Play Book Tag discussion

I appreciated Walker putting a human face on a culture that adopted the practice of “female genital mutilation.” But it bothers me some that she created a fictional culture, the Olinka tribe, to play out the drama of a people that has long adopted the practice. Trying for a universal or pan-Africa perspective I suppose, while avoiding painting a particular real culture to serious social commentary. The book kicks off a quote about Tashi from “The Color Purple”, who as a young immigrant in America chose to have her face scarred by Olinki tradition “to make her people feel better” and to seek the female initiation ceremony as well:
Tashi was happy that the initiation ceremony isn’t done in Europe or America … That makes it even more valuable to her.

It is the same Tashi who leads us back to her family remaining in Africa, long after the political chaos that drove her mother to take her to California as a young girl. She wants to marry her Afro-American partner Adam in the traditional way, including the female circumcision process. We learn about how it is the elder women who are the perpetrators of the crude amputation under a hallowed and mythologized rite of passage. How the men who run the patriarchy justify the system to limit the dangers of female pleasure seeking too much like that reserved for men.

The story unfolds by alternating sections from Tashi or Adam’s perspectives at different points in her life journey. Tashi’s impact of painful intercourse and ultimate aversion to sex is anguishing to experience. Under analysis her dreams reveal a personal accounting of her fate as blended with tribal mystical tales. She tunes into an early memory of the suffering of the girls undergoing the process and a death of one who was dear to her. Tashi’s choice of action to resolve her terrible state is harrowing to experience. Maybe empathy for her emblematic life in this story is the only way to get Walker’s readership to walk this tough walk through all the angles on this widespread cultural practice. Definitely educational, but it was a bit too didactic to fulfill most of my aims in reading novels.

When this was published in 1992, the estimate was 100 million women worldwide who have experienced varying degrees of what is officially termed by the World Health Organization as “mutilation.” In the thorough Wikipedia article on the subject, the estimates are now closer to 200 million. Thus, we in the West can’t just conceive of it as an arcane practice that we don’t want to think about and hope will soon be phased out. I guess I am a cultural imperialist for entertaining those notions. Rates go down only slowly with economic development and education in societies (for example the rate in Egypt among teenaged girls fell from 97% in 1985 to 70% in 2015). Reasons women cite for the practice in 2016 surveys included: “social acceptance, religion, hygiene, preservation of virginity, marriageability and enhancement of male sexual pleasure”. Although many of the nations where the practice thrives are predominately Muslim, this may just be an historical coincidence:
FGM's origins in northeastern Africa are pre-Islamic, but the practice became associated with Islam because of that religion's focus on female chastity and seclusion. There is no mention of it in the Quran.