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Female genital excision first appears in African creative writing in the mid1960s , when young African authors were generating a breakthrough for African literatures in European languages.1 Among those widely recognized for their trailblazing roles are the Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o and the Nigerian Flora Nwapa, who are also the first African novelists to explore female genital excision , respectively in The River Between (1965) and in Efuru (1966/1965).2 The first African author to address the practice is the Kenyan Rebeka Njau in her one-act tragedy The Scar, which was first performed in 1960 and published in 1963.3 Within a few years, two other Kenyan women writers raise the subject, Charity Waciuma in Daughter of Mumbi (1974/1969) and Muthoni Likimani in They Shall Be Chastised (1974a).4 These earliest works dealing with female genital excision also emerge amid “that period of agitation . . . called the suns of politics”(Kourouma 1981, 14), when colonized nations across Africa are achieving independence; a decade or less lies between their publication and the independence of Nigeria, on 1 October 1960, and of Kenya, on 12 December 1963. The African authors writing in this volatile period have a significant role to play 27 Chapter 1 Denunciations of Colonization and Hesitant Feminist Criticism in Early Literary “Circumscriptions” of Female Genital Excision (1963– 1974) This practice [of female genital excision] is not really treated as such. Awa Thiam in “decolonizing the mind” of Africans, as Ngugi calls it in the title of his 1986 volume of essays, or in the words of another African literary pioneer, the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe: it is the task of the “novelist as teacher” to “help [his or her] society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement”(1973, 3). In this context, in which African writers are serving as cultural ambassadors, to Africa and the West, and have to be careful not to jeopardize the fragile process of decolonization, an issue as controversial as female genital excision is not an easy topic. As I have shown in the introduction, this practice, originally a gender ritual signifying the transition from girlhood into womanhood, receives an ethnic significance in the colonial conflict, or to return to Teresa de Lauretis’s terminology, what once was a technology of gender is reinterpreted as an instrument for the construction of ethnicity. This reinterpretation illustrates how women, especially in times of conflict, are held responsible for the survival of their people’s ethnic identity and cultural heritage, both practically (instructing the next generation about the ways of the ethnic group) as well as symbolically (as icons of the ancestral land and its traditions in the colonial conflict). Because of this close connection between (the cultural practices of) women and the identity of the ethnic group, the very identity that is being challenged or downright undermined by the colonizers’ interventions, any debate on women-related issues may constitute a threat to the anticolonial struggle. Notwithstanding these daunting circumstances, no fewer than five African authors take up the subject of female genital excision. This first generation comprises four women and one man, disproving the allegation that “the literary representation of excision [has] been fathered by men”(Zabus 2007, 4). Focusing on their own ethnic groups, the Igbo Nwapa and her Gikuyu colleagues move away from their male contemporaries’ stereotyped and marginalized representations of African women.5 In their works, four novels and a play, female characters appear as protagonists, “focalizers,” and/or narrators.6 The authors’ feat prompts the following questions: How do they creatively render the world of women? And more specifically, how do they go about constructing the practice of female genital excision in their works? Do they, as Achebe advises, act as cultural ambassadors assisting in the process of decolonization? Or do they, as later generations of authors will do, question the traditional constructions of female genital excision? If so, do they then endorse colonial constructions of the practice as uncivilized and heathen, or do they, as later writers do, favor feminist constructions of female genital excision as a tool of phallocratic repression ? And if they explore the gender implications of the practice within the indigenous culture, are they then faced with what Kirsten Holst Petersen calls the impossible choice between “the fight for female equality” and “the fight against Western imperialism”(1984, 252)? In fact, does female genital excision at all appear as a problematic...

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