Possessing the Secret of Joy - Alice Walker [56]
Their biggest fear is that they will have to kill their sons, she says angrily. Even if they themselves almost died the first time a man broke into their bodies, they want to be told it was a minor hurt, the same that all women feel, that their daughters will barely notice, and cease, over time, to remember. If I tell them that, it makes it almost possible for them not to completely despise their sons.
For the pain they inflict.
Yes. Breaking into someone else’s daughter. Just as another woman’s son breaks into theirs.
But the sons know nothing of what is done to women. They only know they’re supposed to be men enough to break into the woman’s body. They often hurt themselves trying. I learned this from Adam, I say, whose father used to treat them for bruises and lacerations.
M’Lissa looks at me coolly.
I squirm under her gaze.
It was also very hard for Adam and me, I say. You’d sewed me so tight, an ant would have had difficulty crawling in.
Oh, M’Lissa says, You were not so tight as that! There are women walking around today who’ve paid the tsungas to make them tighter than that! After each birth of a child they do it. More than once, more than twice, more than three times, they’ve had it done. Each time tighter than before.
But it hurts so much, I say.
The bitches are used to it, she says. And it is true, you know, the men like it tight. Fighting. Don’t think the women never receive pleasure, either, says M’Lissa.
I never have, I say.
That is your own fault, she says. The pleasure a woman receives comes from her own brain. The brain sends it to any spot a lover can touch.
Then why is it that it is a woman’s vulva that is destroyed? I ask. “Bathed,” as they say, “cleaned off,” I ask. And not her shoulders or her neck? Not her breasts?
While M’Lissa is pondering this, I recall the feeling of a banished sensation.
I did have pleasure, once or twice, after my “bath,” I say.
Yes? she says.
But my pleasure shamed me.
Ah, says M’Lissa, your man gave it to you from behind. What is shameful about that? That is how boys do it to each other while waiting for the girl’s dowry to be raised. Dowry raising takes such a long time, what can you expect them to do?
My pleasure angered me, I say. It made me hate my husband.
It was pleasure, wasn’t it?
I felt I had been made into something other than myself.
You had been made into a woman! says M’Lissa. It is only because a woman is made into a woman that a man becomes a man. Surely you know that!
My husband was a man already.
True, says M’Lissa, but perhaps he did not know it.
PART NINETEEN
OLIVIA
IN THE PRISON, now that the date of execution is set—the appeal failed; no word from America—Tashi is treated less like a condemned murderer and more like an honored guest. Within the prison she is permitted freedom. Her days are busy. There are visits from women’s groups and the foreign press. Photographers from every part of the world come to snap her picture.
Through it all, she flourishes, her alert face kind and reflective, angry and disgusted by turns. Each morning she works with me on the AIDS floor, feeding, bathing or simply touching the patients. It is so crowded there’s barely room to squat between mats. Adam and the boys have taken responsibility for feeding the children; bringing in hot meals from the kitchen of our rented house. This is a relief to their parents and older siblings, those that are left, and they thank us gravely with their eyes.
No one has any idea why he or she is sick. That’s the most difficult thing. Witnessing their incomprehension. Their dumb patience, as they wait for death. It is their animal-like ignorance and acceptance that most angers Tashi, perhaps because she is reminded of herself. She calls it, scornfully, the assigned role of the African: to suffer, to die, and not know why.
Why, she wants to know, do mainly homosexual men and intravenous drug users get the disease in America, while here there are as many women dying as men? Who infects the children? Why are