by Alice Walker
I could never again see myself, for the child that finally rose from the mat three months later, and dragged herself out of the initiation hut and finally home, was not the child who had been taken there. I was never to see that child again.
TASHI
AND YET, I SAID, hardening myself against the sight of M’Lissa’s heaving chest, expecting tears, you saw her over and over again, hundreds, thousands of times. It was she who screamed before your knife.
M’Lissa sniffled. I have never cried after that, she said. I knew in the moment when the pain was greatest, when it reached a crescendo, as when a loud metal drum is struck with a corresponding metal stick, that there is no God known to man who cares about children or about women. And that the God of woman is autonomy.
Cry, I said. Perhaps it will ease you.
But I could see that, even now, she could not feel her pain enough to cry. She was like someone beaten into insensibility. Bitter, but otherwise emotionally inert.
Why did they make us do it? she asked. I never really knew. And the women, even today, after giving birth, they come back to the tsunga to be resewn, tighter than before. Because if it is loose he won’t receive enough pleasure.
But you taught them this, I said. It is what you told me. Remember? The uncircumcised woman is loose, you said, like a shoe that all, no matter what their size, might wear. This is unseemly, you said. Unclean. A proper woman must be cut and sewn to fit only her husband, whose pleasure depends on an opening it might take months, even years, to enlarge. Men love and enjoy the struggle, you said. For the woman…But you never said anything about the woman, did you, M’Lissa? About the pleasure she might have. Or the suffering.
I am weeping now, myself. For myself. For Adam. For our son. For the daughter I was forced to abort.
There is caesarean section, you know, the aborting doctor had said. But I knew I could not bear being held down and cut open. The thought of it had sent me reeling off into the shadows of my mind; where I’d hidden out for months. I watched from a lofty distance as Adam packed for his twice-yearly visits to Paris, to be with Lisette and his other son; I watched Benny struggle with all his might to be close to me, to melt into my body, to inhale my scent; and I was like a crow, flapping my wings unceasingly in my own head, cawing mutely across an empty sky. And I wore black, and black and black.
If I look at M’Lissa I know I will leap up and strangle her. Fortunately I am unable to move. I look down at my feet. Feet that hesitate before any nonflat surface: stairs, hills. Feet that do not automatically or nimbly leap over puddles or step gracefully onto curbs.
Perhaps an hour passes. I think M’Lissa has fallen asleep. I glance at the bed and am startled by how small she looks. She seems to have shrunk. I glance at her face. It is alert, watchful. But not because of me. She seems to have forgotten me.
I finally see her, she says, astonished. Self-absorbed.
Who? I ask. You finally see who?
She makes a slight dismissive motion with her hand, warning me not to interrupt.
The child who went into the initiation hut, she says. You know I left her there bleeding on the floor, and I came out. She was crying. She felt so betrayed. By everyone. They’d severely beaten her mother as well, and she blamed herself for this. M’Lissa sighed. I couldn’t think about her anymore. I would have died. So I walked away, limped away, and just left her there. M’Lissa paused. Her voice when she continues is a whisper, amazed. She is still crying. She’s been crying since I left. No wonder I haven’t been able to. She has been crying all our tears.
M’LISSA
I HAVE BEEN STRONG. This is what I tell the tourists who come to see me, and the young mothers and the old mothers and everybody who comes. It is what they tell me back: the president and the politicians and the visitors from the churches and the schools. Strong and brave. Dragging my half-body wherever half a body was needed. In service to tradition, to what makes us a people. In service to the country and what makes us who we are. But who are we but torturers of children?
PART SEVENTEEN
TASHI
CROWDED INTO the small white chapel on the top floor of the prison are Adam, Olivia, Benny, Pierre, Raye and Mbati. Raye has flown in for the execution, though she denies it. It is not your death that is so fascinating, she says bluntly. It is still your life with which I am concerned. Besides, she says saucily, hands on her hips, You’re not dead yet!
Indeed, I think, I am not. But neither would I say I am fully alive.
Considering the deterioration of the rest of the prison, says Mbati, it is odd that the chapel is still intact.
That’s because no one uses it, says Adam, fingering the dusty unopened Bible, whose gilt-edged pages have been gnawed by moths.
It is even cool here, in the evenings; the windows are large and nothing, not even shutters, blocks the breeze. There are no bars, presumably because it is too high to jump.
Since the trial, Olivia has volunteered to work mornings downstairs on the AIDS floor. Adam, Benny and Pierre have rented a jeep and explored the countryside. We’ve filmed everything, says Benny, and now we want you to see it.
Adam starts the projector; at first there are slides. Pictures of the northern territory and its petroglyphs and faded paintings of celebrations and hunts. But then there is a film. I know they are trying to prepare me for it because Olivia is suddenly handing me a glass of water and Adam is holding my hand.
Pierre, who has said he wants to be the first anthropologist to empower and not further endanger his subjects, now stands quietly beside the machine.
At first I think they are showing me a human settlement, a village. The shapes are the same. Huts with umbrella-shaped tops. Huts like mushrooms. But then there is a close-up of the “huts” and a man’s feet and legs rising above them. I recognize Adam’s hiking boots. Then, when the picture is opened up, I see that the settlement is vast, but the “huts” are tiny, only three to six inches high.
Hah, says Adam, squeezing my hand. Fooled you!
I thought it was a village, I say, turning to Olivia and Mbati. Didn’t you?
Mbati smiles. Olivia says, Yes, I did. Though I did wonder about that short lumpy hut that leaned so drastically to the left.
But what is…, I start to say, but am choked by the desperate surge of my heart as it makes a sudden attempt to leave my chest.
It’s ok, says Adam. You are not alone. We are all here with you.
You’re not alone. You’re not, you’re not, I hear from Raye. Her perky voice seems to come to me from another age. Women who are not gelded have a different sound, I think. They can sound perky. A gelded woman can not.
I think this in a flash. My mind in despairing flight from the sight of a tall, rough, earthcolored column on the screen before me, Benny, dwarfed beside it, smiling uncertainly into the camera. My bag of clay! I think.
Pierre clears his throat. It is my belief, he says, after stopping the projector on the image before us, that human beings in Africa (the first ones on the planet, it is assumed), because of the heat and humidity, imitated the termite when they looked about for housing that would be comfortable, long-lasting and easily built. That is why many traditional African houses, even today, and all adobe houses anywhere, resemble those of termites. It was termites who taught early humans about natural air-conditioning, with their long vaulted passageways and great domed storage rooms. Termite houses, like mosques, are always cool, no matter what the outside temperature. Termite houses are made from the earth itself, from clay, the cheapest and most plentiful substance around.
What surprises me is that I can hear Pierre, and even understand what he is saying. It is true my heart leapt painfully once, but now it is beating normally. I glance around the room at the faces gathered about me. They are each as intent as my own.
I look at Pierre and think: Yes, it is a good thing that we train our children to help us. We who need so much help. I send a flash of gratitude to those schools I’ve never set foot
in, Berkeley and Harvard. If I should live, I think, I would visit them as shrines.
I believe, he continues, that over time there was a strong identification with the termite, which Africans call “white ant” even though it bears little resemblance to an ant. Unlike the ant, and most other insects, the termite has kept a place for males in its society. There is a queen, but also a king. Perhaps this is why, also, the people felt an affinity for it. White ants, as you know, are eaten by the people in the country, who prefer them fried.
And in the city too, if they could get them, says Olivia. She glances sharply at Mbati. It is disgusting to see how the youth are gorging on potato chips!
Adam laughs. Mbati pushes her bag of Fry-O potato chips deep in her string bag.
Their religious symbology became completely reflective of termite behavior, continues Pierre. Their gratitude, for having been taught so much by the termite, was great.
And of course the termite was so delicious, says Raye.
The termites, continues Pierre, would have taught them to make pots, which would have led inevitably to the notion that the first human beings were themselves fashioned out of clay. And that something or someone so fashioned them.
But, says Pierre, running slender brown fingers through his sunbleached dark curls, not to run on and on about this…This, Madame Johnson, is your dark tower. You are the queen who loses her wings. It is you lying in the dark with millions of worker termites—who are busy, by the way, maintaining mushroom farms from which they feed you—buzzing about. You being stuffed with food at one end—a boring diet of mushrooms—and having your eggs, millions of them, constantly removed at the other. You who are fat, greasy, the color as you have said of tobacco spit, inert; only a tube through which generations of visionless offspring pass, their blindness perhaps made up for by their incessant if mindless activity, which never stops, day or night. You who endure all this, only at the end to die, and be devoured by those to whom you’ve given birth.
Ah, says Olivia. The termite as Christ!
But how did I know this? I ask my little band of intent faces. No one told me.
We think it was told you in code somehow, says Raye. Not told you directly that you, as a woman, were expected to reproduce as helplessly and inertly as a white ant; but in a culture in which it is mandatory that every single female be systematically desexed, there would have to be some coded, mythological reason given for it, used secretly among the village elders. Otherwise they’d soon not know what they were talking about. Even today there are villages where an un-circumcised woman is not permitted to live. The chiefs enforce this. On the other hand, circumcision is a taboo that is never discussed. How then do the chiefs know to keep it going? How is it talked about?
My mind is blank. Surely no one ever told me anything except that…this thing M’Lissa did to me expressed my pride in my people; and that without it no man would marry me.
Perhaps, says Raye, you had a nursery rhyme when you were small, as innocuous as “Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater / Had a wife and couldn’t keep her / Put her in a pumpkin shell / And there he kept her very well.”
What? asks Benny. Puzzled.
It is about keeping a woman pregnant, says Pierre, stretching out his arms and curving them into a pumpkin shape. Enslaved by her own body.
Oh, says Benny. Appalled.
We know, from Griaule’s work, that among the Dogon it was precisely the elders who were the guardians of the knowledge of the beginning of man. The Creation itself began with mutilation and rape…I wonder if you remember our little lesson, from Griaule’s book, Madame Johnson, Pierre says, looking at me.
Much to my surprise, I do remember it. God wanted to have intercourse with the woman, I say. And the woman fought him. Her clitoris was a termite hill, rising up and barring his way.
Good, says Pierre.
Oh my God, says Raye. I know this sounds ridiculous, but the erect clitoris sort of resembles a little termite hill, or house.
Well, says Pierre, pointing to the giant one on the screen beside which Benny is standing, one like that clearly resembles a phallus.
When the clitoris rose, I continue, God thought it looked masculine. Since it was “masculine” for a clitoris to rise, God could be excused for cutting it down. Which he did. Then, I said, God fucked the hole that was left. Of course I remember, I say to Pierre, that Griaule said God had intercourse. It is I who say God fucked.
And this is how people who mutilate little girls see the beginning of life, groans Olivia, dropping her head into her hands.
Religion is an elaborate excuse for what man has done to women and to the earth, says Raye, bitterly.
But there were other religions, I say, thinking of the little figure blissfully loving herself.
Pierre shrugs. They were destroyed. Your little smiling goddess was destroyed.
I turn to Mbati. Her lovely face is filled with horror. Nobody knows this story, she says. I am convinced. Which means, she says, visibly angry, nobody even knows why they do this thing. I certainly never had any idea why it was done to me. If my sex organs were unclean, why was I born with them? I asked my mother this once, before I was circumcised. She just said everyone knew a woman’s vulva to be dirty. And to need to be removed. That was all there was to it. No termites, no “white ants,” no structural similarities between genitals and insect dwellings were discussed.
And who would not laugh at the notion that a clitoris, like a penis, can rise?
Olivia asks if I am hungry or would like more water to drink. I am not sure. The sight of Mbati’s anger has split me in two. Only a part of me is sitting in the midst of my family and friends. Another part is watching myself as a small child bring a tray of food and water to the elders of the village. They sit beside a baobab tree and gaze wisely out over the plain. The heat is intense but does not bother me. The earth is red. There are flies. Because I am small, they do not completely stop their talk.
Number one: What is a man?
All: Huh!
Number two: A man is blind.
All: Huh!
Number three: He has an eye.
All: Huh!
Number four: But it can not see.
Number one: Man is God’s cock.
Number two: It scratches the furrow.
Number three: It drops the seed.
Number four: But its offspring…
All: The crop!
Number one: Excrement!
Number two: It cannot identify.
Number three: God’s blind cock produces God’s blind eggs.
Number four: Is an egg not blind?
Number one: It is so.
Number two: The tsunga’s stitch helps the cock to know his crop…
All: Which after all belongs to God.
Number three: That is why it is said…
Number four:…the tsunga though herself a woman…
Number one:…helps God.
All: Is it not so?
All: It is so.
All: Woman is queen.
Number one: She is Queen.
Number two: God has given her to us.
Number three: We are thankful to God for all His gifts.
(They do not, however, thank the child for bringing the food or send thanks to her mother for preparing it.)
Number four: Since God has given her to us, we must treat her well.
Number one: We must feed her so that she will stay plump.
Number two: Even her excrement will be plump.
(They laugh.)
Number three: If left to herself the Queen would fly.
Number two: True.
Number three: And then where would we be?
Number four: But God is merciful.
Number one: He clips her wings.
Number two: She is inert.
Number three: And even her excrement is sweet.
Number four: Because she is Queen!
Number one: And we are only workers!
Numb
er two: Blind, it is true, but that is God’s will.
Number three: Did He not make us so?
Number four: True.
Number one: And did He not put the Queen’s body there to make our offspring?
Number two: And to be our food?
Number three: It cannot be denied.
Number four: And when she rose up…
All: Hah!
Number three: Rose up indeed.
Number four: As a man would!
Number one: She did not see God’s axe.
Number two: No, she was blind like us then. She did not see it.
Number three: God struck the blow that made her Queen!
Number four: Beautiful enough for him to fuck.
Number one: God liked it fighting!
(Laughter)
Number two: God liked it tight!
Number three: God liked to remember what He had done, and how it felt before it got loose.
Number four: God is wise. That is why He created the tsunga.
All: With her sharpened stone and bag of thorns!
Number one: With her needle and thread.
Number two: Because He liked it tight!
Number three: God likes to feel big.
Number four: What man does not?
(Laughter)
Number one: Let us eat this food, and drink to the Queen who is beautiful, and whose body has been given us to be our sustenance forever.
(Laughter, and the noisy eating of food)
The small child that I was is not noticed at all. She could have been a fly, or an ant. I do not particularly notice them, either. They’ve always been there underneath the baobab tree, graybearded, old. Dressed in thick dark robes against the sun. Their wise old heads wrapped and their eyes mirroring the timeless vacancy of the landscape around them.