Postcolonial Imaginations and Moral Representations in African Literature and Culture by Eze Chielozona;

Author:Eze, Chielozona;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books

FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION: A SYMBOL OF AFRICAN WOMAN’S STRUGGLE

Many Africans rightly feel insulted when Westerners describe, sometimes in minute details, the gory scenes of female genital mutilation that takes place in some societies in Africa. It is easy to see why these Africans feel that their world is under attack, for most of these Westerners inevitably equate the brutalities of genital mutilation not only with the practices of chastity belt during the European middle ages, but with perceived practices of ritual killings, rape and, in the Westerner’s thinking, the uncountable wars going on in Africa. As Julian Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi rightly puts it:

It is not uncommon to hear some Western feminist scholars at conferences who, when they include a few sentences or paragraph(s) on “Third World” women in their paper, immediately narrow their focus to clitoridectomy/infibulation in Africa. . . . We are told that circumcision takes away [women’s] pleasure for life. This is sometimes followed by a plethora of examples that depict African men as inherently savage and violent.[28]

The fact that Westerners seize on the ugliness of female genital mutilation, or female circumcision, as if it is often euphemistically termed, to build their feminist arguments, does not in any way mean that African women should not examine the practice of female circumcision in a somewhat more objective, critical manner.

It might be more beneficial to examine the practice without reference to the gaze of the white world. In this regard, we could see it as a particular incident in which the undeniably patriarchal systems in Africa express themselves just like the patriarchal systems in Europe did in many other ways, one of which was the already mentioned chastity belt. To me, the African American, Alice Walker, has been unduly demonized for broaching the topic of female genital mutilation in her novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy.[29] Pierre-Damien Mvuyekure interprets the novel as a colonialist text, and even makes a convincing link between the discourse world of Possessing the Secret of Joy and Alice Walker’s other bestselling novel, The Color Purple, which, in Mvuyekure’s thinking depicted Africans in negative stereotypical manner. [30]

I recognize the feminist thrusts of works such as Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood, and Flora Nwapa’s Efuru. The twenty-first century provides narratives with somewhat more robust feminist statements. Such works include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s, Purple Hibiscus, Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come, and Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives. The novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy, must be seen in the same way these other novels are seen as highlighting issues that impede the joys of the African woman.

To me, Alice Walker sees, in the practice of female genital mutilation, not necessarily the savageness of the African man, but a direct interference on the condition of womanhood by the patriarchal society in which the women live. This practice of female genital mutilation therefore raises not only cultural, but existential questions that have to be answered by any one interested in feminist discourse in Africa. Unfortunately though,

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