by Alice Walker
Her tone was now clinical. It relaxed me. I breathed deeply and sought the necessary and familiar distance from myself. I did not get as far away as usual, however.
Always different, I would think, I said, exhaling breath, because women are all different. Yet always the same, because women’s bodies are all the same. But this was not precisely true. In my reading I had discovered there were at least three forms of circumcision. Some cultures demanded excision of only the clitoris, others insisted on a thorough scraping away of the entire genital area. A sigh escaped me as I thought of explaining this.
A slight frown came between Raye’s large, clear eyes.
I realize it is hard for you to talk about this, she said. Perhaps we shouldn’t push.
But I am already pushing, and the boulder rolls off my tongue, completely crushing the old familiar faraway voice I’d always used to tell this tale, a voice that had hardly seemed connected to me.
It was only after I came to America, I said, that I even knew what was supposed to be down there.
Down there?
Yes. My own body was a mystery to me, as was the female body, beyond the function of the breasts, to almost everyone I knew. From prison Our Leader said we must keep ourselves clean and pure as we had been since time immemorial—by cutting out unclean parts of our bodies. Everyone knew that if a woman was not circumcised her unclean parts would grow so long they’d soon touch her thighs; she’d become masculine and arouse herself. No man could enter her because her own erection would be in his way.
You believed this?
Everyone believed it, even though no one had ever seen it. No one living in our village anyway. And yet the elders, particularly, acted as if everyone had witnessed this evil, and not nearly a long enough time ago.
But you knew this had not happened to you?
But perhaps it had, I said. Certainly to all my friends who’d been circumcised, my uncircumcised vagina was thought to be a monstrosity. They laughed at me. Jeered at me for having a tail. I think they meant my labia majora. After all, none of them had vaginal lips; none of them had a clitoris; they had no idea what these things looked like; to them I was bound to look odd. There were a few other girls who had not been circumcised. The girls who had been would sometimes actually run from us, as if we were demons. Laughing, though. Always laughing.
And yet it is from this time, before circumcision, that you remember pleasure?
When I was little I used to stroke myself, which was taboo. And then, when I was older, and before we married, Adam and I used to make love in the fields. Which was also taboo. Doing it in the fields, I mean. And because we practiced cunnilingus.
Did you experience orgasm?
Always.
And yet you willingly gave this up in order to… Raye was frowning in disbelief.
I completed the sentence for her: To be accepted as a real woman by the Olinka people; to stop the jeering. Otherwise I was a thing. Worse, because of my friendship with Adam’s family and my special relationship to him, I was never trusted, considered a potential traitor, even. Besides, Our Leader, our Jesus Christ, said we must keep all our old ways and that no Olinka man—in this he echoed the great liberator Kenyatta—would even think of marrying a woman who was not circumcised.
But Adam was not Olinkan, said Raye, puzzled.
I sighed. The boulder was gone, but speech itself suddenly felt quite hopeless. I never thought of marrying Adam, I said, firmly, and watched the surprise in her eyes. I married him because he was loyal, gentle and familiar. Because he came for me. And because I found I could not fight with the wound tradition had given me. I could hardly walk.
But who…? Raye began, even more perplexed.
At last I found a cool smile forming on my tense face. I smiled at the young innocent, ignorant girl I’d been. The boulder now not only had rolled off my tongue but was rolling quite rapidly away from me toward the door. Like every Olinka maiden, I said, I was in love with the perfect lover who already had three wives. The perfect lover and father and brother who had been so cruelly taken from us, but whose laughing eyes we saw in the photograph he’d left us, and whose sweetly tempting voice we heard on cassette in the night. Poor Adam! He couldn’t hold a candle to Our Leader, the real—to us—Jesus Christ.
ADAM
THE OLINKANS SPOKE of “Our Leader” with exactly the fervor we wished them to speak of “Our Lord.” There were always tales of his exploits drifting through the village, his “miracles” of ambush and derring-do against the whites. He seemed like Christ to the villagers except for one thing: his acceptance of violence as a means to the end of African oppression. He was called “Our Leader” because the white regime made it a crime to say his name aloud. There were men walking about in every Olinka village whose backs bore the scars of their forgetfulness or defiance of this edict. And when these men spoke of “Our Leader,” an especially harsh protectiveness and anger blazed in their eyes. In fact, it became increasingly frightening to try to talk to them about Christ at all. Our Christ. Our white, pacifist leader safely dead.
PART EIGHT
LISETTE
WHEN PIERRE TURNED SEVENTEEN and had completed his studies at the lycée, nothing could prevent him from going to America to be nearer his father. He is thoughtful, curly-haired, golden. In France, people assume he is Algerian. I sent him to Harvard. Why not? As I tell my friends, since Pierre is my only expense, I can afford to be lavish with him. But it is more than that. Because he has grown up virtually without a father, I feel compelled to compensate.
When Evelyn learned of my pregnancy with little Pierre, as Adam and I and my parents used to call him, she flew into a rage that subsided into a years-long deterioration and rancorous depression. She tried to kill herself. She spoke of murdering their son. I felt badly for Adam. He had not intended to have a child with me. It was I who wanted a baby. I who did not want, except occasionally, a man. Perhaps I was simply swept along by the winds of change that were blowing over women’s lives in France, thanks to women like my suffragist grandmother and writers like Simone de Beauvoir, whose book The Second Sex put the world I knew into a perspective I could more easily comprehend, if not control. Prior to reading her book I felt doomed to incomprehension regarding the universal subjugation of women. Doomed to ignorance, in spite of having listened, from babyhood, to the flaming speeches of Grandmother Beatrice, as she labored for the rights of French women. Doomed, even, to a kind of insanity that I believe the pampered oppressed always feel, and for which there seems to be no remedy except enlightenment regarding their plight, followed by active exercise of the insights of their awareness.
It was hard enough to have been forced to leave Algeria, our house and gardens and servants and friendships (with the servants) there. But the French were killing the Algerians, body and soul, and the Algerians grew sick of being treated worse than dogs. They fought back. There seemed to be a rising tide of blood across the land, and even clergymen like my father were not exempt. We left in tears, for we considered ourselves Algerians. French Algerians, of course. Members of the ruling class and race, bien sûr. The elite. And yet I, especially, felt native to the land, because I was. I was born there. Hot sun even now is the kind I prefer. I am never so happy as when enveloped by a scorching Parisian summer, when most true Parisians make sure to be someplace else. Someplace cooler. The ocean or the mountains.
There were places—restaurants, nightclubs, schools, neighborhoods—the Algerian natives could not go. The old colonial story. And yet the people were so beautiful, hospitable as Africans are always, especially our servants and playmates. The children taught me games, and they and their parents taught me Arabic.
There was no way I could understand what was happening, when they arrived for work with their eyes veiled, even hostile, and their faces swollen from grief. Some loved one would have been picked up by the French security forces in the night, grilled, imprisoned, tortured, killed.
Loving my nurse, my playmates
and the servants, I naturally hated France. And then suddenly to have to “return” there, as the newspapers said of us. I protested to my parents that France was a place I’d never been; how, therefore, could I “return”? My parents, like most settler parents, had no answer. They were far from happy about the turn of events themselves. They’d left France in the first place because French society had no place for them; all prominent spots, my father joked, having been occupied; and though in Algeria my father suffered as a Christian minister surrounded by a world of Moslems, he felt he’d discovered and enlarged a niche for himself that was rewarding. He had more power in Algeria, and a more conspicuous place in society, than he ever could have had in France.
I liked to watch my father with petit Pierre, his namesake. They were physically much alike, short, thin-bodied and serious, rather slow and low-key among the coffee-crazed, perpetually cranky Parisians. I know that when my father looked at Pierre he saw the innocent, that is to say, apolitical, Algerian boys of his congregation whom he’d left behind to an uncertain fate, caught as they were between the French security forces, to whom all Arabs looked alike, and the Maquis, the NLA and the more militant Moslem fanatics, to whom Christian Arabs looked not at all like themselves: which is to say, like true Arabs. The young boys who had appeared deeply moved by the nonviolence preached by the Jesus Christ of my father’s church. The Jesus they inevitably identified as a rebel Algerian, for not only did the Jesus Christ of the Christian religion look like an Algerian, but for a long time there was a tradition of Arab martyrdom in Algeria, of which they were well aware, as young “Arab terrorist” after young “Arab terrorist,” sometimes boys no older than themselves, went up, barehanded or with stones and rusty swords, against the machine guns and hand grenades of the French.
Petit Pierre, appearing years later, after my parents had resettled completely into French life, and I had settled for the first time, became both our remembrance of our Algerian experience, which in Paris seemed suddenly never to have existed, and our solace. This became true even for my mother, who cared, to a much greater extent than either my father or I, what other people thought. She did not have her own mother’s firm belief in her right to enjoy life as she pleased and in such company as she alone chose, but she had loved Algeria and the warmth of the people had impressed itself upon her. Her bourgeois French racism—“All Arabs steal; the women are no better than they should be; the children are born with a criminal streak; etc., etc., etc.”—had been severely shaken by the suffering of her servants and friends.
She adored Pierre. When he left for America I thought her heart would break. She who saw him as the light of her waning existence, and the light of her memory of an earlier phase, in which he had had no part, but rather was like a belated sun in the evening of her life, illuminating some new truth she now knew, pointing backward with its rays. She who, since he could walk, had strolled hand in hand with him in every Paris square. Protectively wary at first of the covert glances of strangers; then boldly in solidarity with petit Pierre; then lost, happily, in the grandmotherly joy of his golden hand in hers.
EVELYN
I TOLD RAYE about my lifelong tendency to escape from reality into the realm of fantasy and storytelling.
Without this habit, I said, it would be impossible for me to guess anything out of the ordinary had happened to me.
What do you mean? she asked.
I mean, if I find myself way off into an improbable tale, imagining it or telling it, then I can guess something horrible has happened to me and that I can’t bear to think about it. Wait a minute, I said, considering it for the first time, do you think this is how storytelling came into being? That the story is only the mask for the truth?
She looked doubtful.
I grew to trust Raye. One day when I went in to see her I found her with her cheeks puffed out like a squirrel. Her skin was ashen and she looked awful.
What’s the matter? I asked.
She grimaced. Gum mutilation, she said, with her lips pursed.
Later, when she could speak more clearly, she told me how it had bothered her that the kind of pain I must have endured during circumcision was a pain she could hardly imagine; and so, having been told by her dentist that she had several pockets of gum disease, in an otherwise healthy mouth, she’d had her gums turned down like socks around her teeth, their edges clipped and insides scraped, and then sewed up again, tight, around the roots of her teeth.
I could not prevent an involuntary shudder of disgust.
But of course I had anesthesia, she said, still speaking as if her gums were stitched. And of course in a few days I’ll be better than before.
But you are obviously in pain now, I said.
Yes, she admitted. And it is nearly impossible for me to bear it, and also talk. Not surprisingly, making love to anyone at all is the furthest thing from my mind. She laughed. And this is only in my mouth!
You shouldn’t have done it, I said coldly. It was stupid of you.
But she only chuckled, grimacing painfully as she did so. Don’t be mad because my choosing this kind of pain seems such a puny effort, she said. In America it’s the best I can do. Besides, it gives me a faint idea. And it was something I needed to do anyway.
I was angry because I was touched. I realized that though Raye had left Africa hundreds of years before in the persons of her ancestors and studied at the best of the white man’s schools, she was intuitively practicing an ageless magic, the foundation of which was the ritualization, or the acting out, of empathy. How theatre was born? My psychologist was a witch, not the warty kind American children imitate on Halloween, but a spiritual descendant of the ancient healers who taught our witch doctors and were famous for their compassionate skill. Suddenly, in that guise, Raye became someone I felt I knew; someone with whom I could bond.
In my heart I thanked Mzee for her, for I believed she would be plucky enough to accompany me where he could not. And that she would.
PIERRE
IT WAS A RAINY DECEMBER AFTERNOON and we sat by the fire, reading. My mother sat; I lounged on the sofa across from her. Earlier that morning she had permitted me to sleep late, missing school, and had brought her gifts to me and spread them across the foot of my bed. Each year since my birth she’d knitted me a sweater. Each year I watched the piece of knitting grow between her flashing needles; each year I was charmed by the result. This year, as every year, she’d outdone herself. The new sweater wrapped me in gold and chocolate; near the center of my chest, just above my heart, there was a petroglyphic spirit head in a rich, mossy green.
I was reading a book by Langston Hughes, the laughing spellbinder whose sadness almost hid itself in the insouciance of his prose. I had already devoured several novels by James Baldwin, the guerrilla homosexual genius whom I had met once when he came to speak at our school, and two volumes of essays by Richard Wright, the tortured assimilationist and great lover of France. These men, “uncles” from my father’s side, would be my guides on my American journey. I glanced over at my mother, expecting to find her still reading, or staring thoughtfully into the fire, but finding instead that her warm brown eyes were fixed on me.
I was just thinking, she said. It has been sixteen years since you were born. I can’t believe it.
That long? I said, smiling at her.
Her brown hair was dusted with more gray than I’d noticed before, and her face seemed thinner than usual, and more pale. I sighed with the contentment of the spoiled only child, and pondered my good fortune. I felt the greatest possible security with my mother. As she often said, our hearts had beat as one since before my birth. No matter who else was not in my life, there was always my mother: reading, knitting, preparing for her classes at the lycée. It was true that I was beginning to feel ready to separate from her, but gently, as a fruit drops from the tree. One more year of school, of Paris, and I would be gone.
If you go to America, she said—as if I might not after all our years of planning—and
spend time with your father, there’s something you should know.
What? I asked.
Something minor, perhaps. But he won’t remember it. And I do.
How mysterious, I said.
Not so mysterious! she said. It’s just that I’ve realized with your father that men refuse to remember things that don’t happen to them.
Full of the passionate words of Baldwin, Hughes and Wright, which rang in my heart as if already inscribed there, I leaned forward to protest. My mother put out her hand and covered my lips.
For as long as I could remember, my father came to see me and my mother once in fall and once in spring; for two weeks each visit. He never came on my birthday, because coming at that time seriously distressed his wife. Each time he came he showed me photographs of his other son, Benny, and at least one photograph of his wife, Evelyn, or, as he sometimes called her, Tashi. Benny was nearly three years older than me, with bronze satiny skin and a sweet, tentative smile. Whenever I saw a new photo of him I wondered if he’d like me. If we could ever be friends. Once, my father told me that Benny wasn’t as “quick” as I. This pleased me enormously, though I hadn’t the words to ask him what a lack of “quickness” like mine might mean.
My mother began to tell me the story of how she met my father, years ago in Africa. I’d heard it before. I nodded complacently as she talked about the hours she spent with my father in Old Torabe’s hut, as the old man waited for death. But I soon realized my mother was adding a more adult twist than usual to the tale.
You have to understand, she said, there was a reason why Old Torabe lived alone, way outside the village, and why none of the villagers came to care for him. Your father certainly didn’t enjoy caring for him, either; your grandfather Samuel assigned Torabe to him.