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On the bodies of third world women: Cultural impurity, prostitution, and other nervous conditions. By: Saliba, Therese, College Literature, 00933139, Feb95, Vol. 22, Issue 1

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ON THE BODIES OF THIRD WORLD WOMEN: CULTURAL IMPURITY, PROSTITUTION, AND OTHER NERVOUS CONDITIONS

Contents

  1. SEXUALITY AND POLITICS IN WOMAN A T POINT ZERO
  2. COLLECTIVE VOICES AND SHARED CONDITIONS
  3. THIRD WORLD TEXTS IN FIRST WORLD CONTEXTS
  4. NOTES
  5. WORKS CITED

It is women everywhere in what is called the Third World who are changing things. (Doris Lessing, African Laughter)

Individual women from the [third world] appear on the feminist stage as representatives of the millions of women in their own societies. To what extent they do violence to the women they claim authority to write and speak about is a question that is seldom raised. (Marnia Lazreg, "Feminism and Difference")

In postcolonial Zimbabwe, women are involved in the construction of a collective text of their lives called "the women's book." This book, written by rural women who choose both the topics and materials, funded by government ministries, and orchestrated mainly by urban women in order to involve rural women in the development of the country, is described as "really revolutionary . . . challeng[ing] the fabric of [Zimbabwean] culture and customs" (Lessing 362). As a collective text written by postcolonial women themselves, "The women's book" functions, it would seem, as an antidote, a resistant, curative story to what Homi Bhabha describes as the "English Book," the text that crops up in the remote comers of the world as the sign of colonial authority and the superiority of Western patriarchal civilization. These colonizing texts of the civilizing mission, written "in the name of the father and the author . . . install the sign of appropriate representation: the word of God, truth, art creates the conditions for a beginning, a practice of narrative" (166). If, as Bhabha claims, the texts of the civilizing mission suggest the triumph of Empire, then the collective third world women's text suggests the triumph of decolonization. This revolutionary document, written, as it were, in the name of women who do not necessarily have access to the tools of authorship and its implicit authority, by women participating in the reconstruction of postcolonial Zimbabwe, constitutes what Karen Caplan describes as an "outlaw genre" because it simultaneously "'authorizes' and validates the identity of the individual writer" and constructs a collective document that resists the hierarchical structures of patriarchy, capitalism, and colonial discourse (120-21).

In order to discuss two novels by third world women, WomanatPointZero (1975) by Egyptian Nawal El Saadawi and Nervous Conditions (1988) by Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga, I invoke "the women's book" as a model against which we may examine third world women's narratives, particularly those produced by postcolonial bourgeois women writers. Both novels operate as collective texts of women's multiple experiences that expose the problematic social conditions facing postcolonial women as they examine the heterogeneity of third world women's experience. The double protagonists within these novels comprise a collective subject that problematizes the role of the bourgeois postcolonial subject. Her economic and social privilege is critiqued indirectly through the class differences between women characters as detrimental to women's unified struggle against the patriarchal class system. In both WomanatPointZero and Nervous Conditions, the lower class woman's voice dominates the text, thereby disrupting the hierarchy among women. In giving their bourgeois women a significant but less pervasive voice, both authors indirectly interrogate their own positions of privilege and comment on their roles as bourgeois women in the construction of a collective, yet multiple women's subjectivity. As Gayatri Spivak argues, "the postcolonial bourgeoisie must most specifically learn to negotiate with the structure of enabling violence that produced her" (58).[1] So while these texts on one level recount resistances to patriarchal and colonial control, the bourgeois characters/authors implicate themselves in this "structure of enabling violence" in order to examine the fragmentation between women that results from the structures of patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism.

The collective text, in effect, operates as a collective body of women's voices, a re-embodiment of the disembodied voices of postcolonial intellectuals and silenced subaltern women who exist atpointzero within the hierarchies of international capitalism, still suffering the "nervous conditions" of postcolonial or neocolonial race, gender, and class oppression. Like "the women's book," these novels situate rural or peasant womenat the center of the decolonizing project. Significantly, both texts were initially rejected within their own countries for their pointed critiques of male domination. All of El Saadawi's writings were banned for eleven years under Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, her books were censored in Jordan, Libya, and Saudi Arabia, and eventually she was imprisoned by Sadat for speaking out against male domination in Egypt. Similarly, Dangarembga's novel was rejected by male-dominated publishers for being too "negative"[2] in its depiction of women's lives. Although both stories are situated on the African continent, Egypt is predominately Arab and Zimbabwe predominately Shona (70%). Both countries were colonized by the British, although Egypt gained independence in 1954 after more than seventy years of occupation and resistance,[3] whereas Zimbabwe fought a bloody ten-year revolution to force the British out, and finally won independence in 1980. These significant differences in national formation are evident in that El Saadawi writes in her native Arabic, and Dangarembga in the colonizer's language, English. Both texts are primarily concerned with issues of gender and class oppression within their respective societies, yet their (post)colonial contexts shape the ways in which gender and class issues are played out on women's bodies.

With the hybridization of culture resultant from colonialism, indigenous women's bodies have come to signify, within indigenous male ideology, sites of cultural impurity, bodies polluted or sickened by "diseases" of Western influence. However, these women writers reclaim women's bodies as sites of resistance to both the internal "diseases" of the patriarchal class system and the extemal "disease" of Western colonialism/imperialism. In WomanatPointZero and in Nervous Conditions the so-called diseases of cultural impurity are manifest as prostitution and as anorexia nervosa, respectively, one with its roots in the conditions of lower class women, the other in women of privileged classes. In refusing to carry the burden of postcolonial corruption, these women effectively transform their bodies into a site of rebellion. The women are cured to some degree by women uniting across class lines to form a collective body, a collective book written as part of the process of decolonization against the oppressive legacies of patriarchy and colonialism.

SEXUALITY AND POLITICS IN WOMAN A T POINT ZERO

In much of the literature of the Arab world, the prevalent figure of the female prostitute signifies the nation prostituted to the colonizer for superficial gains, bands of gold, and the false beauties of Westeren "modernization." In post-World War I Egypt, many Egyptian peasants and middle class expressed a growing opposition to British colonial presence and the corruption it wrought on traditional religious and family structures. As prostitution "mushroomed"[4] in the streets of Cairo and around British bases, the corruption of various political leaders and groups who "prostituted" themselves to colonial interests was further reflected in the burgeoning sexual corruption of lower-class women whose "dishonor" became emblematic of the condition of the Egyptian state. In Midaq Alley, Nobel Prize novelist Naguib Mahfouz portrays a Cairo neighborhood "in almost complete isolation from all surrounding activity" ( 1) as its inhabitants come in contact with the influences of British occupation, which draws the young men into the army and the women into prostitution. Although many Egyptian men collaborated with and benefited from the British occupation, Egyptian women were expected to bear the burden of cultural tradition by keeping their "honor" intact.

El Saadawi faults Mahfouz for his objectification of women in his symbolic equating of sexual aggression against women with colonial aggression against a nation, and asserts that

at the individual level the honour and integrity of women remains for Mahfouz a totally different thing to that of men. The honour of women is preserved or lost depending upon the type of sexual relations which they have with men, rather than on the other aspects of their life. (Hidden Face of Eve 166)

In resistance to the dominant male ideology reflected in Mahfouz's work, El Saadawi directly incorporates elements of his system of relations and further sharpens her criticism of that system by focusing on prostitution. WomanatPointZero, a feminist[5] reading of prostitution and the social, economic, and political factors that define women's oppression within Egyptian society, challenges male understanding of the conditions of women's lives and subverts her own position of privilege within the existing relations of power.

In this novel, Firdaus, who is imprisoned for murdering a pimp, recounts her life story as she awaits her death. As a prostitute from the peasant class, she must tell her story to the psychiatrist, Dr. El Saadawi, who operates as "translator," much like Spivak's postcolonial intellectual who must represent the silenced subaltern woman. In giving voice to Firdaus, WomanatPointZero may be viewed as a response to a tradition of Arab literature that has failed to give women a voice other than that which is dislocated in patriarchal discourse; but it should also be read with an understanding of its political/historical context. According to Barbara Harlow,

Firdaus's story is the history of an Egyptian peasant girl victimized by the conservative indigenous traditions of her country and exploited by the post-colonial corruption which characterized Egyptian society and government, particularly under Anwar Sadat. (137)

In the 1983 English translation of the novel, Firdaus's story is framed by El Saadawi's explanation of her role as psychiatrist within the prison, her research on women prisoners, her husband's thirteen-year imprisonment as a political detainee, and her own subsequent arrest under Sadat, who imprisoned 1500 intellectuals, writers, and journalists for voicing opposition to his policies in 1981.[6] Although the terms of Firdaus's and El Saadawi's imprisonment are very different, they both signify ways in which corrupt postcolonial governments attempt to silence and contain resistance. Throughout the novel, Firdaus expresses contempt for these "kings, princes, and rulers" (11) by spitting on their pictures in the newspaper, and exposes the criminal corruptions of a system that leads a woman to murder. El Saadawi's research of women political prisoners, published as Women and Neurosis in Egypt in 1976, aptly describes the "nervous conditions" of Egyptian women's lives. Her writing of WomanatPointZero, on the other hand, recounts a woman's individual story, described by El Saadawi herself as "haft way between fiction and fact . . . Imagination is only twenty per cent, maybe ten per cent" ("Reflections" 402). According to El Saadawi, Firdaus's story asserts the "need to challenge and to overcome those forces that deprive human beings of their right to live, to love, and to real freedom" (iv). Her writing, however, fails to redeem Firdaus from death, except in a symbolic sense.

Firdaus's story arises from silence, from her initial refusal to speak. She recognizes, like Frantz Fanon's native intellectual, that "To speak is to exist absolutely for the other" (Fanon 17), and she believes that the doctor is one of "them," one of the repressive authority figures implicated in her hanging. In some sense, Firdaus's assessment of the doctor's authority is correct: the doctor (like the Western reader) is implicated in this collective "they" who hold authority over the prisoner, and the doctor must relinquish her position of authority before Firdaus will address her. Firdaus's silence, therefore, resonates with strength and dignity and nags at the doctor: ". . . her refusal to see me, the feeling that I was helpless, and of no significance grew on me . . . Since she had rejected me, did that mean she was a better person than me?" ( 3). The power of Firdaus's silence reverses the hierarchical relationship between the doctor and the prisoner, placing the doctor in a position of dis-ease, and compelling her to relinquish her authority in order to approach Firdaus's story. When Firdaus finally does agree to speak, perhaps because she believes that the doctor is not entirely other, her voice is authoritative and urgent. "Let me speak. Do not interrupt me," she commands. The doctor grants Firdaus her uninterrupted say in the session, but Firdaus too allows the doctor a heating of the story of her life. In so doing, she struggles for a position of subjectivity that does not exist entirely through and for the other,

This zeropoint of subjectivity from which Firdaus speaks is a space emptied of desire, a final, total vanishing point[7] from which the subject refuses to be subjected by those in authority. In exposing the methods of patriarchal dominance--including social, religious, economic, and political control--and returning to a zeropoint where all has been revealed and discarded, Firdaus constantly subverts this space into which she is forced. Her position atpointzero is simultaneously one of lack and of subversion, because the "nature of [her] subalternity leads [her] to struggle against the process of hierarchization as a whole" (see Hammami and Rieker 101).[8] Firdaus has turned the complete negation of women to the zero degree into a self-claimed space where she can no longer be subjected. Yet because she cannot exist as a subject within the existing patriarchal class system, she must be hanged.

Firdaus's ability to manipulate the roles she is cast in by those more powerful than she is evident in her embracing of prostitution as a method of liberation. She insists on a high price for her body, rejects men who are dirty, and resists by making her body "passive, inert, unfeeling" in these sexual encounters (85). After her own experiences as wife, prostitute, and office worker, she characterizes all women as "prostitutes who sold themselves at varying prices" (76). In her outcry against male dominance, she exposes the multiple forms of hypocrisy and control used to gain authority over women. For example, she states, "The men I hated most of all were those who tried to give me advice, or told me that they wanted to rescue me from the life I was leading . . . they thought they were better than I was . . . they saw themselves in some kind of chivalrous role" (88). Indeed, all those who supposedly rescue Firdaus, men and women alike, end up using her for their own purposes. When she is propositioned by a policeman for a visiting Head of State and rebuked as "unpatriotic" at her refusal, she responds, "I told the man from the police that I knew nothing about patriotism, that my country had not only given me nothing, but had also taken away anything I might have had, including my honour and my dignity" (90). Firdaus's refusal to serve "her country" and those government officials who attempt to master her through manipulation empowers her and poses a threat to the state she exposes as corrupt. She also counters here the nationalist ideology that encouraged collaboration with corrupt leaders and positioned lower class women as "patriotic prostitutes" who must bear the burdens of nation without benefiting from the nation in any way. By refusing to prostitute herself to state "interests," Firdaus, in effect, extends the control of her body to an act of rebellion against the state.

Some Arab male critics have demonstrated their limited understanding of feminist politics by characterizing Arab women's writing as individualistic and autobiographical rather than as fictional accounts representative of a collective social reality.[9] Women's individual lack of freedom is, however, part of the collective social reality. Yet this fact seems to escape Georges Tarabishi who, in Woman against Her Sex: A Critique of Nawal El-Saadawi, gives more credence to woman's lack of the phallus than to her lack of freedom within patriarchal society. Tarabishi describes Firdaus as "only interested in liberating herself, not her female sister" (32), and further faults El Saadawi for "her individualistic philosophy, combined with her elitist attitude" (33). Yet he misses two key points of the text: the individual woman struggling against social and economic dominance represents her sisters' struggle and lends courage to that struggle; and the doctor interrogates her position of privilege and relinquishes her authority in order to hear Firdaus. The doctor takes Firdaus in--"she vibrated within me" (iii)--even as she realizes that "Firdaus had more courage than I" (110). Firdaus's story, therefore, operates as a "way in" to the subaltern woman's experience, for Firdaus's courage has infused those stony parts of the doctor, of the listener, of the reader. Thus the story functions as a collective cure for the many female listeners who might hear it.