Sensibilities can indeed be tender on this subject, as Alice Walker found out in the United States. In the early 1990s, Walker became the first per- sonality of world renown to publicly oppose female genital mutilation. Her novel Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) and documentary (with Prati- bha Parmar) Warrior Marks (1993) did more than decades of international and grassroots agitation by “ordinary” citizens to raise the issue with law- and policymakers in Africa and the African Diaspora. Before the 1990s, FGM could still be considered a taboo subject, the number of academic and popular articles remaining shamefully small. True, in 1982 Elizabeth Passmore Sanderson published an 82-page bibliography, but ethno- graphic work, the bulk of listings, addressed academics, not legislators, citizens, activists or practicing groups. And anthropologists, to put the best construction on it, although admirably aware of colonial abuses, tend to be blinded by goodwill—toward systems in power, which means pa- triarchal privilege over women.
Walker, however, is not an anthropologist but a creative writer whose intervention was followed by action. I contend it is more than coincidence that the two major international conferences, Vienna on Human Rights (1993) and Cairo on population (1994), coming so closely on the heels of Walker’s efforts, finally figured FGM as a major humanitarian challenge. Yet, in the United States, where girls of African origin are clearly at risk, problems in reception of Walker’s book and film surfaced immediately. Now, Walker knew to be fearful. In Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A
Writer’s Activism, she records her apprehension. Visiting Jung’s home in
Bollingen, the final quaff of inspiration taken, she notes: “This was the last journey I had to make before beginning. . . . Possessing the Secret of Joy, a story whose subject frankly frightened me. An unpopular story. Even a taboo one” (126).
Although the United States gave the novel mixed reviews at best, the film incurred outright hostility. Led by African women intellectuals resid- ing in North America, voices of resentment against Walker’s violation of boundaries resonated loudly. Newsweek, for instance, quoted Sudan’s pre- mier female surgeon, Nahid Toubia, alleging that only because Walker’s
popularity had suffered did she take on FGM; a “falling star,” the author was trying to get “the limelight” back (Levin “Alice” 244). More to the point, Walker, it was said, failed at empathy, her accusatory finger not il- luminating but condemning and, therefore, insulting the audience she claimed to address, African women perpetrator-victims.
How affected Walker was by her critics can be teased out of the speech that opened Warrior Marks’ tenth screening on February 24, 1994, in Oak- land. “What can you do?” she asks her opponents. “Refrain from spend- ing more than ten minutes stoning or attempting to malign the messen- ger. Within those minutes thousands of children will be mutilated. Your idle words will have the rumble of muffled screams beneath them” (Heaven 63). Yes, she concedes, victims “will have to stand up for them- selves, and . . . put an end to it. But that they need our help is indis- putable” (63). Indeed.
Yet, ironically, Walker’s compassion is siphoned from a pool of shared African-American suffering, “our centuries-long insecurity” (Anything 150). This presumption of solidarity, not with former slaves but with im- migrants to the United States, proves the lightning rod to her African crit- ics. She dares them to know “who we are [and] . . . what we’ve done to ourselves in the name of religion, male domination, female shame or ter- rible ignorance” (150). But who are “we”? An African-American assumes commonality with African immigrants in the United States—an unrecip- rocated move.
What is unbearable to Walker’s critics, but incontrovertibly central to events, is named by Verena Stefan in a chapter devoted to Tashi in Rauh,
wild & frei: Mädchengestalten in der Literatur [Rough, Tough and Free: Images
of Girls in Literature]. Stefan reads the murder of the Tsunga (Walker’s in- vented term for the excise use in Possessing the Secret of Joy) as a dagger to the shibboleth, reverence for the matriarch, in part inculcated by an au- thoritarian culture.6Stefan reads the broken trust of FGM as “betrayal of
girls by their mothers,” and critiques the “control that the older wield over the younger” (108). Furthermore, in a revealing contrast, Stefan takes the rapport between Celie and Shug in The Color Purple as the other side of cli- toridectomy’s perfidy: “During circumcision, we have shared intimacy be- tween woman and girl, but it is the intimacy of horror. Women observe and touch a young girl’s genital—to mutilate it” (108).
In The Dynamics of African Feminism: Defining and Classifying African
Feminist Literatures, Susan Arndt confronts homophobia, fear of which
propels Stefan’s observations, and also, I believe, accounts in part for Walker’s negative U.S. reception. In particular, two theorists of African womanism—Mary E. Modupe Kolawole and Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi—frankly come out as homophobes. Arndt writes, with in- appropriate neutrality: “I do not know of any feminist theoretician in
the West who dissociates him- or herself explicitly from lesbianism. . . . [So] it is a novelty within the feminist discourse that theoreticians of gender issues like Ogunyemi and Kolawole reject lesbian love explic- itly, generally and firmly” (53).
Now, as most of us know, homophobia kills—and overcoming it is one of the last frontiers. It was homophobia that made “offensive” to some critics Possessing the Secret of Joy; and the lesbian subtext is doubtless pres- ent in Warrior Marks. Pratibha Parmar, after all, lives an openly lesbian lifestyle. Although “a film maker first and last,” and not a “lesbian film- maker,” Parmar has, for instance, in her film “‘Jodie: An Icon’ . . . looked at ways in which . . . Foster has been constructed . . . for lesbians in her various screen personas” (Lola 38). Juxtaposed with a programmatic statement by novelist Buchi Emecheta, the conflict becomes clear. Emecheta charges Western feminists with concern only for “issues… rele- vant to themselves . . . transplant[ed] onto Africa. Their own preoccupa- tions—female sexuality, lesbianism and female circumcision—are not [African women’s] priorities” (Ravell-Pinto 50).
I disagree. Consider Fanny Ann Eddy, a thirty-year-old human rights activist, who, in 2002, had founded a Lesbian and Gay Association in Sierra Leone. On September 29, 2004, Eddy was murdered, having earlier told the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations in Geneva how dangerous it was for lesbians, gays, bi- and transsexuals to remain invisi- ble in African society (Guido 13).
Invisible, too, had been FGM. But breaking taboo has its price, and Walker suffered for her courage. Was she still ill at ease with the topic more than a decade later? Would her retirement be permanent? I asked Efua Dorkenoo, OBE, adviser and participant in Warrior Marks, if she knew why Alice had stopped campaigning. After all, I thought, Walker in- tervenes for other, important abuses and “insists upon the necessary and strong relationship between spirituality, activism and art” (Griffin 23). Mainly, Efua told me, Alice had not forgotten the broad misrepresentation of her motives, the charges of ignorance of Africa and of self-interest. “That hurt her quite a lot, leading to the decision [to step back]. Her aim had always been to use her talent as an artist to bring the subject to the world. Having done that, maybe she feels justified in moving on to other things” (interview).
Typical of critics who misunderstand her aims, Jo Ellen Fair sees Walker’s presence in her documentary as “paternalism,” giving it an aura of “Westerners know best” (12). But Warrior Marks is a mixed- genre, as much a portrait of the artist-activist as a plea for girls. The “Amt für Frauen” [Women’s Buro] in Schöneberg, Berlin, agrees, prais- ing the documentary’s “poetic narrative.” Like a bildungsroman, “with- out recourse to bloody sensational scenes, [it] gets under your skin”
(Amt für Frauen). Behind Fair’s judgment, in contrast, is an uncon- scious but tenacious a priori: only Africans own this issue. Awa Thiam, for one, firmly disagrees. When asked, “How do you feel about us com- ing here and making this film?” she tells Pratibha Parmar: “‘You know, I work . . . in the belief [in] universal sisterhood, that we are all in this together” (Lolapress 36).7
Sadly, where allies should be, they often aren’t. Take, for instance, Yari Yari Pamberi, that remarkable gathering at New York University in October 2004, and Walker’s presentation at the end of a star-studded panel. Not a word was spoken about FGM, this omission of a piece with Ousmane Sembene’s Moolaadé having been on the conference schedule but taken off. Lincoln Center provided a better venue. To his credit, as he announced the venue change, host and organizer Manthia Diawara gave a few militant words to FGM. But as recently as 2004, the elite of the African and African-American intelligentsia continued tight-lipped over torture.8
How different has been the reception in Europe, particularly in Ger- many, where more than 20,000 African girls are at risk. Walker’s input has not only been welcomed but acted upon. For instance, following a major interpolation in 1998, Walker is named by the Bundestag as an in- spiration in asylum debates.9The decision to offer sanctuary to African
women fleeing the threat of excision is, in part, based on Walker’s work. “In many respects, genital mutilation resembles torture and violates the human right to bodily integrity,” the Bundestag agrees (Drucksache 14/5285). And the document goes on: “Human rights organizations like Terre des Femmes and human rights activists like Alice Walker have been pushing the theme into public awareness for years.” Footnoted is “Walker, Alice/Parmar, Pratibha, Narben oder die Beschneidung der weib-
lichen Sexualität, Hamburg 1996,” the German translation of Warrior Marks.
What’s more, at a preparatory multipartisan hearing organized by the Green Party in Bonn, Dr. Angelika Köster-Lossack, MdB (Member of Par- liament) embedded the German title of Walker’s film—Narben [Scars]— in the title of her talk. Terres des Femmes, the German NGO advocating for women’s human rights commended by the Bundestag, took as its motto directly from Walker: “Resistance is the secret of joy,” the closing lines of Possessing the Secret of Joy. Alice Schwarzer, Germany’s “first” feminist and editor of EMMA, has featured Walker and Narben in her magazine’s pages. In 1996, Christa Müller, wife of Oskar Lafontaine, for- mer head of the Social Democratic Party, advertised Narben on the pro- gram of her association’s inaugural conference, the keynote address de- livered by FORWARD’S Comfort Ottah who appears in Walker’s film. In fact, Warrior Marks has been distributed throughout the nation; nearly
every major university and gymnasium has it in its archives or has shown it at film festivals and other events (Levin “Alice” 246).
This astonishing diffusion and approval have not been due to suppres- sion of resident African women’s voices, for their opinions have been sought. They are engaged in many of the NGOs feeding into governmental agencies concerned with refugees, foreign aid, and women. Finally, gov- ernment has accepted the responsibility of protection, even if there remains a great deal to be done toward implementation. Indeed, a network for all groups working on FGM within Germany and abroad, INTEGRA,10held its
inaugural conference in Berlin on December 12–13, 2006. It acts under the patronage of none other than the president of Germany, Dr. Horst Köhler.
In conclusion, what has made such a difference in reception? Why should Alice Walker be shunned in the United States for dealing with this issue but celebrated in Europe, especially in Germany? Reasons are, of course, complex, and have to do with the development of the women’s movement on both continents; on what has been learned, in Germany, from the Holocaust; on what is permitted in terms of who may speak “for” whom, and on the preference for human rights discourse in Europe as opposed to poststructuralist shattering of needed coalitions in the United States with its stubborn, divisive, essentialist stance on “race.” Though no one will argue the absence of racism in Europe, the history of its institutionalization is very, very different—and has led to a striking distinction in Alice Walker’s influence on movements against FGM.