Tired of Weeping: Mother Love, Child Death, and Poverty in Guinea-Bissau

1. Marriage Relations

During my fieldwork I was often confronted with contrasts. Sometimes I experienced the hopelessness and desperation of the mothers . Despite heavy and incessant work they could hardly feed themselves and their children. Their husbands , and men in general, were frequently commented on as ka bali nada (totally worthless). The world of mothers was full of constraints, and adversity marked their lives. I could see it with my own eyes: these women were unhappy, exploited , oppressed, and powerless. At other times, I admired the pride and self-confidence of these very same women, their initiative, and their ingenious solutions to diverse obstacles . Social gatherings were often easy-going, and relaxed and women shared humorous stories, brinkadeira (fun, jokes), and danced. I listened to people of all ages who talked about their mothers and grandmothers with love and respect. I concluded that these women knew how to enjoy life, and they were certainly respected, bright, and enterprising. How can I explain these varied views? Are my interpretations of the women’s situation in Biombo somehow inconsistent? Am I oscillating between the two extremes of either attributing them no agency, or too 27 1 Marriage Relations much: one day perceiving them as oppressed and passive victims in an unfair and harsh world, the next day glorifying their daily struggle for survival? The question of women’s subordination was a central issue in feminist anthropological studies in the 1970s (MacCormack and Strathern 1980, Ortner and Whitehead 1981, Reiter 1975, Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974). Women’s relative status or power was estimated through cross-cultural comparisons and their subordination was mainly taken for granted.1 The implications of symbolic interpretations and varied cultural logic of gender was examined and important factors for female domination, such as mode of production, division of labor, and structures of power, were studied . While in 1977 a review of studies on women’s status called for further research (Quinn 1977), another review in 1988 concluded that “the old and simple determinants, along with the concept of ‘status,’ have been found to be multidimensional; they have given way to complex embedded processes” (Mukhopadhyay and Higgins 1988:486). One of the questions raised in the 1970s concerned the relationship between rules of tracing descent and women’s status. Alice Schlegel (1972) argued that there was a general tendency to allocate more power to women in matrilineal societies than in patrilineal ones, in particular when residence was also matrilocal. Schlegel found a great deal of variation in female status within matrilineal societies, depending on the interplay of authority between a woman’s husband and her brother; she concludes that matrilineal groups in Africa are husband dominant. Schlegel was concerned with “the matrilineal puzzle,” a term first used by Audrey Richards in 1950. According to Richards (1950:246 –51), the term refers to the con- flicting interests of a husband and her brother in the same woman and her children. Victor Turner, who studied the opposing character of matrilineal kinship ties, emphasized “how they resist disruptive forces put into action by conflicts of interest which arise within the institutional complex of matriliny itself ” (1996 [1957]:129). As such, the matrilineal descent contributed to both equilibrium and disorder. Anthropologists have since emphasized the fragile, contradictory nature of matrilineal societies and the frequent tensions between males and conflicting marriage relations (Douglas 1969, Holy 1996:102–15, James 1993:124 –30, Stone 1997:109 –50). These societies are commonly documented as having high rates of divorce , individual mobility, and strong bonds between mothers and their children. Recently, older studies on matrilineal societies have been revisited and new findings presented (Brantley 1997, Crehan 1997, Lovett 1997, Peters 1997a). Pauline E. Peters (1997b) points out that since the 1970s authors concerned with matrilineal societies find women to have more authority than formerly recognized. Still, according to Peters, recent studies highlight “the 28 Marriage Relations degree to which matriliny was misperceived, misrepresented and derogated by travelers, missionaries, the colonial state and non-matrilineal African groups” (134). She emphasizes the importance of thinking of matrilineal societies as a cluster of features rather than a totality. For Peters matrilineal societies do not contain more “puzzles” than others, “but more contradictions are produced” for these societies as they are minorities within the larger society as well as globally (141). Further, she argues, “the matrilineal puzzle is worth revisiting, but with a more explicit gendered and historical approach”(142...