Possessing the Secret of Joy (9 page)

It was to her, however, that I found myself speaking, one day, about Our Leader. Our Leader, like Nelson Mandela and Jomo Kenyatta and others before them, had been forced into exile and eventually captured and jailed by the white regime. Still, miraculously, by word of mouth and the occasional clandestinely made audiocassette, we were able to get his surprisingly frequent “Messages to the People.” Unlike Nelson Mandela or Jomo Kenyatta, Our Leader never made it to freedom himself; he was assassinated on the eve of Independence as he left the high-security prison in which he’d been incarcerated, under heavy guard. It was believed, in fact, that the guards assassinated him, though this was never proved. His murderers, in any case, were never brought to justice, or even identified; and so, even as Olinkans celebrated what we thought was our freedom, there was already an internal backlash of hurt and rage that only swift justice administered to his killers might have assuaged, and the desperate need to show our remembrance and love of Our Leader in everything we did.

But you had already left Africa by then? said Raye, as I explained this to her.

Yes, I said. My body had left. My soul had not. I paused. It seemed impossible that anyone should ever understand. Especially not this smoothly dressed woman who walked with a spring in her step and whose brown skin, the color of cinnamon, was flawless.

There was a jaunty tone she sometimes took, at the most unlikely points. She used it now.

You can tell me, she said, with the look of a conspirator.

But I was stuck. Our Leader had died for us. For our independence. For our freedom. What could I possibly say about my insignificant life in the face of that reality? I could feel a boulder, twin to the one that suppressed the truth of Dura’s murder, begin closing my throat. I felt a lie beginning to form. A lie that said the boulder was not a rock but rock candy. Then I remembered Mzee. You yourselves are your last hope, he’d said. Did I believe this, or not?

I cleared my throat, and began.

He was Jesus Christ to us, you know? I said, after the lengthy silence.

Raye looked at me expectantly.

If Jesus Christ has died for you, how can you find fault with anything else he did?

Some people fault him for claiming to die for them, said Raye. But we’ll let that pass. Better to declare him perfect and be done, she added.

But what if he’d told you to do something that destroyed you? Something that was wrong?

Impossible, said Raye. He was perfect, remember.

But then she smiled impishly, and I saw the trap of such reasoning and also the joke in what she said. However, my jaws were too tight to smile.

I began again. Even from prison we received our instructions, I said. Good instructions. Sensible; correct. From Our Leader. That we must remember who we were. That we must fight the white oppressors without ceasing; without, even, the contemplation of ceasing; for they would surely still be around during our children’s and our children’s children’s time. That we must take back our land. That we must reclaim the descendants of those of our people sold into slavery throughout the world (Our Leader was particularly strong on this issue, almost alone among African leaders); that we must return to the purity of our own culture and traditions. That we must not neglect our ancient customs.

There was another silence, as I played with the black plastic-looking elephant hair bracelets I wore on my wrist.

We thought him a god, really, I said finally, sighing. To have suffered so much…We knew they had tortured him, we could even imagine how, based on the mutilated bodies sometimes returned to relatives from the prison. We knew he’d spent years in solitary and been driven nearly out of his mind. But he had not broken. Nor had he forgotten us.

In every hut, even when I was a little girl, there was a small picture of him wrapped in plastic and carefully hidden in a special place among the rafters. His eyes were laughing! Such wise, gay eyes. They seemed to speak. Whenever we received a message we took down the picture, and while going over the message and learning it by heart we would gaze at it. We loved him. We believed everything he said. We thought he knew best… about everything.

The missionaries had made a big campaign against what they called the scarring of our faces with the Olinka tribal markings. But Our Leader had these same markings, and was obviously proud of them; and so it was difficult to hear the missionaries’ objections, or to care about the missionaries themselves. Though we gave them our mumbled prayers and conversions, with which they seemed so easily, like mothers of docile children, satisfied.

Raye was leaning forward in her chair. As I spoke, I became aware I had covered both my cheeks with my fingers. I had also crossed my legs. I took my hands down and placed them in the folds of my dress. A light blue dress with aquamarine dots, it reminded me of the sea, and of tears.

As for the thing that was done to me… or
for
me, I said. And stopped. Because Raye had raised her eyebrows, quizzically.

The initiation…

Still she looked at me in the same questioning way.

The female initiation, I said. Into womanhood.

Oh? she said. But looked still as if she didn’t understand.

Circumcision, I whispered.

Pardon? she said, in a normal tone of voice that seemed loud in the quiet room.

I felt as if I had handed her a small and precious pearl and she had promptly bitten into it and declared it a fake.

What exactly is this procedure? she asked, briskly.

I was reminded of a quality in African-American women that I did not like at all. A bluntness. A going to the heart of the matter even if it gave everyone concerned a heart attack. Rarely did black women in America exhibit the graceful subtlety of the African woman. Had slavery given them this? Suddenly a story involving Raye popped into my mind: I saw her clearly as she would have been in the nineteenth century, the eighteenth, the seventeenth, the sixteenth, the fifteenth… Her hands on her hips, her breasts thrust out. She is very black, as black as I am. “Listen, cracker,” she is saying, “did you sell my child or not?” The “cracker” whines, “But listen, Louella, it was my child too!” The minute he turns his back, she picks up a huge boulder, exactly like the one that is in my throat, and… But I drag myself back from this scene.

Don’t you have my file? I asked, annoyed. I was sure The Old Man sent it before he died. On the other hand, this was a question he’d never asked me. I’d said “circumcision” to him and he’d seemed completely satisfied; as if he knew exactly what was implied. Now I wondered: had he understood?

I have your file, said Raye, tapping its bulging gray cover with a silver-painted nail and ignoring my attitude. I am ignorant about this practice, though, and would like to learn about it from you. She paused, glanced into the folder. For instance, something I’ve always wondered is whether the exact same thing is done to every woman. Or is there variation? Your sister… Dura’s clitoris was excised, but was something else done too, that made it more likely that she would bleed to death?

Her tone was now clinical. It relaxed me. I breathed deeply and sought the necessary and familiar distance from myself. I did not get as far away as usual, however.

Always different, I would think, I said, exhaling breath, because women are all different. Yet always the same, because women’s bodies are all the same. But this was not precisely true. In my reading I had discovered there were at least three forms of circumcision. Some cultures demanded excision of only the clitoris, others insisted on a thorough scraping away of the entire genital area. A sigh escaped me as I thought of explaining this.

A slight frown came between Raye’s large, clear eyes.

I realize it is hard for you to talk about this, she said. Perhaps we shouldn’t push.

But I am already pushing, and the boulder rolls off my tongue, completely crushing the old familiar faraway voice I’d always used to tell this tale, a voice that had hardly seemed connected to me.

It was only after I came to America, I said, that I even knew what was supposed to be down there.

Down there?

Yes. My own body was a mystery to me, as was the female body, beyond the function of the breasts, to almost everyone I knew. From prison Our Leader said we must keep ourselves clean and pure as we had been since time immemorial—by cutting out unclean parts of our bodies. Everyone knew that if a woman was not circumcised her unclean parts would grow so long they’d soon touch her thighs; she’d become masculine and arouse herself. No man could enter her because her own erection would be in his way.

You believed this?

Everyone believed it, even though no one had ever seen it. No one living in our village anyway. And yet the elders, particularly, acted as if everyone had witnessed this evil, and not nearly a long enough time ago.

But you knew this had not happened to you?

But perhaps it had, I said. Certainly to all my friends who’d been circumcised, my uncircumcised vagina was thought to be a monstrosity. They laughed at me. Jeered at me for having a tail. I think they meant my labia majora. After all, none of them had vaginal lips; none of them had a clitoris; they had no idea what these things looked like; to them I was bound to look odd. There were a few other girls who had not been circumcised. The girls who had been would sometimes actually run from us, as if we were demons. Laughing, though. Always laughing.

And yet it is from this time, before circumcision, that you remember pleasure?

When I was little I used to stroke myself, which was taboo. And then, when I was older, and before we married, Adam and I used to make love in the fields. Which was also taboo. Doing it in the fields, I mean. And because we practiced cunnilingus.

Did you experience orgasm?

Always.

And yet you willingly gave this up in order to… Raye was frowning in disbelief.

I completed the sentence for her: To be accepted as a real woman by the Olinka people; to stop the jeering. Otherwise I was a thing. Worse, because of my friendship with Adam’s family and my special relationship to him, I was never trusted, considered a potential traitor, even. Besides, Our Leader, our Jesus Christ, said we must keep all our old ways and that no Olinka man—in this he echoed the great liberator Kenyatta—would even think of marrying a woman who was not circumcised.

But Adam was not Olinkan, said Raye, puzzled.

I sighed. The boulder was gone, but speech itself suddenly felt quite hopeless. I never thought of marrying Adam, I said, firmly, and watched the surprise in her eyes. I married him because he was loyal, gentle and familiar. Because he came for me. And because I found I could not fight with the wound tradition had given me. I could hardly walk.

But who…? Raye began, even more perplexed.

At last I found a cool smile forming on my tense face. I smiled at the young innocent, ignorant girl I’d been. The boulder now not only had rolled off my tongue but was rolling quite rapidly away from me toward the door. Like every Olinka maiden, I said, I was in love with the perfect lover who already had three wives. The perfect lover and father and brother who had been so cruelly taken from us, but whose laughing eyes we saw in the photograph he’d left us, and whose sweetly tempting voice we heard on cassette in the night. Poor Adam! He couldn’t hold a candle to Our Leader, the real—to us—Jesus Christ.

T
HE
O
LINKANS SPOKE
of “Our Leader” with exactly the fervor we wished them to speak of “Our Lord.” There were always tales of his exploits drifting through the village, his “miracles” of ambush and derring-do against the whites. He seemed like Christ to the villagers except for one thing: his acceptance of violence as a means to the end of African oppression. He was called “Our Leader” because the white regime made it a crime to say his name aloud. There were men walking about in every Olinka village whose backs bore the scars of their forgetfulness or defiance of this edict. And when these men spoke of “Our Leader,” an especially harsh protectiveness and anger blazed in their eyes. In fact, it became increasingly frightening to try to talk to them about Christ at all. Our Christ. Our white, pacifist leader safely dead.

W
HEN
P
IERRE TURNED SEVENTEEN
and had completed his studies at the
lycée,
nothing could prevent him from going to America to be nearer his father. He is thoughtful, curly-haired, golden. In France, people assume he is Algerian. I sent him to Harvard. Why not? As I tell my friends, since Pierre is my only expense, I can afford to be lavish with him. But it is more than that. Because he has grown up virtually without a father, I feel compelled to compensate.

When Evelyn learned of my pregnancy with little Pierre, as Adam and I and my parents used to call him, she flew into a rage that subsided into a years-long deterioration and rancorous depression. She tried to kill herself. She spoke of murdering their son. I felt badly for Adam. He had not intended to have a child with me. It was I who wanted a baby. I who did not want, except occasionally, a man. Perhaps I was simply swept along by the winds of change that were blowing over women’s lives in France, thanks to women like my suffragist grandmother and writers like Simone de Beauvoir, whose book
The Second Sex
put the world I knew into a perspective I could more easily comprehend, if not control. Prior to reading her book I felt doomed to incomprehension regarding the universal subjugation of women. Doomed to ignorance, in spite of having listened, from babyhood, to the flaming speeches of Grandmother Beatrice, as she labored for the rights of French women. Doomed, even, to a kind of insanity that I believe the pampered oppressed always feel, and for which there seems to be no remedy except enlightenment regarding their plight, followed by active exercise of the insights of their awareness.

It was hard enough to have been forced to leave Algeria, our house and gardens and servants and friendships (with the servants) there. But the French were killing the Algerians, body and soul, and the Algerians grew sick of being treated worse than dogs. They fought back. There seemed to be a rising tide of blood across the land, and even clergymen like my father were not exempt. We left in tears, for we considered ourselves Algerians. French Algerians, of course. Members of the ruling class and race,
bien sûr.
The elite. And yet I, especially, felt native to the land, because I was. I was born there. Hot sun even now is the kind I prefer. I am never so happy as when enveloped by a scorching Parisian summer, when most true Parisians make sure to be someplace else. Someplace cooler. The ocean or the mountains.