Genital Cursing, Social Justice, and Affect: Jack Tracey with Naminata Diabate, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and author of Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa. FOR READERS WHO MIGHT NOT KNOW WHAT IS GENITAL CURSING (OR NAKED AGENCY) AND WHAT CONTEXT DOES THIS FORM OF PROTEST TAKE PLACE? Genital cursing is a ritual gesture whereby, in anger or in desperation, mature women expose their nudity accompanied with incantations to punish male targets, leading to social and political change. Within specific indigenous religious contexts, genital cursing is a potent mode of conflict management, a form of checks and balances. It carries such persuasive meaning for several reasons, including the prominence of social cohesion in the constitution of collective and individual identities, the importance of shame as a major deterrence, and the understanding of mature women’s bodies as housing maleficent and beneficent forces. In this sense, the threatening exhibition of tabooed body parts is said to cause the women’s targets a myriad of misfortunes, impotence, social isolation, illness, and death. These longstanding meanings have, however, lost their potency in major African cities. My book demonstrates that factors— anonymity, the erosion of social ties, the restructuring of gender norms, and ethnic diversity—have deritualized and secularized most contemporary instances of genital cursing. It thus became clear that the term naked agency was more befitting than genital cursing or naked protest because it accounts for the backlash (physical and verbal abuse, arrest, threat thereof, and even murder) that the gesture is currently begetting. WHAT WAS THE INSPIRATION FOR THIS BOOK? HAVE YOU EVER WITNESSED OR PARTICIPATED IN ONE OF THESE PROTESTS YOURSELF? Naked Agency was a response to an unsettling aspect of my graduate school education. In my Women’s and Gender Studies courses, I was consistently frustrated by images of black women’s bodies as consistently subjugated, mutilated, diseased, and violated. These images negatively influenced my relationship with my own body as a black African woman in the US academy. In conjunction with the personal, I was also frustrated at these biased images because I was exposed to other ways in which in my childhood neighborhood in Côte d’Ivoire, women’s bodies could be mobilized as a form of resistance to and punishment of males of all ages and professions. In resorting to their bodies, these women were capitalizing on the fear that men in my community have of female sexuality, which they have been taught to regard as dangerous. Flashing taboo body parts, threatening a man with menstrual cloths, or touching men’s food or clothing with secretions considered repugnantly sexual often made men listen or comply in instances where other mechanisms of resistance have failed. WHAT METHODOLOGIES DO YOU PRIMARILY USE TO EXPLORE GENITAL CURSING AND NUDE PROTESTS? To explore this uncivil gesture, I draw on a variety of cultural products, newspapers, pictorial arts, oral tradition, narrative film, documentaries, novels, autobiographies, and social media posts. Additionally, the book covers more than thirty (30) different events involving nakedness over nine (9) decades and from more than twenty (20) African countries where populations speak thousands of languages. Given the multiplicity of sources, genres, platforms, and contexts, I adopt a multidisciplinary approach. Literary, visual, and cultural analyses leads to the interpretative framework that I call “open reading.” Open reading enables me to follow specific events of naked agency through their multiple manifestations and developments. For instance, the July 2002 genital cursing threat of Nigerian women against multinational oil companies made international news. Then, the feature documentary, The Naked Option: A Last Resort (2010) by American filmmaker Candace Schermerhorn provides a richer account of the women’s threat by giving them the opportunity to “tell” their side of the story. The film shows women’s challenging working and living conditions, highlighting the depth of their unwavering resolve to stand up to multi-billion dollar companies. When one thinks that the July event is complete and fully known through news reports and the documentary, additional visual artwork provide a deeper context. Three versions (1994, 1996, and 2007) of the Nigerian Bruce Onobrakpeya’s visual artwork Nudes and Protest stage how elderly women of the Niger Delta express their grievances against unrestrained rule and mismanagement of natural resources. Not only were the 1994 and 1996 works prescient in predicting the 2002 threat of cursing but it also responded to it with the 2007 version. My multidisciplinary approach and open reading allow thinking of each of these genres (news reports, documentary, and painting) as different restagings of a single event. I even go as far as to argue that each retelling gives us an additional event because each demands different points of access, different audiences, different stakeholders, different political and cultural work, different affective reactions, and different conclusions. THIS IS A SERIOUS SCHOLARLY WORK, YET YOUR TEXT ENGAGES WITH VERY DIVISIVE POLITICAL ISSUES, HOW DO YOU WALK THE LINE BETWEEN YOUR OWN POLITICAL BELIEFS AND YOUR ROLE AS A RESEARCHER? This compelling question reminds me of the tight rope that I had to walk when writing this book. As a cultural critic and academic, I was trained to hold in high regards scholarly objectivity. I attempted to hold myself to that standard for the rigor of my analysis but also out of respect for my readers. After all, this is not a manifesto, but rather, it is a set of exploratory reflections to get readers thinking about more seriously about a subject matter that often is dismissed as sensational, playful, and inconsequential. For these two reasons, I succeeded for the most part in holding my own ideological and political beliefs in check. However, my thriving for neutrality was markedly challenged when I found out that the 2011 female genital cursing performance in Côte d’Ivoire that led to the killings of multiple women was masterminded by a political party during post-electoral violence. Instrumentalizing women’s bodies and rituals using the empty rhetoric of “republic motherhood” turned these women into political pawns. I had to rewrite that chapter multiple times because the first versions were a series of indictments of political leaders; my biases and anger were oozing from the screen. In rewriting the chapter, I worked through some of my biases in order to achieve the celebrated and wished for objectivity. The affective dimension that I sought to curtail, however, proved productive because it strengthened my sense of responsibility and respect for the women who dare disrobe for justice and dignity. CAN NUDITY BE USED AS A SYMBOL SUCCESSFULLY IN OTHER CULTURAL CONTEXTS, AND WHAT IS UNIQUE TO ITS USE ACROSS DIFFERENT CULTURES IN AFRICA? Literally and symbolically, nudity can be used as a form of resistance and counter resistance. In most societies where clothing or body covering is required in public, the uncivil exposition of genital organs disrupts principles of decorum, thus becoming capable of drawing attention. The book shows that the meanings of intentional nakedness are markedly contextual, and culturally and historically determined. As one of the most universal and yet the most highly context-driven modes of dissent, defiant disrobing is not just one thing. It is many things. Each time it is performed, insurrectionary self-exhibition animates a differ¬ent code to decipher deeper cultural and societal accounts. Given that thousands of nations and ethnicities populate Africa, it is productive to highlight two overarching phenomena: the myriad of indigenous terms to designate the gesture and the current deritualization trend. In lieu of a few English terms to designate the threatening removal of clothing, most nations in Africa have their own terms, which may not refer to nakedness. For instance, the term adjanou in Baoulé (Côte d’Ivoire) does not translate as naked, or nakedness; instead, it refers primarily to the sacred and secret exorcism ritual during which naked elderly women mobilize the entities within their bodies either to curse an offender or to ward off evils. Similarly, the name anlu in Kom (Cameroon) to designate genital-cursing rituals actually means “to drive away.” Anlu refers to a famous Kom legend in which women disguised themselves as men to drive away the neighboring Mejang. Clearly, Ad¬janou and anlu are not just descriptive of nakedness; in Ivorian and Cameroo¬nian representations, they evoke fear and awe because they carry historical and customary connotations as well as unexplored and complex valences. To navigate the diversity of terms, I propose the term naked agency to move beyond the ethnic and the local but also allowing for them.A connecting thread linking instances of defiant disrobing in the generalized African context is what I call the increasing deritualization or secularization of the gesture by both the women and their targets and bystanders. Post independence civil servants deritualize genital cursing by stripping it of its culturally sanctioned symbolic and indigenous religious meanings so as expose it to the repressive mechanisms of the so-called secular state. Such trends occurred in the Gambia in 2001, Côte d’Ivoire in 2011, and Uganda in 2015. Some protesters, including female students of the generalized 2015 – 16 Fees Must Fall movement in South Africa, who marshal insurgent nakedness benefit from the seculariza¬tion trend because it enables certain kinds of agency. They perform naked agency to attract media attention to their cause or voice their grievances. Even without its religious aspect, the secularized version of the gesture still violates the Judeo-Christian precept of decorum of the “secular” nation-state. In consequence, naked pro¬test works without the need to invoke the sanctity of motherhood. DOES NUDITY DO ANYTHING TO DECONSTRUCT A COMMON AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE OF AFRICA AS A CULTURAL MONOLITH? Sadly, my research has demonstrated that naked agency actually reinforces centuries-long accounts of Africa (a continent of 55 countries with thousands and nations and ethnicities) as culturally monolithic. Most online newspapers’ reader comments in the United States, a once coveted forum of public deliberation, focus on the women’s genitalia and breasts and the mystical forces thereof at the expense of women’s other modes of resistance and retribution. Typically, genital flashing is the last resort, but these multiply removed audiences (as I call them in the book) frame it as the only form of conflict management. This misreading often denies the women the political rationality afforded to non-women-non African protesters. Even the most sympathetic supporter of the women can fall into that trap, as did President Barack Obama and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in their 2011 responses to the killings of Ivorian women who staged genital cursing. I discuss this (unwitting) misreading in Scene 1 of the book. WHAT ARE SOME OF THE MAJOR TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS BOOK? I hope to highlight the unintended consequences of the viral nature of news reporting about protest nudity. It has profusely crossed borders because of globalization and its attendant wider cir¬culation of images and ideas. This border crossing indicates two things: that the oppositional tactic of one group can serve as a model for other resistance groups, and that the performance of insurgent self-exposure in one place can dilute or enhance its reception elsewhere. Specifically, disrobing by Occupy Wall Street activists, lactivists, and World Naked Bike Riders elicits markedly different material reactions than in Kenya. Thus, further deliberation is necessary if the ultimate weapon for some women, in highly oppressive and volatile contexts, becomes merely one more playful spectacle of sexualization and globalization. Additionally, I seek to deepen our understanding of the myriad modes of conflict management. The book has taught me that the most oppressed often have the most to teach us about resilience and creativity.
