Anything We Love Can Be Saved Read online

  In the center of the long table is the major chief of the Northern Region of Ghana. He is a large man, forthright and jovial, dressed half in Ghanaian, half in Western, clothes. He jokes easily with Veronica, acting mistress of ceremonies: they apparently grew up in the same village and went to school together. He evokes laughter and applause when he bluntly asks: “If God in his goodness gave woman a clitoris, who are we to take it away?” He also calls circumcisers “butchers” and says they should all be put in jail.

  Next, a judge from the high court painstakingly explains why the Ghanaian constitution does not guarantee the right to circumcise children, as some have apparently claimed, even though it emphasizes the need to uphold cultural traditions. Since the constitution stresses that the cultural traditions to be upheld must be “enjoyed,” any ritual that causes pain is by its nature left out. He is followed by a government minister who calls the practice of FGM dangerous, evil, and a blight on the conscience of Africa.

  It is a strong panel. Conscientious and clear. I feel relieved, though I personally believe it is retraining for gainful employment that the mostly female circumcisers need, not imprisonment. Pratibha looks over at me from where she’s panning the audience. It means a lot to us to hear strong words against FGM from African men.

  I have been disoriented by the long flight, the smothering heat, the food, and the challenging accommodations. Not to mention the depression I feel witnessing the widespread poverty and misery of Ghana, a country that, at the time it achieved its independence from Britain, in the late Fifties, showed so much promise. Hungry children, ragged adults, beggars, and hustlers are everywhere; the land itself seems under a blight. We have been told that the very climate has changed in the last several years, that the sun is hotter than it has been in anyone’s lifetime, and that the misapplication of artificial fertilizer imported from the West has destroyed Ghana’s most fertile areas. The combination of heat and chemical fertilizer has turned what was once verdant land into a desert. To be absorbed also is the meaning of the looming, malevolent slave “castles” we have visited in Cape Coast, through whose dungeons so many of our African ancestors passed. As well as the realization that the rain forest of Ghana—the “jungle” African Americans were taught to be thankful to have been delivered from, via enslavement—was destroyed, its trees cut down and shipped to Europe, long before saving the rain forest became an issue anywhere in the world. It has been difficult to sleep, thinking of all this, but also because of mosquitoes, unstable beds, and air conditioners that, when working, sound like trucks.

  On the day that I’m to speak I am out under a tree interviewing Zan and have to be fetched. That I was chosen to speak on “Cultural and Modern Development in FGM” had completely slipped my mind. “Maybe it was the title,” I say to the group. “I would never go near a subject as general as that!” Instead I talk about how, as a child, I became aware of violence against women. The group groans as one when I say that as a thirteen-year-old I saw the body of a woman whose husband had shot off half her face. I speak of my determination to remember her, to grow up and go to school and learn how to tell her story. How the indelible moment in which I saw she had newspaper stuck in a hole in her shoe was the moment when, just at puberty, I became a novelist. I talk about my mystification in Kenya, years later, when the subject of FGM was discussed among the people I was working with, building a school. I was by then twenty, but nothing in my own experience had prepared me to understand female genital mutilation. It took me years, I say, just to gather my nerve to attempt to write about it.

  My presentation is followed by that of the Imam, spiritual leader of the region’s Muslims. Slender and smiling, somewhat coy, he wears a white robe and flowing headdress. A necklace whose pendant is a lock of stringy blond hair of some kind hangs from his neck. He seems less sure than the other men that FGM should be abolished, though his presence means he is leaning in that direction. He tells a horrific story about the beginning of circumcision which he claims is written in the Muslim’s “secret book.”

  In the Bible, he says, it is recognized as the story of Sarah and Hagar, Abraham’s wife and his concubine. But in the “secret book” of the Muslims (not the Koran) there is a significant twist to the story. In the Bible, Sarah demands that Abraham banish Hagar and her son, Ishmael, to the wilderness, as Hagar’s punishment for having a son by Abraham. But in the “secret book” of the Muslims Sarah deepens her revenge.

  To atone for the sin of begetting a son by the unfortunate servant Hagar—and never mind that this was Sarah’s idea, since she, at the time, could not become pregnant—Abraham offers to destroy Hagar’s beauty. Traditionally, the Imam explains calmly, to destroy a woman’s beauty you must cut her in three places. He raises his finger to his nose, then to each ear. But, he says, Sarah showed mercy to Hagar, and asked that she be circumcised, and instead of having her ears cut off, her ears were pierced. And, joked the Imam, Hagar could now wear gold earrings!

  Traditionally, African women who are Christian identify with Hagar. I could feel this identification—a stunned, offended silence—in the room.

  Until this moment I had been studying the Imam hopefully. Now I thought instead that perhaps this tale from the “secret book” of the Muslims explained not only the entrenched nature of genital mutilation in many Muslim cultures but also the original use of the chador, the black head-to-toe shroudlike garment that women in many Muslim cultures are still forced to wear. Especially the use of the veil.

  Sitting in that bare, narrow room, on a broken chair that wobbled each time I moved, my brain steamed flat by the stifling heat of a part of the world I’d never thought of visiting before, I found myself transported back to my own childhood in Georgia, sitting on the creaking swing that graced our front porch, reading a comic book whose white male Western hero was enchanted by the seductive gaze of a young woman in purdah in whatever foreign land the action transpired. For days, months, years, this beautiful woman eludes him, until finally, one blessed day, worn down by his begging, she decides to believe he truly loves her and therefore agrees to remove her veil. He is shocked to discover that she has no nose, and that what is left of her face under the veil is covered with flies. Of course the Western would-be lover runs screaming back to his own culture, as I ran screaming to my mother. “What is leprosy?” I asked her, pointing at the word in the comic book. Together we looked it up in my dictionary. “A disease that eats away the body,” we read.

  But now I thought: They’ve lied about everything. Of course they’ve lied about the chador. Purdah. The veil. Perhaps it wasn’t sickness or woman’s seductive and evil visage the veil was intended to cover, but the marks of violence.

  If you wanted to possess a beautiful woman, your fifth or sixth bride, for instance, and she refused you, or preferred another, or made faces and disgusted grunts and groans while being raped by you, or fought back, and if you, in a fit of rage, cut off her ears and her nose, as your “secret book” said you could, what then did you do? Especially if she had become the mother of your sons?

  You insisted, I think, that she cover her wounds so that you would never have to see them. Or be reminded daily of her dislike of you and of what you had done in response. A thousand years later her descendant daughter would think it the female face itself that caused offense, not what had “traditionally” been done to it.

  I was suddenly more grateful than ever that I had been able to attend this workshop on FGM. Otherwise I would have missed the Imam’s chilling story, and this bit of the puzzle of the ancient oppression of women might have eluded me.

  Response to our film—though sometimes hostile in the West—was, in this setting, among grassroots activists working to abolish the practice of FGM, overwhelmingly affirming. As was reaction to Warrior Marks, the book; a lone copy passed from hand to hand during the workshop, amid entreaties that we have it distributed widely in Africa—which would be a major feat, since there are no distribution networks in areas where genita
l mutilation is most widely established, and almost no publishing houses—and that it be translated into French (millions of mutilated women are French-speaking)—a lesser, but still formidable challenge.

  Pratibha and I left the gathering feeling optimistic, nonetheless. A pan-African assault on the practice of FGM marks a major break with its past that Africa is poised to attempt. One that can only mean a strengthening of the African people and of the continent. The abolitionists at the workshop, women and men, struck us as uncommonly brave, trustworthy, dedicated, and sincere. We found ourselves feeling stronger in our own commitment to the health and happiness of children and women around the globe, and immensely heartened by the presence of the men who’ve come to join this particular struggle.

  As we approach the millennium I think it is necessary to consider that the human race, like the living organisms that left the oceans for dry land, is at the beginning of learning an entirely new and different way to be on the planet. The way of conscious harmlessness. I view the commonplace, remarkably mindless attacks on the bodies of children and women everywhere in the world as a symptom of the race’s collective madness, which stems, I think, from its insufficiently examined hatred of itself. A hatred that has never seemed to have sufficient cause, since so much hateful behavior, male to female, female to male, parent to child, humans to animals and the environment, has been cunningly hidden beneath the word “taboo,” recorded, if at all, in “secret books” only a few male clergy could read. Ignorant of our true, rather than our imagined, glorified past, we have been plagued by an inexplicable anxiety, often violently expressed against ourselves.

  But, as we have now all seen, mutilated women, in Africa and elsewhere, are increasingly mirroring a mutilated world. For the earth to know health and happiness, this violence against women must stop. We cannot care for the environment around us, our self-designated role from the beginning, if we are in excruciating pain.

  Like Zan, I believe that if the women of the world were comfortable, so would the world be. In fact, I know this in my bones. Out of a woman’s security—which always means free agency in society, sexual and spiritual autonomy, as well as the well-being of her children and the sanctity of her home—comes ultimate security for the world. Archaeological findings in ruins of matristic, prepatriarchal societies bear this out. Evidence shows that for thousands of years before male domination of Earth, women headed vibrant cultures that traded, reasoned, and celebrated with each other without the need to erect forts or walls.

  Certainly the peacefulness Zan identified in me, a hard-won, not-every-minute-present peacefulness, to be sure, springs from my utter lack of interest in maiming, starving, killing, conquering, or otherwise inflicting humiliation and suffering on anyone or anything.

  We will end the practice of female genital mutilation, and that of the facial scarring of children as well, because there are countless others in the world who also lack the impulse to harm, and who share instead the desire to cherish and to make whole. It will be a long struggle, waged neither with weapons nor words of blame, but rather with the understanding, patience, and commitment of a few thousand peaceful women—and men like Zan—who deeply respect women and love children, who are, after all, the ultimate foundation of a human future.

  This conference took place in April of 1996.

  Anything We Love

  Can Be Saved

  THE RESURRECTION OF ZORA NEALE

  HURSTON AND HER WORK

  An address delivered at the First Annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival, Eatonville, Florida, January 26, 1990.

  Diamond Ash

  My first visit to Eatonville was on August 15, 1973, seventeen years ago. I was twenty-eight, my daughter, Rebecca, three. Sometimes she tells me of the pain she felt in childhood because I was so often working and not to be distracted, or off on some mysterious pilgrimage, the importance of which, next to herself, she could not understand. This trip to Eatonville, not one of whose living inhabitants I knew, represented such a pilgrimage, one that my small, necessarily stoic child would have to wait years to comprehend.

  But at the time, I felt there was no alternative. I had read Robert Hemenway’s thoughtful and sensitive biography of Zora Neale Hurston, after loving and teaching her work for a number of years, and I could not bear that she did not have a known grave. After all, with her pen she had erected a monument to the African-American and African-AmerIndian common people both she and I are descended from. After reading Hurston, anyone coming to the United States would know exactly where to go to find the remains of the culture that kept Southern black people going through centuries of white oppression. They could find what was left of the music; they could find what was left of the speech; they could find what was left of the dancing (I remember wanting to shout with joy to see that Zora, in one of her books, mentioned the “moochie,” a dance that scandalized—and titillated—the elders in my community when I was a very small child, and that I had never seen mentioned anywhere); they could find what was left of the work, the people’s relationship to the earth and to animals; they could find what was left of the orchards, the gardens, and the fields; they could find what was left of the prayer.

  I will never forget reading Zora and seeing for the first time, written down, the prayer that my father, and all the old elders before him, prayed in church. The one that thanked God that the cover on his bed the night before was not his winding sheet, nor his bed itself his cooling board. When I read this prayer, I saw again the deeply sincere praying face of my father, and relived my own awareness of his passion, his gratitude for life, and his humbleness.

  Nor will I forget finding a character in Zora’s work called Shug. It is what my “outside” grandmother, my grandfather’s lover and mother of two of my aunts, was called. It is also the nickname of an aunt, Malsenior, for whom I was named. On any page in Zora’s work I was likely to see something or someone I recognized; reading her tales of adventure and risk became an act of self-recognition and affirmation I’d experienced but rarely before.

  Reading her, I saw for the first time my own specific culture, and recognized it as such, with its humor always striving to be equal to its pain, and I felt as if, indeed, I had been given a map that led to the remains of my literary country. The old country, as it were. Her characters spoke the language I’d heard the elders speaking all my life. Her work chronicled the behavior of the elders I’d witnessed. And she did not condescend to them, and she did not apologize for them, and she was them, delightedly.

  It was very hot, my first visit to Eatonville. As hot in Florida as it had been in Jackson, Mississippi, which I’d left early that morning, and where my small daughter remained, in the care of her father and her preschool teacher, Mrs. Cornelius. I thought of Rebecca as Charlotte Hunt and I drove about Eatonville and, later, Fort Pierce on our mission. I wanted to mark Zora’s grave so that one day all our daughters and sons would be able to locate the remains of a human mountain in Florida’s and America’s so frequently flat terrain.

  Today, knowing as I do the vanity of stones, their true impermanence, the pyramids notwithstanding, I would perhaps do things differently, but at the time my passionately held intention to erect a reminder of a heroic life indicated the best that I knew. And we were successful, I think, Charlotte Hunt and I, for we lifted from ourselves the pall of embarrassment at our people’s negligence. We acted for Zora, yes, but in a way that relieved us of the shame of inactivity. Paying homage to her, memorializing her light, her struggle, and her end, brought us peace.

  At least it brought me peace. I should perhaps not attempt to speak for Charlotte, who volunteered to be guide and companion to me. And yet I felt that Charlotte, too, loved Zora’s spirit and was no less concerned than I that her body not seem to have been thrown away.

  But what is a dead body, what are bones, even of a loved one? If you mixed Zora’s bones with those of Governor Bilbo, for many years an especially racist oppressor of black people in Mississippi and, psycholog
ically, of the whole country, the untrained eye would not be able to tell them apart. And nature, in its wisdom, has made sure that the one thing required of all dead things is unfailingly accomplished. That requirement is that they return to the earth, which in fact, even as living bodies, they have never left. It matters little, therefore, where our bodies finally lie, and how or whether their resting places are marked—I speak now of the dead, not of the living, who have their own needs and project those onto the dead—for our ultimate end, blending with the matter of the earth, is inevitable and universal. I hope, myself, to become ash that is mixed with the decomposing richness of my compost heap, that I may become flowers, trees, and vegetables. It would please me to present the perfect mystery of myself, prior to being consumed by whomever, or whatever, as rutabaga or carrot. Sunflower or pecan tree. Eggplant.

  The spirit, too, if we are lucky, is sometimes ground to ash by the trials of life and tossed on the collective soul’s compost heap. That is what has happened to what we have come to know as Zora. That is why we are here today, honoring her, startled, perhaps, by the degree of nourishment each of us has gained from her, startling in our diversity.

  Zora Hurston’s ash was diamond ash.