These miserable, grieving, orphaned young women and children ended up as sex slaves, concubines, and drudges in the service of the soldiers and the priests.* Women have little voice in the Bible, and what voice they do have is given them only to illustrate the deviousness, silliness, untrustworthiness, and general insignificance of their sex. The only thing that makes them worthwhile is the birth of a son; they expend much of their energy trying to bring this about. In the whole of the Old Testament only Deborah, the judge; Vashti, the dignified wife of a foolish king; Esther, who saves her people; and Naomi and Ruth, the devoted mother- and daughter-in-law, stand out as women of substance. One cannot help but feel empathy for the Jewish women of the Bible, however, who had no rights under the law of Moses—and indeed were told to stand back when he came down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments, which, after all, were not written for them—and were forced to share their husbands and homes with strange, weeping women abducted from other lands.
As to why my mother and grandmother rarely spoke of their spiritual connection to the Universe, we have only to read these verses in Deuteronomy, Chapter 17:
2 If there be found among you … man or woman, that hath wrought wickedness in the sight of the Lord thy God, in transgressing his covenant,
3 And hath gone and served other gods, and worshipped them, either the sun, or moon, or any of the host of heaven, which I have not commanded;…
5 Then shalt thou bring forth that man or that woman … unto thy gates … and shalt stone them with stones, till they die.
This is a God who does not recognize you as His unless you are circumcised. I don’t believe the men in the congregation I grew up in realized this; they were definitely not circumcised. On the other hand, reading the Old Testament, and noting how readily this God would kill you if you were uncircumcised (Zipporah, the non-Jewish wife of Moses, circumcises one of their “heathen” sons with a rock before entering Egypt), I am inclined to believe that the circumcision of women (genital mutilation)—women who wanted to belong, to be accepted by God—has some of its roots here. Certainly the slaughter of nine million “witches” over five centuries in Europe has its root in Leviticus, Chapter 20, Verse 27: “A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them.”
Under this order the “wizards” Moses, Joshua, and Jesus—especially Jesus, who raised people from the dead and changed water to wine—would have been burned at the stake in the Europe of the fourteenth through the eighteenth century.
It is chilling to think that the same people who persecuted the wise women and men of Europe, its midwives and healers, then crossed the oceans to Africa and the Americas and tortured and enslaved, raped, impoverished, and eradicated the peaceful, Christ-like people they found. And that the blueprint from which they worked, and still work, was the Bible.
BAPTISM
They dunked me in the creek;
a tiny brooklet.
Muddy, gooey with rotting leaves,
a greenish mold floating;
definable.
For love it was. For love of God
at seven. All in white.
With God’s mud ruining my snowy
socks and his bullfrog spoors
gluing up my face.
This is the poem of a seven-year-old pagan. The “God” of heaven that my parents and the church were asking me to accept obscured by the mud, leaves, rot, and bullfrog spoors of this world. How amazing this all is, I thought, entering the muddy creek. And how deeply did I love those who stood around, solemnly waiting to see my “saved” head reappear above the murky water. This experience of communal love and humble hope for my well-being was my reality of life on this planet. I was unable to send my mind off into space in search of a God who never noticed mud, leaves, or bullfrogs. Or the innocent hearts of my tender, loving people.
It is fatal to love a God who does not love you. A God specifically created to comfort, lead, advise, strengthen, and enlarge the tribal borders of someone else. We have been beggars at the table of a religion that sanctioned our destruction. Our own religions denied, forgotten; our own ancestral connections to All Creation something of which we are ashamed. I maintain that we are empty, lonely, without our pagan-heathen ancestors; that we must lively them up within ourselves, and begin to see them as whole and necessary and correct: their Earth-centered, female-reverencing religions, like their architecture, agriculture, and music, suited perfectly to the lives they led. And lead, those who are left, today. I further maintain that the Jesus most of us have been brought up to adore must be expanded to include the “wizard” and the dancer, and that when this is done, it becomes clear that he coexists quite easily with pagan indigenous peoples. Indeed, it was because the teachings of Jesus were already familiar to many of our ancestors, especially in the New World—they already practiced the love and sharing that he preached—that the Christian Church was able to make as many genuine converts to the Christian religion as it did.
All people deserve to worship a God who also worships them. A God that made them, and likes them. That is why Nature, Mother Earth, is such a good choice. Never will Nature require that you cut off some part of your body to please It; never will Mother Earth find anything wrong with your natural way. She made it, and She made it however it is so that you will be more comfortable as part of Her Creation, rather than less. Everyone deserves a God who adores our freedom: Nature would never advise us to do anything but be ourselves. Mother Earth will do all that She can to support our choices. Whatever they are. For they are of Her, and inherent in our creation is Her trust.
We are born knowing how to worship, just as we are born knowing how to laugh.
And what is the result of decolonizing the spirit? It is as if one truly does possess a third eye, and this eye opens. One begins to see the world from one’s own point of view; to interact with it out of one’s own conscience and heart. One’s own “pagan” Earth spirit. We begin to flow, again, with and into the Universe. And out of this flowing comes the natural activism of wanting to survive, to be happy, to enjoy one another and Life, and to laugh. We begin to distinguish between the need, singly, to throw rocks at whatever is oppressing us, and the creative joy that arises when we bring our collective stones of resistance against injustice together. We begin to see that we must be loved very much by whatever Creation is, to find ourselves on this wonderful Earth. We begin to recognize our sweet, generously appointed place in the makeup of the Cosmos. We begin to feel glad, and grateful to be here.
This exploration of my own spiritual quest was presented at Auburn Theological Seminary, New York City, in April of 1995.
* Not her real name.
* In the discussion that follows I am indebted to the fabulous Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and her great work The Original Feminist Attack on the Bible (published as The Woman’s Bible, 1895–98), for her insights and, more particularly, for her attitude.
PART TWO
Anything
We Love
Can Be Saved
“You Have All Seen”
IF THE WOMEN OF THE WORLD
WERE COMFORTABLE, THIS WOULD BE
A COMFORTABLE WORLD
“You may touch them,” he said.
I was looking at the scars that curved down his cheeks: pencil thin where they began beside his nose, wider—flat, shining—beside his lips.
Ever since we’d met at the airport in Accra I’d wanted to touch them.
With eagerness I raised my fingers to his face. In the mid-April heat of Northern Ghana I was surprised to find the skin of his face so cool. Gently I traced each scar—near his nose, finely puckered, near his lips, smooth as ice—with my fingers.
“How did it happen?” I asked.
“One day when I was a small boy—maybe five years old—my grandfather came to visit. As he sometimes did without asking my parents, he carried me home with him. While I
was there, someone came to the house and did it. I bled a lot.” He paused. “I also cried.”
His name is Samuel Zan, and he is general secretary of Amnesty International in Ghana. Gentle in manner, reed thin, and very good-looking, he is dressed in a loosely fitting printed shirt of royal blue. It is the perfect color for him, the deep blue accentuating the richness of his very dark, luminous skin.
“Did it hurt very much?”
“Yes,” he said. “It did. But it was the surprise of it, the betrayal, that hurt the most.”
“I can still see it,” I said. “The small boy’s hurt surprise, in your eyes.”
“My son looks at me fearfully sometimes, and asks if the same thing is going to happen to him. I tell him no. But he still has anxieties.”
“It is probably no consolation,” I say—what could be?—“but they are in fact beautiful.”
“Peaceful woman!” he exclaims (the nickname he has given me), laughing in disbelief.
His scars are beautiful, because he is; it isn’t even a paradox. I can hardly imagine his face without them. Which is not to say I am glad they are there. I place myself in the body of the small boy innocently visiting his grandfather. I imagine the harshness of being grabbed, commanded to be still. The scars are deep, not superficial. To struggle might mean a gaping hole beside one’s nose, another mouth. Carved into his face to make him forever identifiable as a member of his tribe, the scars set him apart in the Western and westernized world; this too must be very painful.
This is a human-rights-awareness workshop in Bolgatanga, Northern Ghana, of African women and men who are dedicated to the abolition of female genital mutilation. It’s theme: “Working Together for Change—Stop Female Genital Mutilation.” It has been organized by Amnesty International under the direction of Angela Robson, a sensitive and dynamic woman from the London office, and Samuel Zan of Bolgatanga, and has attracted representatives from eight West African countries: Togo, Senegal, Benin, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Mali, as well as Ghana. The filmmaker Pratibha Parmar and I have come simply to be present at this historic occasion and to document, on video, the stories of many of those attending. We have also brought our film Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women to screen for the group. In this film I use the partial blinding I suffered as a child—when one of my brothers shot me in the eye with a pellet gun—as a metaphor for the sexual “blinding” caused by excision of the clitoris. Presenting my own suffering and psychic healing has been a powerful encouragement, I’ve found, to victims of mutilation who are ashamed or reluctant to speak of their struggle. Telling my own story in this context has also strengthened me, an unanticipated gift.
Both Pratibha and I are moved by Zan’s story, for it links the suffering of small boys who are forced to endure facial scarring to that of small girls, who are sometimes scarred facially as well as genitally mutilated.
It is the story of his own birth, however, that explains Zan’s vehement opposition to FGM.
“A brother died before me, being born,” he tells the gathering. “My own birth was long, very complicated. It went on for three days. My mother suffered a lot and was never again really well. An odd sound came from her uterus from the day of my birth. Her labor was so agonizing that her cries attracted the whole village. It was a major ordeal. So much so that I was named to memorialize the horrible nature of the event. My tribal name means ‘You Have All Seen’ ” (the complications caused by the practice of FGM). Zan pauses. “Implicit is the question ‘What are you going to do about it?’ ” From what Zan is telling us, it sounds as though his mother was not only clitorally excised but infibulated (stitched shut) as well. This would mean an impossibly painful labor unless someone was there to properly open her up. Apparently no one was.
He retells this story to the camera while sitting under a mammoth tree outside the building where the workshop is held. I am asking questions, Pratibha is filming. In less than three days we have bonded. I feel I have known Zan all my life, and for many lifetimes before. I lean my head against his shoulder when he stops for breath. His lanky body relaxes in a sigh as he leans closer to my side. We shall probably never meet again, but there is definitely a forever feeling about the moment.
“Alice,” he says after a long silence, “do you know what I believe? I believe that if the women of the world were comfortable, this would be a comfortable world.”
For two days we listen to testimonies of adults who were overpowered as children and irreparably wounded. I notice that for some of the women speaking, it is as if a dam has burst. They tell their stories over and over, with the same stunned amazement that there is a circle of faces mirroring them. That they are being heard. That all of us have wounds, of one kind or another, to share. And that somehow making sense of our wounds transforms them. As with the scars on Zan’s face, as each woman shares very private memories of a fateful day in childhood during which she was changed forever, I am overwhelmingly aware of triumphant grace, naked loveliness.
One of the more regal women telling her story is Madame Ba, of French-speaking Mali. Tall and stately, a magistrate in her native Bamako, each day she is dressed more elegantly than the last. Her story, it turns out, is not about her own mutilation but about that of her five daughters.
On the very first day we met, all of us, in the dusty garden of a guest house on the outskirts of Tamale, as we waited for our ride to Bolgatanga, she sat across from me and, through Yidu, a bilingual male FGM abolitionist from Togo, told what happened.
Her children had been mutilated against her will and theirs while their mother was away.
“Five?” I ask incredulously, thinking the number a mistranslation.
She repeats it. Five. Her eyes express sadness, shame, and a terrible guilt.
It is the family, she explains. Neither she nor her husband wanted their daughters circumcised, but they were helpless before the combined might of their extended clan.
Her daughters’ aunts had the children mutilated, and presented them to her, harm already done, on her return home.
Hannah, from Sierra Leone, tells a similar tale. As a small, trusting child, she was cajoled into accepting a ride on an older woman’s back, then dumped into the restraining arms of many women, who held her down as her clitoris was cut away.
As she speaks she relives the pain of the child she was; the adult woman disappears in the recovered terror of the child. I think of the hundred million or so stories still to be told, mirrored, heard. I can only hope the arms of the world will prove wide enough to embrace them all. But that we at the gathering embrace each other is clear from the beginning: Florence, just met, agrees to watch my bag as I search for a rest room in the Accra airport, and I, worried that she might not have eaten breakfast, and that there might not be food on the plane, bring her a sandwich.
The angriest woman at the gathering is also one of the youngest. She is the only one with a child, an infant boy, whom she breastfeeds while listening intently to what everyone says. Still holding her sleeping child, she rises to address us. The story she tells is of a young girl who refused to be circumcised, whose parents beat her and threw her out of the house, ending any and all support. She could no longer live at home, eat food at home, or wear clothing bought by her parents. She had to drop out of school because her school fees were no longer paid. She was forced to live with whoever took her in. What, she now asks, do we think should be done to such parents?
Her pain and rage are palpable. There are many attempts to answer her, none of them satisfactory. Her blunt, courageous anger makes me think of Sojourner Truth baring her breasts to the jeers of white men at a nineteenth-century women’s rights convention. It is she and her sisters, I feel, who will move the struggle against FGM ever forward.
In three days I feel close to Florence and Veronica from Ghana, to Caroline from Nigeria, to Blanche from Ivory Coast, to Hannah. When there is a break in the proceedings as we await the tardy male dignitar
ies who are scheduled to speak to us, we pile into Veronica’s pickup truck and go downtown Bolgatanga—a triple row of shops and stalls—to shop. The truck is air-conditioned and Veronica has country-and-western music on the tapedeck. Gliding over the dusty, potholed streets in the white pickup, sealed off from the appalling heat as if in a Frigidaire, listening to a maudlin white man croon shallow love songs—to which Veronica nonetheless swoons—is a surreal experience of contemporary Africa.
Oddly, though, it is this stolen hour of shopping (I buy bottled water, a straw hat and bag) and love songs—a break we thoroughly enjoy—that pulls us through the oppressive heat of the long afternoon, when local chiefs, a government minister, and a judge have their say.
At first it is truly discouraging, being in a room filled predominantly with women, many of them wounded because they are women, looking up at the all-male bank of leaders assembled to address us. I feel I’m not alone in my momentary urge to throw something. The gender imbalance does not go unnoted: there is a collective sucking of teeth.
And yet, sitting at one end of the dais is the quiet, soft-spoken man who offered to help Pratibha and me with our luggage at the airport, and then out of thin air managed to bring us tea. I now learn he is a chief as well as an Amnesty International official. He is dressed like the party socialist he perhaps once was, in an olive-gray Mao-style suit that makes him look a bit Chinese. The day before I’d noticed him seriously cramming, with his head in the pages of the one copy of Warrior Marks (the book that chronicles the making of our film) available at the gathering, which is being passed from hand to hand, with obvious and heartwarming respect. I am soothed by his gentle presence and wry humor, and relax.
The evening before, over a meal of cold canned beans and gummy rice, I’d overheard him remonstrating with another of the male participants, who was trying to defend the practice of polygamy, which is rampant in Africa and results in innumerable hungry and destitute children, since each of an average of four wives (the number sanctioned by the prophet Muhammad) has children for a single “husband.” I have been told the number of street children is increasing in Ghana at a phenomenal rate. In fact, I have been shocked by the scores of them I’ve seen. “According to this book I’m reading,” the gentle chief had said, “polygamy is a forerunner of the plantation system! Instead of buying the women outright to work for you, you marry them!”