Some late ponderings

01/22
Some late Ponderings

I had meant to write a reflection on my class period last week right after class. Unfortunately my body has limited my ability to be a human being the past weekend but I do have strong feelings about the last class and the introspection it has provided me and my body.

In class last week we were finally able to move around and perform. I love this class as it is (I know Dr. Calafell says it doesn't have to change your life-but it is changing mine) but when we actually allowed to move in class and perform I felt that a theory/practice connection occurred in my my brain and body that hadn't previously. I know I was nervous-I love movement, I was a dancer for years and a mover in college. I love acting although I have never been that great at it, The Vagina Monologues performance I was in changed my life. It came rushing back to me, the adrenaline, the pulsing, the rush of being in front of others connecting to them in a way that is impossible unless bodies and minds are both physically present. It also allowed us to work with one another differently than is possible when just sitting discussing readings for the day. There were arguments and discussions, there were times I didn't want to put my body into certain physical spaces that I was comfortable with. There were ways we wanted to communicate things all different, but all valid and good. I am always overly-sensitive from power and that day after my first class discussing feminism and "the feminist perspective of voice" (dripping with sarcasm) and I just wanted to make sure our pose conveying voice was an attempt at trying to eliminate power differentials. Although not perfect on the first try the second try (and the class) gave us lots of helpful ways to suggest fixing the performance to make it even more dialogic.

Then we performed an excerpt of Soyini Madison's piece on Trokosi women in Ghana. I felt personally connected with the piece on many levels. To give those who may be reading this a little background on Trokosi (not to sound overly confident as I am truly not) are women who live in the temples and shrines dedicated to different deities in the traditional religious practices of Ghana. I am sure this is universalizing and homogenizing the practice much more than it actually is. The issue is complex like Female Genital Mutilation. Those that practice Trokosi say the girls are taken to the shrines in order to receive an education in order to learn to be proper wives etc...while those on the outside believe the women to be oppressed, denied human/personal rights because they are taken from their homes in order to be servants (sex and otherwise) to priests in the temples. Neither side is completely right or wrong instead it depends mostly on one's positionality and where one stands.

I have not been to Ghana but I have been to South Africa and not to homogenize the cultures and assume in any way shape or form that the entire continent is the same, it just happens that I had an interesting experience while I was in South Africa. We visited a community still much rooted in traditional Xhosa! religious practices ad visited an actual kingdom on the east side of the country. While there we received an interesting talk from a ma who basically manages the tourist aspects of the kingdom. A large coliseum type structure was constructed centrally in the kingdom and we were all seated within it in order to hear the man speak. He told us that the coliseum was constructed on a shrine/grave yard of the past kings. At the end of his talk he invited all the males at the talk to the shrine/grave yard but told all the females they were not allowed to enter the grounds. My professor was outraged. She felt the situation was archaic, sexist, and patriarchal. She wanted to know why it was and the man claimed that it was tradition and that they believed women could contaminate the area with bad luck (my professor attributed this to notions of witchcraft-I am not so certain.) While my professor was outraged I had friends I relayed the story to when back in the U.S. who said that she was crazy for being upset. It is their religion, their customs and traditions, we/I wasn't supposed to judge them with a western lens. Honestly I was torn. A large piece of me was in agreement with my friends back home that we shouldn't continue to colonize people by diminishing their practices or trying to get them to change but at the same time I did not really agree with the practice either. I was in a space of cognitive dissonance. I thought of this as I read the words of the advocate for individual human rights by Madison.

I was angry while I read the piece. Angry at the group, although it wasn't really their faults specifically. I didn't like that we were placing me a white woman in the role of "western feminist." It was too real, this position. I had been in too many women's studies classes where the issue of female genital mutilation and similar practices were heavily critiqued by younger women who couldn't get passed the grotesque nature of the act to understand that for many women it is there only way to access economic resources through marriage. I am not particularly fond of the practice but I see it as a complex issue with many pieces and parts that cannot be judged simply by a western criteria of feminist action. But my role was in many ways to take on this kind of naive simplistic way of seeing Trokosi women as oppressed, uneducated, unenlightened women. On the opposite of this the male in our group played who he considered to be the asshole, the character advocating for keeping the practice of Trokosi. Again maybe too real the man advocating for the possible subservience for women-not that that is what the part entailed or the script explained but what I think the perception could be when the role is played by a male character.

I was a bit angry at this, but we were limited in resources and people so the performance was limited also. I didn't mind the "speaking for others" it was more what was being spoken I had issues with because I didn't agree with my character, but at the same time I didn't completely disregard it or agree with the other side either. That was really the beauty of the piece it showed the dissonance that happens with these complicated issues with no easy answers. I thought that aspect was really poignant and meaningful to me. It got at the fact that there are no easy answers to complicated problems and if anything it at least spurned the dialogue into action. In this sense I see that the performance can be a good starting piece when dealing with complicated social justice issues where nothing is as simple as oppressed and oppressor but shows the complicated interworkings of complex relationships.
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Here is a very westernized version of what Trokosi women go through, I hope to not perpetuate this notion but to use this as a demonstration of the western discourses about Trokosi women.