Daughters of Africa W/Riting Change: Female Genital Excision in Two African Short Stories and in Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy

When in 1992 the African-American Alice Walker published Possessing the Secret of Joy her fictional account of an excised woman's life-story sparked considerable reaction world-wide. While in particular Western feminists have acclaimed Walker's bitter attack on female genital excision, many African critics have taken offence at the novel's derogatory representation of Africa and at the presumptuous manner in which Walker has assumed authority, practical as well as discursive, over African women's lives.
This article compares Possessing the Secret of Joy with two short-stories written by African women who are denouncing female genital excision in equally harsh terms. Unlike Walker, the Somali Saida Hagi-Dirie Herzi and the Egyptian Alifa Rifaat are not outsiders, for in both their countries female genital excision continues to be widely practised. Through 'close reading' of Rifaat's "Who Will Be the Man?" (1981) and Hagi-Dirie Herzi's "Against the Pleasure Principle" (1990), I deconstruct the myth that only Western feminists/womanists are denouncing the practice on behalf of supposedly silenced African women. A comparative analysis of the discursive and narrative strategies used in the African short-stories with Walker's in Possessing the Secret of Joy reveals some of the difficulties that lie in passing criticism on female genital excision as well as the different ways in which these three authors negotiate these difficulties in their creative writing.