Possessing the Secret of Joy - Alice Walker [53]
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