, rises against Amma to prevent the rape. The almighty Creator, however, works his will and excises the Earth’s clitoris, thus ensuring the submission of Earth, and of all women after her.1 Nigeria’s literary pioneer Chinua Achebe, who uses the termites’ home figuratively in his novel Anthills of the Savannah (1988/1987), reveals that its potency lies not just in its rebellious force, but also in its remarkable memory. The termites’ durable construction, which survives “to tell the new grass of the savannah about last year’s bush fires,”serves as a lasting reminder of what has gone on. The anthill, Achebe elucidates further, symbolizes the storyteller, who “creates the memory that survivors must have” so that “their surviving”will have “meaning”and who “appeals ultimately to generations and 3 Introduction Writing Women’s Rites and Rights Writing is like dissection. Nawal El Saadawi generations and generations.”2 Achebe’s analogy evokes the Dogon conception of the anthill’s powerful resistance, for the anthill/storyteller’s appeal to the survivors may lead to an insurrection as rebellious as that of the female Earth in the Dogon creation story. In the title of this book, Rising Anthills: African and African American Writing on Female Genital Excision, 1960–2000, I borrow from both the Dogon and Achebe the image of the potent anthill to draw attention to the power of the literary works dealing with female genital excision. They too record and communicate current affairs to following generations; they too resist and rebel (though not always against female genital excision). The literary explorations of female genital excision are also aiming at a better understanding of humankind. Egyptian author and physician Nawal El Saadawi declares, “Writing is like dissection” (1990, 397–98). Just like the surgeon uncovers the interrelationship of the various anatomical parts, she explains, the literary author exposes the organization of society. The literary texts under review in this book, then, do not just offer a literal combination of creative writing and the cutting of bodies; they also display the sociocritical objective that El Saadawi attributes to literature in her figurative expression, in that they examine female genital excision and its functioning in different societies. The corpus of literary explorations of female genital excision reflects the immense religious, geographic, and linguistic diversity of the ethnic groups upholding the practice. In Africa, ritual genital operations are routinely performed on women in the vast sub-Saharan region that stretches from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, as well as in the Arabic northeast part of the continent, regardless of their social position or religious affiliation, be they Christian (Catholic, Protestant, or Copt), Muslim, Jewish, animist, or atheist.3 Moreover, some members of these excision-practicing groups hold on to the practice after their migration to the West.4 It is estimated that between 100 and 140 million girls and women, about 4 percent of the current global female population, have been excised and that every year a further 3 million girls are likely to be subjected to some type of ritual genital operation, ranging from the cutting of the tip of the clitoris to infibulation, that is, the cutting and suturing of women’s external genitalia.5 The authors who explore female genital excision in their writing—relatively few when considering the high incidence of the practice— likewise hail from different parts of Africa and its diaspora. Their connection to Africa may be evident and direct, as it is for those native to the continent and those writing as first-generation African emigrants to North America, Europe , or the Middle East, or it may date back centuries to the slave trade era, as it does for the African American authors. With the exception of the latter and the arabophone Egyptian writers, the authors are writing in languages other than their mother tongues. They are using the European language (English and French in the selected corpus) that is spoken in (one of) their diasporic places of residence or that was introduced in their home countries by the colonizers 4 Introduction and subsequently came to serve as a (or even the...