Possessing the Secret of Joy - Alice Walker [29]
What exactly is this procedure? she asked, briskly.
I was reminded of a quality in African-American women that I did not like at all. A bluntness. A going to the heart of the matter even if it gave everyone concerned a heart attack. Rarely did black women in America exhibit the graceful subtlety of the African woman. Had slavery given them this? Suddenly a story involving Raye popped into my mind: I saw her clearly as she would have been in the nineteenth century, the eighteenth, the seventeenth, the sixteenth, the fifteenth… Her hands on her hips, her breasts thrust out. She is very black, as black as I am. “Listen, cracker,” she is saying, “did you sell my child or not?” The “cracker” whines, “But listen, Louella, it was my child too!” The minute he turns his back, she picks up a huge boulder, exactly like the one that is in my throat, and… But I drag myself back from this scene.
Don’t you have my file? I asked, annoyed. I was sure The Old Man sent it before he died. On the other hand, this was a question he’d never asked me. I’d said “circumcision” to him and he’d seemed completely satisfied; as if he knew exactly what was implied. Now I wondered: had he understood?
I have your file, said Raye, tapping its bulging gray cover with a silver-painted nail and ignoring my attitude. I am ignorant about this practice, though, and would like to learn about it from you. She paused, glanced into the folder. For instance, something I’ve always wondered is whether the exact same thing is done to every woman. Or is there variation? Your sister… Dura’s clitoris was excised, but was something else done too, that made it more likely that she would bleed to death?
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