“If one womyn told the truth about her life…/The world would
split open.” – Muriel Rukeyser, “Kathe Kollwitz”
So, a lot of things have been going through my head this (as
of Wednesday, March 7!) second month of being a Peace Corps volunteer in
Mali. All of it needs an
incredibly important preface, as well
as a personal note for every one
of you amazing people who takes the time to read my thoughts and experiences
here and catch up with me through my written words.
Personal Note: Peace
Corps does a really thorough job of telling us volunteers not to freak you all
out. They, as a 50 year-old
organization, know that we go through a lot—of “ups” and “downs” with our jobs
here, wondering why we’re here and whether or not we’ll be effective, “culture
shock” – which is, I only now really understand, a really viable term for what it
tries to capture, and a seeming crossroads with our cultures we came from in
the United States versus the culture we are assigned to, to live in, work in,
and presumably love, at least enough to want to help it sustainably develop. If you want to read about the history
of the Peace Corps, a good book, which I might have mentioned in my Either
you get it at once, or there’s no use trying to explain it to you, Skip post, is “When the World Calls,” a good biased and
unbiased look at the past 50 years of the Peace Corps. It gives a lot of insight as to why the
Peace Corps might tell us during our training in Mali, that we “must read, and
reread, and then read again” everything we write to anybody, including hand-written letters, e-mails, facebook
postings and messages, and especially blogs, before putting it out to you all.
The big reason is that, some days, I might really dislike
some things here, and while that’s completely fair of humyn beings to do—we
each go through our own interactions with the world and have different
experiences that cause us to like or dislike certain aspects of it, especially
when it’s new to us—one of the big goals of Peace Corps is bringing our
experiences, insights, and new-found knowledge about these places we’re sent
to, home to our friends and family in the States. And if I call you, even if I really need to, when I’m
freaking out and having an emotional breakdown in Ziangolodougou, because of
something I’ve seen or been thinking about that didn’t agree with me at all,
you’ll be a. freaked out and want me to
come home right that instant and
wonder what I got myself into,
but b. getting a picture of Mali that doesn’t do it justice. Just think of a really horrible day
that you have in the States: you almost get into a car accident with a guy that
you swear was an absolute
moron, get butted in front of at the
supermarket on that one day it
seems like everybody just needs
to buy something and you end up
waiting for what feels like hours,
you see a person kick their dog when it wanders off the sidewalk during its
walk, and a kid next to you on that day you had to go to the DMV just wouldn’t stop crying, and then someone calls you and asks, “How’s the
States?” You would make them never
want to come! So, I want everyone, as does Peace Corps, to get something
out of the incredible experience in cross-cultural exchange and sustainable
development work that I am having by learning about Mali not only on my bad
days.
For this reason, I go through my blogs and messages over
and over again to make sure that I’m
presenting a fair enough view of what I’m seeing, beyond my cultural opinions
and biases and really showing you something of a balanced perspective. Mali is a beautiful country with an incredibly
rich history (which, by the way, if you want to cheat and learn about quickly,
you can do at the Mali wikipedia page—it’s pretty good). It’s cultural traditions are varied and
studied and people travel from around the world to see them. That said, “cultural relativism,” or
the propensity to say that some things are not universally better than others,
but rather culturally “different,” is an excuse for apathy about practices in
certain cultures that can be grossly inappropriate. This post will be about some things I’ve seen that I
consider grossly inappropriate on a humyn rights level, though I hope that it
is not offensive. I respect Malian
values and traditions to a certain extent, as with any culture, but some things
I have seen here are humyn rights violations that must be discussed with others
in order to bring about change. It
is in that spirit that I am writing this post now.
Preface: This post,
I say, is about “womyn.” Two
things. One, I have spelled
woman/women as “womyn” since my senior year in high school, and forget that I
do it pretty frequently because it comes as second nature to me now. The reason why is because I do not
believe that the words “man” and “men” need to exist to construct the
linguistically-communicated idea for “womyn.” Language is an incredibly important extension of how we see
our world, and unconsciously—and consciously—reinforces certain cultural values
that are frequently outdated. This
is because language has to start somewhere, but, like countries’ laws and
precedents, has to evolve to be just.
Thus, our language changes kid of slowly and does not match progress
much of the time. Examples are how
Americans still use the term “gypped” when they feel as though they’ve been
“swindled” or “screwed,” even though the term “gypped” is a derogatory slur about
gypsies. (Yeah, and if you didn’t
know that, by the way, you should stop using it!) I take language very seriously because changing how you
speak is a clearly noticeable way to change your behaviour purposefully that
makes people think about their world.
So, instead of saying “kill two birds with one stone,” I say “bathe two
birds with one bath”; instead of saying “I bombed that test,” I simply say
“Wow, I fucked up.” And, instead
of spelling “womyn” the way I know it “should” be spelled, I argue that it
purposefully should not be spelled that way.
Two, I acknowledge that misogyny is not only about
womyn. Gender is a problematic
construct. But that sentence
inandofitself is bourgeois and vague, so lemme explain: gender and sex are two
different things. Sex is “what’s
between the legs,” or the biological markers that would make you female or
male; gender is “what’s between the ears,” or the roles assigned to us based on
our presumed sex. Sex caused me to be born with a uterus
and, because I get a period and am fertile, to possibly (hopefully not any time
soon) have a baby one day. Gender
caused me to be expected to dress “well,” wear a bra whenever in public, be
thin and therefore somewhat attractive, be “modest,” not “be a bitch” or rather
just to not be assertive in work situations, and to not laugh too loud or seem
too outlandish, or rather, to be a “lady” in good company.
Gender forces people into one of three categories: male,
female, or somewhere problematically in between. Thus, if you’re a man, you’re a man, but if you’re perceived
as having “feminine” characteristics, like speaking softly, with a lisp, being
“nice,” dressing a little too well, then
you must not be a man: you’re gay—problematically in between men and
womyn. If you’re a womyn, you’re a
womyn, but if you wear jeans that are a little too baggy (in the US), have a
lower voice, act assertively, speak your mind freely, and look people directly
in the eyes when you speak to them, then you’re not a good girl: you’re either
gay, a tomboy, or androgynous, scary even, and entirely unattractive.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard from people—and
their parents!—“Oh, I had a feeling you were gay. I just knew it.”
And when I ask what they “know” and how they “know” “it,” they always
say, “Oh, it’s just the way you are, you act, you know. I just knew.” I.e., I act like a man with my confidence, don’t I? The answer is always a ‘yes’ without
shame—being raised by a man, I project a certain type of confidence that I have
come to realize is something womyn are not typically raised to embody: innate
confidence without fear of being told to “be a lady.” Because men don’t ever have this fear, because of gender. And trust me, some people really
hate it. I got hate mail in
university for being “fat” and a “faggot,” have been interrupted rudely and
silenced at numerous social occasions—by both “men” and “womyn,” told to “shut
up” in classroom discussions in high school without teachers reprimanding
students for these words, and know that some people just outright don’t like me
for this part of what people see as my general “air.”
All going to explain what I mean when I say, gender is a
problematic construct. It’s not
just about womyn—it’s about a social system that forces us to either act within
certain social boundaries and rules or to be perceived of as abnormal, and
therefore scrutinized as such. Furthermore, it makes this social
scrutiny acceptable!
But, here in Mali, gender roles are more rigid than I have
perceived them to be in any other place I have lived, the US, Kenya, Brazil,
and short stints in South Africa and Vietnam combined. Thus, when I call this post a “plea for
womyn,” I’m calling it a plea for womyn because of how people perceived of as
womyn are treated. I have seen
very few instances of people breaking gender lines here, because, insofar as I
can see, the social consequences are far greater than they are in the US for
doing so. Really, even to see a
womyn wearing pants is something rarely
seen (I’ve seen womyn wearing pants less than ten times since I’ve come here
who are Malian). So when I say
it’s a plea for “womyn,” I mean that this is a plea for rights regardless of
gender. I’m framing it as a plea
for “womyn” in honour of the people I live with here who identify as “womyn”
and do not get treated with respect because of this identity.
It ain’t all ‘bout who we call “womyn,” ya dig?
Lastly, keep in mind that the vast majority of my opinions
that I hold are based on public health.
If it doesn’t help people be healthy, than it’s bad. Simple, right? I think the world would be far better
if that were our criterion for bad and good: not religion, not subjective
biases, but health. Because you
deserve to be healthy, regardless of who you are. You should be born in good health, and your health is nobody
else’s but yours’ from the day you’re born to the day you die, and something to
be respected as such. It is not a
commodity that should be paid for: it is your body, your mind, yourself. Your health is important, and things
should always promote it, because I’ll be damned, if all things aside, there
isn’t enough madness in this world working against us all staying sane that you
don’t deserve to at least make it to your 70th birthday.
So, to begin!
The quote at the beginning of this post is, I think, one of the most
beautiful things I’ve ever heard.
I read it in a book on (get this, it’s kind of crazy to think about)
Jewish Orthodox Lesbians and Queer Womyn, called “Keep Your Wives Away From
Them: Orthodox Women, Unorthodox Desires.” I cried when I read it. It’s been used as a kind of feminist anthem, and there are
loads of reasons why. First being,
womyn create people. They
definitely do it with the invaluable asset of men’s help in conception, but afterwards,
it’s called “delivery” because they effing deliver people to the world Womyn
are incredibly powerful types of people, even when they can’t give birth/choose
not to. But women, for the
perceived role of giving birth, are treated like baby machines and emotionally
fragile parts of our species that are too connected to child-bearing and
feelings that children and womyn supposedly only have. And while it’s easy to see that that’s
ridiculous when it’s spelled out all simply and plain like that, it’s less easy
to see how little we actually listen to womyn and their lives and ideas and
truths. It’s for this reason that
I think the quote is so profound: we even just one womyn told herself, G-d, can you imagine how powerful it
would be to hear? If everyone were
listening with the respect she deserved?
If a part of a species that is frequently belittled and considered
lesser-than could have one moment of our time to talk about what they’ve seen,
how much would we learn and what would we say afterward? My G-d, the world might split open! Those words, that noise could break our perspectives
down. And this quote really came
home to me when I witnessed my first two births in site this past month. Coming back to that soon.
So, there’s this phrase in French called “chosification.” I
love it. It translates directly as
“thing-ification.” We have a word for this is English—it’s
“subjectification,” or the
making of something into a subject instead of a living thing. I like “chosification” better, because “subject” is a really nice word
for what you do when you thing-ify something: you make it into a “thing,” a
“play thing,” “your thing,” whatever “thing” you want it to be. We do this with womyn. We
“thing-ify” them, make them into malleable objects that can be held up to
standards that inanimate things usually are: this womyn is “good,” “not good
enough,” I need “a better one,” she’s “cheap,” she’s “fancy,” she’s “used up.”
Now, I know we all hold everyone to certain standards, men
included. The difference is in how strictly we perceive of those
standards. I.e., I expect men to
be “chivalrous” sometimes, but the reality is, even if a man isn’t “chivalrous”
or seen as “well-meaning,” I’ll listen to him in any conversation over a womyn
and most likely take him more seriously.
This is something I’ve come to terms with gradually in order to change
it within myself. It is important
to acknowledge: we are taught from childhood that men have more social value
than womyn, and therefore are allowed to say more and expected to say better,
more sensible things. And that’s
why they get paid more for the same work, and higher positions than womyn with
the same merits and experience.
When a womyn doesn’t act “like a womyn should,” wow, do we all talk
about it behind her back! She’s a
thing to be scrutinized—if she’s not “acting right,” she’s kind of “broken,”
isn’t she?
And it’s something to talk about. She needs to “act right,” and G-d forbid if anything happens
to her, but a lot of the time, she was just “asking for it,” be it that
demotion, losing her job, losing custody of her children, getting sexually
harassed, or, again, G-d forbid, getting sexually assaulted. In my work I have done (places listed
below, and if you ever think about making donations anywhere, feel free to
shoot any one of these organizations a call and ask how you can help, either
with your time or money—they’re all awesome and do great things!), in sexual
assault, domestic violence, sexual health education, and restraining order
assistance, I’ve seen all types of victim-blaming and womyn-hating for things
that are not womyns’ fault.
Case in point: womyn can wear whatever they want. People shouldn’t rape them. Womyn who wear certain things, walk
alone at night, take a shower, do anything, do not “deserve” to or “ask” to get
raped. That’s ridiculous. No. Rapists shouldn’t rape people. Where have we gotten to in our society’s consciousness where
rapists are considered to not be at fault? It’s disgusting, and should give us all considerable
pause. Rape is a war against womyn
that says, “This is your place—stay in it.” It does not need to be done to every womyn for her to know
her “place.” That is why it is a
war that has continued for so long—it’s private and shameful, and therefore a
war that’s not discussed even though it happens all the time and therefore does
not make perpetrators suffer great losses most of the time (except a loss of
dignity, but that’s nothing near what rapists deserve as punishment for their
crime), and it’s incredibly effective in maintaining a social hierarchy that
exalts perceived masculinity, and that makes masculine people happy. But I digress.
In studies where people in management situations are
described as telling people how it is and firing people when they need to, as
well as being straight-forward and attentive to rules, when described as men,
they are described by participants as “assertive,” and when described as womyn,
for the same actions, they are described
as “bitchy” and “aggressive.”
These responses come from social conditioning that starts young for
seeing the social value of womyn as lesser than men. In the US, it starts when boys answer most of the questions
in classrooms and girls who do the same are seen as “gross,” “nerdy,” “weird,”
and “ugly.” It continues as girls
who aren’t stick-thin and subscribe to standards of beauty are seen as “cows,”
various other animals, and rendered basically invisible. As girls who study a lot are as
well. And eventually, it becomes
the big question everyone asks me, as soon as I tell them I have a job: “So,
are you seeing anybody?” (Never
mind that I’m leaving the country for two years and it’d be a little strange if
I just up and decided to start “seeing somebody” right before I left, or even
keep it going, arguably) Because
the job isn’t enough—the social validation comes when this pretty girl who’s
doing some good things finds a good (Jewish) boy!
In Mali, there is also social conditioning protocol. And it might just be because I’m
culturally biased to think that our conditioning is not extreme—when, I must
reinforce, it is, if it renders anyone
less of a person and more a “thing” than others—but I see the social
conditioning surrounding gender in Mali to be incredibly extreme, and even would venture so far as to call it
dangerous.
It started a couple weeks before I left for Mali. In October, Newsweek did an article on
the “Top 10 Best and Worst Countries for Womyn,” and Mali turned up as 5th
worst. There were three major reasons I can remember why:
- Legislation
brought up (not even passed) in 2007 to allow womyn basically to not
follow their husbands’ decisions caused riots by both men and womyn
throughout Mali.
- (I
think this was reason #2, but maybe it’s just another obvious reason)
Literacy rates are at 33% across the country, but womyn do not go to
school nearly as much or as long as men do. Case in point: a volunteer told us during training that
when a man she was working with in her village said that womyn were going
to school now, he cited an example of 6 womyn in a class of over 30. This segues into a considerable
lack of female leadership in the country, from lawyers to government and
so on, in any jobs that make good, stable money.
- Female
Genital Mutilation is performed on
96% of womyn in Mali.
Now, point 3 needs a little explanation. Female Genital Mutilation, referred to as “FGM” in short by people in humyn rights work, and
“female circumcision” by others who argue that FGM is a cultural practice and
not mutilation, happens in 3 different ways. There is the “least severe,” which is the partial or total
removal of the clitoris; “excision,”
which is the total removal of the clitoris and partial or total removal of the
inner labia; and “infibulation,” the “most severe,” which is the total removal of
the clitoris, inner labia, part or all of the outer labia, and frequently, the
sewing up of the vagina to allow for the space of a matchstick to remain open,
intended to be “broken in” or ripped open by the womyn’s first sexual
experience with her husband. Excision is what 96% of womyn experience in Mali; thus, it
can be assumed, in the vast majority of cases, that most womyn in Mali that I
meet have undergone this ‘procedure.’
Note: I am painfully
aware that this conversation thing-ifies Malian womyns’ bodies as if I am
discussing animals’ bodies. This
is why this is most likely the only post I will write at all addressing FGM:
it’s incredibly important to discuss, but if you’re not apart of the culture that
largely practices it and are looking in, you end up discussing what has
happened and should happen to womyns’ bodies without them frequently being
present in those conversations, and that is wrong. So, I apologize sincerely if this comes across as an insensitive
way to discuss it. It just must be
explained to discuss the ways in which I have observed it might affect gender
relations and health in Mali.
Who doesn’t experience FGM? Mostly womyn in more
affluent relationships, who are also frequently the only wife in their marriage
(as I mentioned in my second post in Mali, polygamy is a common practice here,
and men usually have 2-4 wives, and it is customary linguistically for you to
ask “how many wives he has,” and
only to ask a womyn if she is married).
Also, womyn do not experience it in villages where the practice has been
addressed by Malian NGOs against it and stopped. There are villages where excision doesn’t take
place—supposedly my village is one where it happens far less frequently now than
before—and there are Malians who do not believe that FGM is a legitimate
practice. And there are several
reasons why it is definitively not a legitimate practice:
- The
clitoris is more sensitive than any other part on the humyn body, male or female. It is incredibly sensitive, and frequently the main way
womyn reach orgasm during sexual activity. Removing it is inhumane.
- Because
of the practice of polygamy and the cultural ideal of womyn having as many
children as possible so as to “stay in favour” with their husbands, womyn
have the capacity for significant pleasure taken away from them and are
then culturally and socially pressured into having several children, and
therefore having a lot of sexual interactions, with their husbands when it
is “their turn.” One must ask
if these sexual interactions are truly consensual for womyn who, as Malian
midwife Monique puts it in the book “Monique in the Mango Rains,” do not
experience “pleasure as great as a man’s.”
- It
occurs when womyn are girls.
By “girls,” I mean 5-10 years-old. There are lots of things we do to children without
giving them a choice: we send them to school, frequently make them go to
religious centers regularly or at least semi-regularly, and make them eat
vegetables. But these are all
things they can stop doing at some point if they please. Nobody can give people their
clitorises back.
- It’s
bad for womyns’ health. This
is my main point I emphasize in Mali. I have now seen 2 births, which I’ll talk about, again,
in a second, and have seen first hand as well as read about womyns’ birthing
experiences in Mali who have been subject to FGM: it makes birth harder
and more dangerous. And in a
country where the average womyn gives birth to 6-7 children, and the
maternal mortality rate is 1 in 12 births, it is of the utmost importance
that everything that can possibly get done in Mali happens so that womyn
stop dieing. FGM, thus, needs
to stop.
Now, I never talk about FGM in Mali unless it is with my
homologue Diakaliah or my matrone Mariam, who is now officially my bffl. And only when they bring it up. It is a practice that people regard as
religiously sanctioned in the Quran (religious book in Islam, as the bible is
in Christianity) and, more frequently, something that “makes womyn good wives.” It is not sanctioned in the Quran—Saudi Arabians do not practice FGM, FYI—and the idea that it “makes womyn
good wives” in a primarily polygamous society means that womyn who experience
great sexual pleasure will stray from their husbands, and that while men can
have many wives, womyn must only have one partner, remain “faithful” to that
one partner (though men with many wives are “faithful” because they are
married), and have their children.
Regardless of reasons, I know that most Malians (maybe ¾)
respect FGM and think that it is a good thing. And old, respected womyn in villages are the ones who
perform it on girls. It’s not as
clear-cut as you would think—when womyn are doing this practice to womyn, the
gray area in how to stop it is vast.
And, the movement must come from within Mali. I have absolutely no place in talking about it outside of a
health context, because I am a health volunteer, and not a cultural
imperialist, coming to peoples’ homes and telling them their centuries’ old
traditions are wrong. Malians are
living in a culturally rich and promising country, and lots of things are
happening here that show the beginnings of true development that will
last. Malians should be concerned
that FGM is happening, and stop it.
I have no place in that struggle other than to affirm Malians whose
opinions go against the practice and encourage them to do all the work they can
to stop it.
Also, if FGM enrages you, I would encourage you to put
that energy to amazing use and check out the following Malian NGOs working
against FGM:
-"Aid for the Development of Traditional
Medicine"/Aidemet
-Plan Mali (They did work in my village)
And I’ll add more to this list after my next big training
when I meet with more volunteers to discuss efforts in their communities that
they’ve seen as well.
This website is a great place to learn more and support a
good group too: http://www.stopexcision.net/about_fgm.htm
Anyways, like I said, big reasons why Newsweek named it the
5th worst country for womyn.
Now, there are other reasons, and things I have seen, that make
me believe Newsweek. Just to say
beforehand, there is a Gender and Development volunteer committee that I’m
going to get involved in after my next month of service, when my real work
begins here. That committee is a
bunch of individuals dedicated to gender being less screwed up in Mali, for
lack of a better way of generalizing it, and furthering development by what
revolutionary people I love in DC and Providence call “gender-fucking” things
up. They organize
take-your-daughters-to-work days, retreats, and weeks, where girls meet female
professionals, have pampering sessions just focused on them, dance, and
celebrate being womyn and think about their futures and going to school, and
learn things they can say and do if their parents think they should stop going
to school at any point. And they
do loads of other things. And I’ve
had loads of conversations about gender here that give me incredible hope for
womyn in Mali and get me excited about its possible future. But, like Thomas L. Friedman says in Hot
Flat and Crowded, it’s going to be hard work to get there, for something
that won’t show results for awhile.
People have to be committed to change, and that commitment in many is
what’s lacking right now. It makes
the conversations I have and actions I make at all times, especially as a womyn
here, of the utmost importance in getting people to see how things can be
different. There is hope.
But, in village, I’ve seen several things. It starts with how children are
treated based on gender. Children here in general aren’t treated
all too great. They are allowed to
bathe only when their parents want them to be, which isn’t usually more
frequently, as I’ve seen, than twice a week. They aren’t allowed to use latrines until they’re about
10-years old, which means that they have to do all their business outside, and also
means that there is humyn waste sitting outside and being wafted up by dust
onto food, and causing numerous parasites and bouts of diarrhea for everyone in
the village. They are not allowed
to eat on chairs when eating food—which means that I let girls sit on chairs
who eat with me when no adult is around for the meal, and they feel
spectacularly special. In general,
a childhood in my village is really different than it is in the US. To quote another volunteer in Sikasso, my region I work in in Mali,
These kids can’t write
numbers. So I try to have them
trace mine, and they’re 8 or 9, so they’ve been in school, and they can’t copy
my numbers. So I try to have them
doodle, like a smiley face, and stuff like that. And they can’t even do that! It’s like, what do I do to give you a childhood of doodling
back? And now you can’t write?
It’s difficult to say that children aren’t treated well at
all, because they’re arguably allowed to play a lot more freely than kids in
the US. I mean, they play with
anything they want, and as long as they don’t piss off adults around them, they
can do it for as long as they want.
I mean, everything from soccer balls, to tires, literally to knives and
fire. Kids are also, though,
expected to do far more than kids in the US far earlier, like be the exclusive
caretaker of younger children for hours at a time by the time they’re 7. And that is where gender comes in.
There’s an 8-year old girl I’ve become friends with named
Warsa. Warsa loves that she gets
to sit in my chair, and I can see that she feels like a million dollars as she
trips animatedly over her words in broken Bambara and Senufokan about loads of
things I can’t understand, until the 20th word or so when I ask for
clarification and then let her run off into the conversation sunset of her dreams. The
one thing she does always say
that I can make out, though, is something to the effect of,
“Eh, n ka baara ka ca!”
(G-d, I gotta lotta work!)
Why, you might ask?
Because she is either pounding corn, rice, millet, or sorghum with an
effing mallet almost half her size for hours every day, helping cook, or out
getting firewood with the older womyn.
She’s not at school—she’s not old enough to have started yet. She just works all day, enough, to tell
me how much work she has as a primary topic of conversation, sit back in my
chair, and say her back, it hurts, it really hurts.
Now, Warsa is not, from what I have seen, and she lives with
me, abused; she seems to be treated like every other girl I see in every family
in my village. She goes to the
bathroom outside, like boys, but wakes up at least an hour earlier to do it, so
that she can help her mother/s work after her mother gets up, hours before her
father will get up. She doesn’t
shower either, but works all day long in what I would consider hard labour, and
is therefore dirtier than boys her age who also don’t shower. And, in my village, by the time Warsa
is 14 or 15-years old, it is incredibly likely that she will get married off to
a man in another village, because that is how marriages work here: you are
married to another man (unless you have a pretty affluent background, your
marriage is arranged, which is not inandofitself problematic, as many of my
friends’ family members had arranged marriages and love their spouses, but
frequently does result in what I have seen are marriages that feel more forced
than loving in the long run), move to their village away from your family, and
stay there for the rest of your life, unless, G-d forbid, you get divorced, at
which point you are most likely going to be semi-excommunicated from your
family anyway.
It starts when boys are the only ones in village that yell
at me—my name, greetings over and over again, after I have responded, and
seemingly heckle me unless adults, especially men, are with me—and run away
laughing afterwards, and girls stay silent and only look on in seeming awe of
me. It starts when your average
family does not send their daughters to school if they don’t have the money
(all schools here cost at least a small amount of money to attend), but usually
seem to find the money for their sons to go. And this includes my homeologue Diakaliah’s family. His daughter, Aramatu, will, as he said, “…help [me] with
anything, always, whenever [I] need it,” but will not be going to school,
because she’s 11-years old now, and she’s “too old” to start school at this
point. “Money wasn’t around
before,” he’s said. “And now,” I
asked, “It is? All of your
children are in school?” “Yes,” he
responds. “Besides Aramatu?” “Yes,” he responds.
It evolves into the younger wives doing the majority of
housework. Now, note: it may seem as though, from the tone of what I
hold in this post, I think polygamy is wrong. This is not true.
In fact, I believe that polyamory, or loving/being in relationships with
many people at once, while it might not be something I see work all the time,
is, like all sexual practices, fine as long as it is healthy for all people involved. I do think, though, when there is a
cultural precedent that allots men wives and assigns womyn all work that does
not make money, such that men must be consulted before all monetary decisions
and therefore hold all power and final word on womyns’ actions once they are
married off and must leave their villages, that polygamy ends up reinforcing
ideas that are disenfranchising, sexist, and most importantly work against
womyns’ health. How is a womyn to
make healthy decisions for herself when her life is dictated by a man who, at
least 95% of the time I have seen in conversations, believes that a man’s word
is final and men know best?
Anyways, younger womyn, especially second, third, and fourth
wives, do the hardest and longest work of all womyn in their married-into
families. To quote another
volunteer:
So this guy, who was trying to piss
me off because they know in my village what makes me angry and what I think is
wrong, tells me he wants to find a good girl who’s 16. And he’s like, 45, right? And I say, ‘So, you want a slave?’ There are other men around us, and he
asks me what I mean. I say,
‘Because, once she moves into your house, she’ll do all the work for your other
wives, all the time. She’ll be
your slave. You’re saying you want
that.’ And the other men say,
‘Yeah, you are saying that!’
It continues to the conversation I observed after a womyn
had given birth in the maternity.
Between her family members and Mariam, my matrone, these womyn say, “And it’s absurd that they say
that if a womyn dies, a man needs more wives to continue taking care of the
house, but if the man dies, the womyn can ‘just be married off to someone
else,’ and it’s fine. And they say
that’s why men need many
wives. It’s absurd.” Which, by the way, was exactly
my question during training on “gender
roles” during my Pre-Service Training prior to becoming a volunteer here! And I got laughed at by the man I asked
the question to. He said that
womyn just “don’t have that problem.”
And womyn would not have these conversations if men were present. Just as womyn do not speak when men are
around. Men speak, at a minimum,
for at least 75% of all conversations I observe with womyn, even if I can see
that they respect the womyn they are speaking to, listening to them, and
greeted them before speaking to them genuinely. My matrone
Mariam gets bowed to by younger womyn (womyn in my village, and frequently in
Sikasso, bow to men when greeting them before speaking to them), because she is
incredibly respected. But she will
not speak nearly as much in the presence of another man. Womyn will rarely offer their opinions
around men in conversations I’ve seen.
I want to reiterate, there are vast differences between
my village and villages only an hour’s travel away. But that does not change the ramifications that tradition
has on gender roles that I must consider how to face and work against to help
people be healthier.
Along those lines, like I said, not every day is a gendered
horror story. I had a lovely
conversation, which I had thought was going to end horrendously, with Mariam’s
husband, who is usually around for a couple nights a week and other nights
“stays in Zegoua.” It began with
him telling me and repeating that men are the dugutikis, or “village chiefs,” of the family in Mali. I responded by saying that I thought
that when womyn and men work together in a marriage, both people are the “village chiefs” of their family. He ended up saying that that was
true. He said that he “knew that
womyn work more than men,” and thinks that womyn should go to school. He agreed with me that, if womyns’ work
was considered as highly as mens’, Mali would be a better place and develop
quicker.
But I then discovered the same day from Mariam, after he
left for Zegoua, that that was where his other wife lived.
I don’t want to question his feminism. I just question whether or not you can
believe that someone believes in equal rights for men and womyn who, just
before the aforementioned conversation, laughed hysterically and told me that I
“couldn’t marry multiple men in Mali” when I asserted I wanted to, because it
“just isn’t done.” I also want to
stress that I met his second wife the week before I left for this trip to
Bamako and Sikasso that afforded me internet access. And she had come to Ziangolodougou specifically to hang out
for a day with Mariam. So they
have a relationship of their own that seems quite wonderful—their husband was
not around the entire time she was there, and we danced, and we ate chocolate
to celebrate Mariam’s upcoming birthday together (FYI, I insisted on doing
this, because birthdays aren’t a Malian thing to celebrate—there’re so many
kids, my matrone says, that it’s a little tough to keep up with all the
birthdays when you gots a lotta work as a womyn…and I said, fair point). So, I don’t want it to come across that
I hold this deep contempt for her husband and her relationship with her
husband. Those can be good, I am
sure, for them, if it is healthy.
But the cultural boundaries that form the basis for their relationship
is what I worry about with all Malian romantic relationships engaged in
polygamy, and something I think about often: are womyn perceived of emotionally
as mens’ property and workers, and if so, how could this ever lead to healthy growth
and love between people? A sense
of empowerment in one’s actions in life?
Societal changes come with time, and I can understand that
industrialization brings some sense of important changes to be made—like better
economy, tourism, and general finance—as well as another rivaling sense of this
idea that changes are being imposed, and
gosh-haven’t-we-lived-so-long-without-all-this-new-stuff, that means that
people might think it’s kinda silly for me to talk about the importance of
washing their hands when they’ve made it this long as Malians without doing
it. So, sexism and gender as an
issue is gonna seem kind of quaint and removed from a lot of Malians, I can
already imagine. Because they have
loving families, they would say, big families, and they all look out for each
other in their communities, and families are the center of the culture here and
of utmost importance. And these
are all, at least on some level, true assertions. They don’t change the fact that the womyn I speak to about
washing their hands with soap can’t do so until their husbands think it’s
important enough for them to give their wives the money to buy the soap, and
then use it when eating with their families, when womyn cannot eat from a bowl
until after men are finished with their share.
Just like in the US, health is frequently damaged by the
gender binary. If people are seen
hierarchically, someone has to always be the disadvantaged one, right? With less possibilities to
succeed. Sexism was acknowledged
in a loud way in the US in the 70s as preventing womyn from succeeding. And today, I still talk about it all
the time—did the Vagina Monologues (if you haven’t heard of it, look it
up! It’s all about expanding the
dialogue on sexuality to actually include the consideration of anything
vagina/womyn, to affirm womyns’ sexuality. Problematic, at times, but important as a social cause and
movement nonetheless. I was “My
Vagina is Angry,” which most people guess when they meet me, paha, and one of
the womyn in the optional monologue “They Beat the Girl Out of My Boy.”), get
viscerally angry when people catcall at me on the street, work on sexual
assault and harassment with people all the time. But here, it’s what I would call far more severe, and I am
beginning to see it far more because I’m beginning to see it when people are
sexist towards me. I know that
that’s selfish, but it’s true.
Your personal lens is how you notice the most first, right? So, when only 10% of men greet me when
they see me, in a culture where you’re supposed to great everyone upon walking
up to them, I get pissed. When men
don’t look at me in conversation, I get pissed. When men walk in front of me in all establishments to do
their business first after looking at me over the shoulder and then looking away,
I get pissed. When policemen ask
if “if they please me” sexually after I’ve met them, I get enraged. When I’m asked to get water for men,
and half-expected to bow to them as well (and holla back after this Purim,
Mordechai, you didn’t bow to Hamann for thinking he was holier than thou, and
I’m not bowing to men for being men!) upon presenting them their cup of water,
I get infuriated. And then, I see
how womyn who are Malian get treated what I feel is much worse. At least I can speak to men and have
them listen to me, even if I might have to speak loudly several times before
they’ll look at me. And some men
are incredibly respectful to me, and really want to know what I have to say,
but I hear them yell at their wives or never speak with them at all. Some men, again, I am sure, are feminists here, and I mean to say by
“feminist” that they do not think that men deserve more of anything than
womyn. One Peace Corps driver
literally told my site buddy,
I don’t get why men marry more than
one wife. I only have one
wife. I don’t think you can love
more than one person.
I’ve also spoken with my homeologue Diakaliah, like I said
earlier, about FGM, and when I got nervous about cultural sensitivity around
the ideas I had about how I could explain that it wasn’t healthy, I just said
it. He had explained that one NGO
had been in village, and when I asked why, he said that they had talked about
“la excision.” When I asked if “it
had worked,” he said that yes, it didn’t happen anymore to any girls (most likely
untrue, but I would believe that it was not performed any more in my village, but rather out in the fields, still with
a select few families, and otherwise, that the people in village were changing
their minds about it, which is good as a start). So I said, “You know, I’d thought that it’d be harder than
that to stop, but it’s unhealthy for womyn.” And he smiled and said, “Yes, c’est ca.”
There are the people who get it here, who, as Mariam’s
husband agreed with me on, haven’t traveled, but still see that something in
Malian culture is a little off in catering to womyn being healthy. I imagine this is just like how some
people in the US see that something is off in our gender binary as well, and
how even more wouldn’t have the conversation with someone about it, but think
about it a fair chunk of their time.
Right now, I’m embarking on what I can see will be the most exciting
adventure of my life: seeing how other people live for two years alongside them,
exalting our lives together and talking about things that don’t work without
fear of being rejected for it, learning to love something totally different and
lovingly dissect it all at once.
Dissection is actually an interesting way to look at it: sometimes, I
feel like the gender binary is a wild animal with rabies that eats peoples
souls that I have to kill with my words in every conversation I have (see—this
vegans’ violent!). But, I digress
from gender.
As I said earlier, I have now seen two births. Both
were difficult to watch, for very different reasons. I have a lot of respect for both womyn, and want to stress
that from the very beginning. But
I couldn’t help but think about borders the entire time seeing them:
Between my body and theirs.
Between my definitions of normal and theirs.
Between my ideas of work and theirs.
The first birth was by a womyn who was 20- or 21-years old,
and it was her second child. FYI,
womyn here generally have their first kid at 17 or 18-years old, if they start
at “a good time,” but I see as young as 15. What customarily happens, supposedly, is both the delivering
womyn’s mother and her husband’s mother come to the maternity, possibly with
some other female family members, and wait outside of the delivery room where
Mariam waits while she goes through the first contractions, walks around with
them, and waits in mostly silence until the contractions get hard enough that
she finally “needs help,” essentially.
I said this before, but to reiterate, Malian womyn are not supposed
to make any noise while in labour. This means screams, moans, anything
outside of asking, “Am I done?” and “It’s about to happen, please help
me.” I want you to think, business
casual. This birth was literally
the most ‘professional’ that a birth could get. The womyn kicked her legs out to help the delivery come
along, paced the rooms—obviously in pain, but just taking deep breaths when a
contraction clearly came—and ate when her family members brought in food for
her. FYI, there were no
injections, no medicines I saw given.
Which, as a totally different conversation, is something I think should
happen all the time unless a birth will plausibly have complications such as
twins or when happening with a womyn over the age of 40, or the womyn really
want to be knocked out, but I digress.
No medical interventions.
And I watched for 5 hours as this womyn’s contractions got more and more
intense. Mariam watched but also
would check her cellphone for the time, nap, or talk to me about random
things—jokes, whether or not I would go to the market that Saturday—in hushed
voices while we waited for “it to start.”
And the whole time we’re talking, I’m consciously freaking out.
See, the only time before this that I’d seen a birth was in
my 9th grade health class, where the teacher had said, “Now, kids,
get prepared for this,” smiled, and then skipped to the middle of this white
womyn giving birth with the horrible narrator from the 70s saying, “And now,
she is getting ready for the miracle of life!” And then, my teacher watched all of the
boys say “Oh, G-d, disgusting!,” and all the girls say, “Oh my G-d!,” and my
teacher laughed hysterically, and then paused the video on the womyn’s vagina
when it stretched, and laughed at us being disgusted—all encouraged,
basically—and then rewinded the video and played it again, just the birth, and laughed hysterically as we
urged her, really, Miss, can you please turn it off?! And then she said, “So, you really don’t want that to happen
to you right now, do you?”
So, the female body had been demonized, thing-ified and
shown as a freak circus side show to all of us as a warning not to do something
that is beautiful: a. have sexual interactions, and b. deliver life. And now, I was in a room with a womyn
who was going to do it, in silence, as if it’s all in her head and she’s got to
do this with a grace of a ballerina—and G-d, is she graceful, and G-d, is she
powerful—and my matrone is straight
chilling, asking me about what I ate that day! It’s the most relaxed room that I thought could ever contain
such an extreme experience.
And I start to see blood coming down this womyn’s leg. And she’s on the floor when the
contractions begin to get more intense.
Why is she on the floor?
“Because of the wound,” Mariam says. And Mariam is a great person, don’t get me wrong. But even in this relaxed room, with
these womyn who might be disrespected elsewhere but know about birth, respect birth, have many births in their lifetimes
and know how painful they can be and believe children are wonderful, even in
this room, this womyn is seen as having a “wound” between her legs. And she’ll get the three perfectly
clean and comfortable mattresses in the next room “dirty” with her
“wound.” So she’ll give
birth on a tarp on the cement floor.
And we will tell her when she starts to whimper that she has to be
“strong,” she’s “done this before,” and just “push.”
I’m getting faint.
I get nervous. This womyn
is bleeding and just wiping it off her legs with a pagne, a fabris you wrap around your legs as a skirt
here. And she’s just pacing and
waiting until the labour starts.
And she says it’s starting, and Mariam calls the other womyn in and sits
with her on the floor.
She says “ton so, ton so kadi” (Push, push well), and then “tuguni” (again), and then “ton so kadi, kadi” and then, “n be se k’a ye, ton so” (I can see the child, push). And the womyn is being held by her
mother, in between her legs, to prop her up as she pushes, and she’s in so much
pain, you can see it, but she’s not making a noise, maybe some light moaning you
could mistake for a sigh, and that’s it.
And she pushes.
And I’m nervous, because I’m nervous to see FGM. And I
hate admitting that to myself.
Because, you see, ever since I came here, I’ve been painfully aware of
my capacity, like America’s historically proven capacity, to thing-ify womyn
and their bodies. Especially the
black female body, and black body in general (if you want to read a really good
book about this, my site buddy reminded me of this book called “Killing the
Black Body.” It’s worth checking
out the summary on Amazon at a minimum).
And I didn’t want to thing-ify Malian womyns’ bodies based on my
problems with the practice of FGM in the ways I have described above—as a
practice that hurts womyn and their health. You see, womyns’ vaginas can literally tear open during
labour, depending on infections and how much was cut off and in what way during
the ‘procedure.’ It makes it
painful and dangerous. Womyn can
die from complications of FGM during the ‘procedure,’ in the months after, years
later, and during childbirth. And
you could also just have complications that make it hurt when you pee for the
rest of your life.
But those reasons should not be ones that make me afraid to
see someone’s vagina. First off, I
shouldn’t be afraid to look at someone’s body as a health volunteer at health
clinics if I am a welcome part of these appointments and medical happenings,
which I was. The womyn was fine
with me being there—she knew me and knew the type of work I’m there to do for
the next 2 years in our village, and we greeted each other—while she was pacing
these rooms, having contractions, and gosh, I wouldn’t have been so nice!—and I
was welcome there. So, the humyn
body is beautiful, and not disgusting, ever. But especially not because of a violent practice done to it. I
never wanted to conflate FGM and the body that is subjected to it. I didn’t want to participate in this
thing-ifying. The female body is
beautiful before, during, and after FGM.
The power of womyn does not change. But I was afraid of seeing a womyn after it, afraid to see a
“mutilated” vagina, a vagina that had been “ruined,” “cut,” in a way “taken
away” from its owner. I thought it
would look disgusting. And I hated
that, that I had this idea that my vagina, that womyns’ vaginas that didn’t go
through FGM, were the normal ones.
The ones with good vaginas, happy vaginas, ones that were better than
the ones in this country I’m living in now. One, obviously, these womyn are people, not just their
vaginas. Two, their vaginas should
obviously not be subjected to norms, they are just their vaginas. There
is not criterion anyone should use to measure how “good” a vagina is. So, I felt that I should not scrutinize
womyns’ vaginas and just be supportive in any way I could during the birth, but
I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I didn’t want to look, but I didn’t want
to catch eyes with her (the womyn delivering) and have her see that I was
looking away, nervous, any more scared that she might be.
So, I look because she’s taken the pagne from her legs and Mariam says “n be se k’a
ye, ton so, a be na” (I can see it, push,
it’s coming). And I see this
little tuft of hair, and it’s getting bigger, and it coming, and it’s her
child’s head. And I’m amazed: Oh
my G-d, this womyn is creating a life!
It’s coming out of her, she’s doing it, she’s making someone be! And then I see that she has no
clitoris, and I want to cry. And I
hate myself for it: why do I have to take away from the power of what this
womyn is doing by scrutinizing what might have been her sexual experiences,
what I think is what “should” be, what I think was taken from her when, in
reality, she might never think about it, and if she thinks nothing was taken
away from her in the first place, why am I forcing that victimization onto her
in my head? But I’m frightened by
not seeing her clitoris, or her inner labia, because it seems wrong to me, and
I’ve taught sexual anatomy and I’ve done the naked party circuit in college,
and this is not what I thought birth “should look like.” But it’s happening, and she’s not
making a sound, and this baby is
coming into the world, and it’s a beautiful womyn, it’s what I need to think is
a beautiful act, a beautiful body, a beautiful experience, and push my biases
and thing-ifying aside.
And the baby comes, after one strong push, it slides out of
this womyn as if it is the easiest thing in the world. And the womyn falls back into her
mother’s hands. And Mariam gathers
the baby in her hands, and ties a string around the umbilical chord, and twists
it, and it breaks, and the baby’s brought to the table, and wrapped in yet
another pagne. And I want to cry, because it’s so overwhelmingly beautiful,
everything that this womyn, that these womyn, have just done together, with no one else around,
this feat with no press, no seeming urgency to document it besides Mariam
asking me the time and writing it down on a slip of paper, no crowds,
nothing. Just us in a room with
the courage it takes to bring someone into the world. And then, I almost faint. Colours start to distort. I sit down and try not to vomit. Maybe it was too much blood for me to see, too new, too
overwhelming emotionally, but I feel weak. So I sit, but the womyn pushes again. And I think, after-birth,
I’ve heard of this, it must be after-birth. And what she pushes out looks big, and
it is big, and Mariam says, “Eh,
a to, den were” (G-d, the rest, the other
child). And she says, “filaniw
tun be” (They were twins). And I realize, after asking several
questions fairly quickly and out of the mother’s earshot, two things:
- The
womyn had been pregnant with twins.
Twins are delivered here by midwives, and it is not considered to
be a high-risk pregnancy that might require medical interventions. Mariam had known she would have
twins, which is rare here, because she’d done all this womyns’ prenantal
exams.
- One
twin had died 3 days before.
Something had happened with her placenta, so they’d both known it
had died. And that twin died
why? “She had been sick, sick
with a fever.”
So I see the other twin. It’s small, dead, and other big things that I assume are
actually the after birth are wrapped around it, and it’s on the tarp on the
floor, and I can’t help but stare at it.
The womyn isn’t looking at it—she isn’t looking at anything, she’s
exhausted. And I can’t stop
looking back to this other baby on the table, wrapped up and fresh and pretty
clean, new, crying, discovering the world for the first time. On one side of me, life. On the other side, it feels like a
waste, a mistake, a tragedy no one wants to pay attention to. I feel bad for this womyn—she had known
she would birth a child that was already dead for 3 days on the same day she
would birth a healthy baby—what I see is a healthy baby boy. But she did so, in silence, no
complaints. And I ask if the baby
will have a ceremony since it died, and I’m trying not to cry—I don’t cry until
I get to Mariam’s house afterward and go to her latrine—and she says no, “We
don’t give ceremonies when they’re this young.” Old people get ceremonies. They would bury this child, but they wouldn’t have a
ceremony. Just like in the US,
people don’t know what to do when children die. It’s horrible, it’s really sad, and then we try to forget
about it and move on.
And I sit for the rest of the time, watch the womyn walk
into the next room to sit on the floor again, watch Mariam tidy up the baby a
bit, watch the family members follow this womyn into the next room, sit on the
mattresses, talk jovially, it’s a beautiful day and a child was born. But I keep thinking, what if this womyn
had gone to Zegoua, my market town, where there’s a clinic and doctors and
maybe different medicines she could’ve taken, would the child have lived? Mariam says “peteti, an t’a don” (Maybe, we don’t know).
The second birth was something I expected to be quick,
like the first, after the contractions quickened, but it was totally different.
The womyn comes into the maternity—this is 3 days or so after the first
birth I saw—at 9am. She’s nowhere
close to birthing, “just scared,” Mariam says. She leaves and comes back later, and around 7pm, after I
take my nightly shower, Diakaliah comes to tell me to go to the Maternity
again, this womyn will deliver soon.
So, all fresh, having eaten dinner, I go out in my village for the first
time at night. At this point, I’ve
only had my puppy, Guacamole, for 3 days, and I get sad leaving him in my patio
for a couple hours, but he needs to get used to sleeping alone, so I go (I’ll
talk more about Guacamole, the cutest thing in the world, in another post
that’s a little less serious, paha).
I get there at 7:30pm.
We go to Mariam’s house for some force-fed second dinner (Mariam never
takes no for an answer with me and food), and then go back. It’s 10pm. Nowhere close to birthing, but I can see, the womyn’s in a
lot of pain—the contractions are really tough with her. She’s 22-years old, my age, and it’s
also her second child. My matrone
brings out a mattress from the third room, the baby-weighing/prenatal consultation
room, and we sleep on it together outside the maternity (hot season was
starting at this point, and yes, it’s now far hotter than you could care to
imagine). And I had put on some
roll-on mosquito repellent beforehand, thank G-d, but that doesn’t fend off the
large roaches roaming on and around me at times, and it’s 4 interesting
hours. And then, the womyn says
she needs Mariam’s help, and her whimpering’s a little loud, and Mariam says
it’s time.
It was four hours
until the birth happened. With the
first womyn, from the time she started pushing to the birth of the first child,
it took about half an hour. So, you have to understand, I was
shocked it took four hours. But,
far more shocking, is that this womyn didn’t follow the cultural silence rule—she
moaned, and screamed, for hours.
Now, every culture has people on the fringe. You hear about it, remark upon it, and
see it all the time. Womyn who
wear tuxedos, have many sexual partners, or play rugby are all good
examples. Outside the norms, and
unashamedly there to stay. This
womyn was doing that, in a way I hadn’t even heard of before.
She was breaking a really serious cultural rule.
They say you shouldn’t “make noise” during birth here for
two reasons:
- If you
make noise, you’ll attract bad spirits and energy to the event and
semi-curse it/the child’s life.
- It’s
nothing to make noise over.
It’s “just” birth.
Real womyn don’t cry during it. They just do it.
The way people cry out in my village (I’m not sure if this
is a Senufo thing or not) is by saying,
“Whoa-ee.” So, this womyn is
moaning, screaming, Whoa-ee, whoa-eeeee, and crying at times, and
saying she “can’t, can’t do this.”
And she’s so, so scared.
You can tell. And if she
had been less scared, the birth would have been much easier, because, to quote
Mariam, “If you don’t do this, where will the baby go? It has to come out! So you have to do this!” It’s scary, but it has to happen. There’s just no real way around
it. And once you give birth, the
pain will stop, your baby will be out, and you’ll be done and happy and
exhausted but with child. So, you
have to do it and just trust that it’ll be better after you do it. But she’s paralyzed with fear, and she
cries, and her mother (her husband’s mother left during the day) gets
incredibly angry with her, as does Mariam, but to a lesser degree. They’re angry, because they tell her to stop moaning and crying,
but she doesn’t. And she reaches
out to them, for physical support, to hold her hand, and says she can’t do
this, and just wants it to stop.
And they both physically and emotionally turn away from her. And there I am, plopped on the table
right in front of her, grating my teeth every time she pushes finally, trying
to almost push with her, will the baby out, but there’s nothing I can do. I’m not trained as a doula or midwife, I don’t speak Bambara well enough to say
what one should say on the fly while a womyn is having a tough birthing
experience, and I damn well don’t know the scant cultural protocol there might
be in these types of situations that rarely happen. I.e., do I support her? If so, how?
What will Mariam say or think?
Will I be allowed to see another birth again? What does it mean to people in the community if I hold her
hand? I want to support her, but I
also know that she needs to give birth, we’re all tired, and we all want it to
be over with, and they’re angry
with her, and it has this social effect where I’m getting angry too. And I catch myself, and think, Who
am I? ‘Labour’ is called ‘labour’
for a reason! Womyn should make
noise during it if they need to! But then I
think, why is she so scared?
Like Mariam keeps saying, you’ve done this before! Do it again! Just push!
Four hours is a long time to be thinking these things and
seeing this womyn go through them over and over again. She ends up crying so loudly for so
long, that her husband comes to the front of the maternity. The womyn is there. She’s out there because she’s been
trying to leave the delivery room several times, as if she can leave and go
home and this would all stop, this birth, if only she could walk. And she’s moaning loudly, and her
mother is yelling at her, and Mariam is just waiting, distancing herself and
resigned somewhat, ignoring her calls for help and wanting her to come back
inside. Men don’t ever go into the maternity, so he conveniently talks to
her outside. He reprimands her,
and I’ll never forget what he says:
What are you doing? The people in the village can hear
you screaming. People are telling me they are hearing you scream,
“whoa-ee,” “whoa-ee,” and it’s embarrassing. What are you doing?
Stop this now! Are you
serious? Stop!
And she’s publicly shamed into silence. And her mother and Mariam say, “You
see?! Are you serious? Stop screaming! Just do it! And it’ll be over with!” And she trudges back, ashamedly, but tired, so tired, into
the delivery room.
She vomits.
This birth is really hard on her.
And she starts to moan again.
She just wants to go to sleep, she’s so tired, she keeps saying. And I believe her. This is hard work she’s been doing, and
the contractions started 20 hours ago. She looks out to me again and again at
this point, looks right into my eyes, and says, “This is hard. This is hard.” She almost smiles, and the Mariam and
her mother laugh at her, and try to include me in her laughter: Is
she serious? they keep on asking me, trying
to get me to corroborate in the public shaming.
They’re publicly shaming a womyn in labour. They want this to be a group
effort. If only she can see how
ridiculous she’s being, she’ll give birth and it’ll be over. I can tell that’s the general mood and
gist of things that night.
I tell her when they’ve left the room in frustration with
her, left her alone with her moans and screams, “I ka kan k’a ke, ni I b’a
ke, a be na ban, nga I ka kan k’a ke folo”
(You have to do this, if you do this, it’ll end, but you have to do it
first). I don’t know if she
understands Bambara, or my Bambara specifically. But I feel like I have to say something.
The husband comes back to the front of the maternity and
says to Mariam, “If it’s this hard, maybe we should just take her to
Zegoua.” In Zegoua’s clinic, they
can’t do a c-section (they can in another town a little further away called
Kadiolo), but they have a trained midwife, and more importantly, as Mariam
tells the womyn angrily, “They won’t be like me. You won’t be able to scream. So do you want to do this here and now, or go there?!” Well, especially when you threaten her
like that, no, she doesn’t want to go to Zegoua. She moans some more, but she wants to give birth here, she
says.
The baby comes at 6:10am. I force myself to stay until the end, because I want
everyone to see that I stuck out this hard night with them, that I care about
womyns’ health, that I care about the births and the full experience. We were all in this together. But I was disgusted. The womyn stamped out her leg once the
baby came out, in pain, but near it’s body, and Mariam’s smacked her fairly
hard on the leg, saying “Where do you think the baby is, huh?” And don’t get me wrong, she really
shouldn’t step on her newborn child, but her mother had hit her too toward the
end. They were done with her. She was so far gone, they thought, and
didn’t deserve respect anymore.
After all that, we could maybe just “slap some sense into her,” it
seemed like they thought.
This post was incredibly long, and has a lot to think
about. It’s probably going to be
the primary focus of my service here for the next 22 months (every 7th
of every month, light a candle for me being awesome and being here another
whole month of service on this lil’ journey o’ mine!): gender and development
is easily one of the most important things to work on for the next several
centuries in our world. How do we
show girls that they can do anything boys can do if they really want to, and
give them the opportunities to do so?
I guess I wanted to end on this final thought:
This womyn screamed her truth, and it was like the village
split open. I’ve seen her once afterward,
from behind, riding home on her bicycle.
I spoke about her birth, much to my disgust with myself but out of a
felt need to discuss an experience like that with Mariam the next day just to
check in and make sure it was as hard to some extent for her as it was for
me. And I spoke about it in front
of my other pregnant friends with Mariam.
I said, “And she screamed! It was crazy!” I
wanted to see what they would say.
My pregnant friends were really surprised, but you could see that they
were a little afraid too, as if they were thinking, Oh G-d, what if I
scream a little? Mariam just said, “She’s not a real person. Who does that? Wow, that was hard!” It’s like a joke to her to some extent
now, because I’ve told her, after that last birth, night births aren’t for me
for awhile. And she’ll laugh
hysterically.
This womyn screamed until the cultural silence surrounding
birth split open. Is that good or
bad? Can her birth be beautiful in
culturally restrained silence?
How do we give womyn the space to tell their truths? And what truths do we expect, or want,
them to tell? And why those
ones? And maybe they’re already
telling them, and maybe lots of people are listening, slowly, more and more,
and picking up the layers and characters and languages and landscapes and
everything, just everything, and hearing those truths, maybe the world’s
changing. But maybe we just aren’t
listening for the truths. Or maybe
womyn have been forced to be silent so long, they don’t know what truths to
tell.
I hope one day I see the world split open. I don’t know what that will look like,
but I know it should mean that something changes, and womyn and men are all
treated like people.
Before I end this post, I just wanted to put out an
honourable mention I mentioned earlier to the various places I’ve worked with
that do amazing work on sexual rights for everyone. The world isn’t hopeless; quite to the contrary, loads of
people are doing things every day to try and change how violent we are towards
womyn.
Places I’ve done work at that deserve honourable
mention!:
DC Rape Crisis Center,
NW Washington, DC
Metro Teen AIDS, NW
Washington, DC
Day One Sexual Assault and Resource Center, Providence, RI
Womyn’s Center Rhode Island, East Providence, RI
Sexual Health And Peer Education, Providence, RI
Later, populace.
