The cutting edge

THE publicity handout next to the cash register at Shakespeare & Company "cordially" invited all comers to "a Dynamic Debate on the Subject of Female Genital Mutilation." And so, with a heavy heart, but conscience-driven to learn about this horrifying subject, I lined up dutifully the other night at the Equitable Center in midtown Manhattan. But was I at the right event? It looked at first like a book party. Cheerful monitors stood in the lobby handing out folders decorated with a color reproduction of the cover of Alice Walker's new novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy. Tucked inside the folder were ten favorable reviews of the book. The stairs leading down to the auditorium fed directly to a table stacked with at least a hundred copies of... Possessing the Secret of Joy. A cash box stood open beside them. Money was changing hands.

The moderator for the evenings discussion turned out to be Terrie Williams, the woman whose public-relations firm is publicizing Miss Walker's book. She was compelled to step in for Faye Wattleton, the celebrated former president of Planned Parenthood. Miss Wattleton, we were told, was delayed on "an international flight from Rome." Three hundred people--mostly women, some of them white--settled into their seats expectantly. Miss Walker was introduced. "Don't sit down," Miss Walker said as the standing ovation died away. "I want to begin with a prayer."

The prayer was addressed to "our ancestors, our people." The evening, she intoned, was meant to remember pain. For "we are all one, in terms of time"--here Miss Walker spoke of "remembering" the slave-ship experience and "we all live on one globe." When the audience was finally allowed to sit down, Miss Walker read an excerpt from Possessing the Secret of Joy--about a female panther who is kissed by the sun and made love to by the moon, or something.

No, the secret of joy is not "female genital mutilation." The main character in Miss Walker's new novel is a woman who, out of loyalty to her African origins, chooses to undergo a wounding circumcision, much to her regret. Throughout the evening, "Tashi" was referred to with great affection and empathy. One speaker even addressed an open letter to her. The phrase, "female genital mutilation," is, we were told, to be preferred to "circumcision," since the ritual cutting away of the labia and clitoris of young African girls is usually much more traumatic than the operation performed on young boys. Before the evening's six speakers got up in turn to denounce this horrible practice, a 2983 BBC documentary was shown that graphically illustrated the surgical incisions and sewings-up. The film maintained that nearly all little Sudanese girls are made to undergo the ritual. In a postscript to her novel, Miss Walker claims that 100 million women in Africa and Asia have been, to use the milder word, circumcised.

Whether these statistics are reliable is hard to say. One is inclined to be wary of exaggeration. However, that clitorectomies are still commonly performed in Africa, despite official edicts outlawing the custom, seems undeniable. It is, in short, a complicated matter, with a long history reaching far back into misty tribal pasts. As the two Africans on the panel pointed out, where the practice is routine it is often desired--by the girls themselves or by mothers for their daughters. To go uncircumcised in some African cultures is to forgo an essential rite of passage, to suffer ridicule and neglect, and to make oneself (literally) less nubile. There are even women who claim it adds to sexual pleasure. In the Sudan, we were told, the need for female circumcision was taken up as a cause by anti-colonialists who were upset by the attempts of the British to put an end to what they saw as a barbaric practice. We were admonished more than once by the African panelists to eschew the insensitivity and arrogance--the "Desert Storm approach,'' as it was called--by which the West supposedly intrudes upon Africa and its indigenous populations.

This call for multicultural toleration contended fitfully with feminist outrage. Thus, there was a good bit of hedging and groveling by the two white women on the panel, one of whom was asked out loud what right she had to be there. She went on to explain that 14 years ago, while wandering through Egypt, she had discovered the practice of genital mutilation and suddenly found her "purpose in life."

The other white woman on the panel was Gloria Steinem. 'For Miss Steinem, female genital mutilation is a demonstration of patriarchy at its worst, a metaphor for the "psychic mutilation'' that women suffer everywhere at the hands of their male "oppressors." Just as African patriarchs have fashioned a brutal practice that would ensure the virginity of their brides, the "spirit-killing regimes of male dominance" in the West rob women of their "reproductive rights" by seeking to outlaw abortion, by insisting on unnecessary mastectomies and Caesarean births, by demanding a kind of subservience that kills the rebellious high-spiritedness of little girls, and so on.

All of this was received with the kind of wild applause and appreciative laughter that one might expect, even if there was--just possibly--something offensively facile about Miss Steinem's eagerness to draw parallels, or "make connections," as she would say. I could not help thinking that fetus-assaulting, that is to say abortion itself and not the curtailing of it, was the closest parallel in the West to the unconsented-to physical assault that "female genital mutilation" was said to be. In any case, the audience members who asked questions of Miss Steinem and the other panelists never challenged the militant feminist assumptions by which the entire subject had been carefully, to use an even milder word, circumscribed.

Miss Walker returned at the end to express solidarity with an African woman who had recently been denied asylum in France. Faye Wattleton, late-arrived from her international flight, thanked Miss Walker yet again for "challenging us" with her novel and motioned to the crowd for another standing ovation, which was promptly delivered. As people rose from their seats to leave, Terrie Williams shouted into the microphone that the best way of carrying the evening's message "into the universe" was to buy the book on the way out.

COPYRIGHT 1992 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning