WUNRN
High Level Panel on Female Genital Mutilation
June 1, 2011, Geneva
Human Rights
Council Session 17
On FGM and the
ARTS
Dr.
Tobe Levin von Gleichen, UnCUT/VOICES Press
Associate, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University
Godfrey Williams-Okorodus. Oil on Canvas. 2009
for UnCUT/VOICES Press
This is, indeed, historic occasion and I thank the
organizersof this Panel, especially WUNRN, for bringing us together. As a
professor, a publisher and an activist, I will focus on my experience in Germany,
the arts and their role in raising awareness of an egregious human rights
abuse.
Fiction, poetry, memoir and film are my arsenal of choice, for FGM
is, as we know, a deeply anchored practice. Where is it rooted? In
the emotions, so that reasoning about it goes only so far. Let’s dwell
for a moment on the passions. Those who practice FGM fear the consequences of not doing it – mockery, exclusion; and desire the benefits they see accruing
from it – inclusion, respect. Those against it rage at the signals it sends of women’s weakness, and extrapolate
to vulnerability like their own while empathizing
with girls under the blade. We quake to acknowledge that “there but for
fortune…”
Victims’ testimonies elicit a physical reaction. Consider how you feel when Khady tells you: “… the
exciser grasps the clitoris and stretches that minute fragment of flesh as far
as [she can]. Then – if all goes well – she whacks it off like a piece of zebu
meat. Often, she can’t hack it off in one go so she’s obliged to saw. To this
day, I can hear myself howling.”[1][1]
What does your stomach do when seven-year-old Fadumo Korn conveys
her confrontation with
A witch. She was most certainly a witch.
The old woman began to empty a pouch and spread out her utensils:
a little sack of ash, a rod, a small metal container with herbal paste, thorns
from a bush, and elephant hair. She broke a razor blade into two halves. Her
lids hung heavy over both eyes, and I asked myself whether she could see what
she was doing. She grasped the rod, trimmed the top end, and slipped the razor
blade into a slit. Then she wrapped sisal cord around the instrument. It looked
like a little ax.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to run away.
But I didn’t want to bring shame on my family.[2][2]
What do you feel? Terror? Admiration? Helplessness ? Entrapment? Anger? All of the above.
In 1975,
Benoȋte Groult wrote, « ça fait mal au c… n’est-ce pas, quand on lit
ça. On a mal au cœur de soi-même. » It hurts down there, doesn’t
it, merely reading about it, and your heart aches.
Sometimes hearts do more – they stop. Once, when first confronted
with the subject, a young man from East Africa fainted on the marble staircase
in Darmstadt’s City Hall. FORWARD – Germany was opening an exhibition of
paintings by Nigerian artists against FGM,[3][3] and although none of the panels is particularly gruesome, the
total impact proved overwhelming. This natural empathy should be enhanced, I
suggest, as people’s feelings about
the subject turn them in one of two directions: most often toward indifference
– literally, torture is a subject you can’t stomach--,
but some toward a commitment to act.
This sense of obligation emerged in Germany in 1977. Because the
history is not well known; because it elevates the arts;
and because the story is also mine, I’ll tell it here, paraphrasing now from my
edited book Empathy and Rage. Female
Genital Mutilation in African Literature.[4][4]
How did I first learn
about FGM?
One
afternoon in Munich, with sharp rays slicing through the pane, I lost my
innocence. The third issue of EMMA, a
German feminist magazine, had opened to a two-page spread. In
“Klitorisbeschneidung” (Clitoridectomy), journalist Pauline Caravello had just
initiated me and EMMA’s 150,000 other
readers to an aspect of women’s oppression hitherto unknown to us. “What?!” we
asked. “They do what?!”
Empathy
and rage. Frankly appalled, involuntarily I crossed my legs and sought solace
from a classic poster where, fondled by Supreme Court judges who were dignified
and robed, a woman lay prone and naked. The caption read: “Die Würde des
Menschen ist unantastbar.” “Human dignity is inviolable,” quoting Germany’s
post-war constitution, evidence that the country has learned from its
excruciating past. The collage, however, had been inspired by a Karlsruhe
magistrates’ 1974 decision restricting women’s access to abortion.
The
power to control her body was not in women’s hands. Not in Germany, not in
Africa. Many of us saw a gender link.
Throughout the nation, a movement arose. Basketsful of
letters reached EMMA’s office. Study groups sprang up. Armchair feminists,
moved by genital sorority, posed the ur-socialist question, “What is to be
done?” We called out to lone African campaigners –Awa Thiam, Edna Adan Ismail,
Nawal el Saadawi, Marie Assaad. The Babikar Badri Women’s Studies Centre in
Omdurman advised. In 1978, the German women physicians’ association invited Dr.
Asma el Dareer to speak.[5][5]
After national coordination of a network fell to my Munich committee, a modest
book appeared.[6][6] And then things petered out.
For in 1980, Copenhagen ‘happened’: African women at
the U.N. Mid-Decade for Women conference, among them Marie-Angélique Savané of
AAWORD, reacted with outrage to Fran Hosken’s workshop on the topic. Hosken
(1920-2006), a sharp-tongued refugee from Hitler, made it her life’s mission to
eradicate the practice; she coined the term FGM. Ceaselessly, she researched,
wrote, and lobbied international agencies. She was, however, notoriously short
on tact and anti-male. With few allies even among non-African activists, she
probably served as template for the ‘white Western feminist’ dismissed by so
many indigenous campaigners who often wished ‘us’ to butt out.
Some
simply couldn’t. Nor would many of the prescient pioneers allow us to. In 1982,
Awa Thiam asked a small group from Germany to participate in the inaugural
conference of CAMS (Commission pour l’Abolition des Mutilations Sexuelles)
[Commission to Abolition Sexual Mutilation] in Dakar.[7][7]
In April 1983, the fledgling German human rights group Terre des Femmes
returned the invitation to Awa Thiam, my house guest, who addressed their first
annual meeting in Frankfurt. Later that spring, Thiam, Efua Dorkenoo, and I met
in Paris. Dorkenoo had just founded FORWARD and all of us asked, How can we
work together?
That
is indeed the question, how to approach an issue viewed as urgent by only a
tiny trans-national minority. For make no mistake: despite a laudable “grassroots movement to
end female genital mutilation,”[8][8]
a powerful majority tenaciously defends the practice. For instance, in June 2007, you might have
read that “as part of the routine practice of vote buying … female teens will
have their clitoris and labia minora cut off at no cost to their families.”[9][9] The news refers to government promotion of
excision in Sierra Leone where more than 90% of females are cut. Such is the
strength of the status quo in nearly all excising cultures. Opposing it in
Freetown, Dr. Irene Koso-Thomas, threatened and harassed, is a solitary voice
whose ideas, first published in 1988, face as much opposition now as then, and
possibly more.[10][10]
In
light of this obstinacy which I’ve come to understand as an emotional, not
rational approach, I invited Mr. Augustine H. Asaah of the University of Ghana
to join me in publishing essays on female genital mutilation in African
literature because authentic voices unequivocally opposed to the practice were
going unheard. But who, really, is more qualified to testify than African
authors like Khady, Fadumo Korn, Waris Dirie or, forthcoming, Berhane Ras-Work
in their memoirs; Nuruddin Farah, Mariama Barry, Ahmadou Kourouma or Osman
Conteh in their novels; Maryam Sheik Abdi in her poem; or Ousmane Sembène in
his film Moolaadé? As we know, no matter how strong the social
rationalizations and peer pressure, FGM inflicts anguish on the body, risks
short and long term complications, and can be lethal. Consensus is lacking,
however, once we look for the ‘words to say it’: do we censure, blame,
persuade, exhort, insult, cajole, seduce, emote – or entertain?
In
fact, the arts can do it all.
APPENDIX: A poem against the world’s indifference by a friend of mine.
The poster shows the type of photo that inspired her art. Visual courtesy of
Terre des Femmes, the text reads: A joyous celebration … no one said a word
about atrocious pain …
SCENE FROM LIFE, FEMALE
CIRCUMCISION
October 1991, p.
36
Chris Leche cdleche@ed.umuc.edu