By Anote Ajeluorou and Greg
Nwakunor
In tune with the theme of
the 5th edition of Garden City Literary Festival (GCLF) 2012, the play Evil
Blade by the late playwright, Amatu
Braide, was presented by the Institute of Arts and Culture, University of Port
Harcourt. It was Day Two of the festival and guests from Britain, South Africa
and Uganda were just warming up to yearly literary feast.
Directed by a professor of Theatre and gender expert, Prof.
Julie Okoh, the play resonated with the ever-changing social realities of
modern day African society, especially with a heavy dose of influence from
outside the continent. Also, the choice of Evil Blade as festival play perfectly amplified the festival’s
broad theme, ‘Women in Literature’ that put women on centre-stage.
With an all-female cast, the dance drama piece was total
theatre presentation that highlighted the plight of women in the face the
menacing traditional practice of women circumcision in Africa’s patriarchal
society, a practice foisted on women by men for reasons too hollow now to
believe. The play highlighted the many evils and socio-cultural conditions
women have had to endure for centuries: female genital mutilation (FGM)! While
the practice is gradually easing off through education and enlightenment, it
dies hard in some parts of the continent where it still remains a scourge.
With its well-choreographed movements, songs, dances and
deft acting, the evils of female circumcision were brought home to the audience
inside the Banquet Hall of Hotel Presidential, Port Harcourt. Ironically, the
play also puts women are at the centre of the perpetuation of the evil
practice, whose origin stems from men’s efforts to curtail women’s sexual
expression. Indeed, fearful that women’s sexuality might cause disruption in
social behaviour, men then devised a means to suppress and rein in women’s
libido by causing them to be circumcised.
To authenticate this blatant fraud on women, men invented
all excuses to hoodwink women into being the ones to wield the blade with which
they chop off the sensitive genitalia that ordinarily affords a woman as much
sexual pleasure as a man. Another myth invented to keep the evil tradition of
circumcision is that should the head of the infant touch the vexed tissue or
clitoris at birth, such child would die. Indeed, maintaining society’s sexual
health from exploding in the face of men, it is also argued, is the reason
offered for the practice; this was tellingly brought home to the audience.
But the hollowness of these reasons has long come to light
and women are taking none of it any more, having seized on modern
enlightenment, education, medical expediency, advocacy and even feminine
militancy combined with a measure of intellectual disputation. These are
women’s weapons to fight what has come to be seen as patriarchal fraud.
Evil Blade took
the audience through the various tricks and harrowing consequences of
circumcision practice that has crippled many women emotionally, having hampered
their sexual urges, causing them pain that often led to Vagina Vesicular
Fistula (VVF), infections from unsterilised blades used in circumcision, the
incidence of HIV/AIDS in certain cases that result in death.
Called to question were the malefolk that require the
practice, the older women who demand that their daughters or daughter-in-laws
get circumcised and, who are also saddled with the ungainly task of
circumcising their kind.
For these crusading women, the traditional practice is a
social aberration that hurt women and which must be stopped by using all the
tools of enlightenment, education and advocacy at their disposal. While the
bible, for example, prescribes circumcision for men at the age of eight, men
have come to prescribe it for women essentially as a weapon to control and
subjugate women and so find ready excuse to keep them in their harems simply
for their pleasure.
So, the women argue that circumcision or not, whichever
women will be prostitutes or ashawo
will be prostitutes or ashawo and
that the practice has nothing to do with a woman’s waywardness or decorum.
Collectively, they affirm the abolition of circumcision as a means of saving
the lives of their daughters from the evil blades that dangerously clip a
woman’s clitoris and her emotions, with its attendant unpleasant, fatal
consequences.
Considering the urgency of the subject matter of Evil
Blade as an advocacy play production,
it’s message has far wider application and should also be presented in remote
villages and communities where circumcision rites still hold sway. It’s a play
that should be appropriated for enlightenment across the country. The Ministry
of Information and the National Orientation arm of the Ministry of Culture and
Tourism could work together to take the play further afield for the message to
be taken to the grassroots to enlighten rural folks amongst whom the practice
is still deeply entrenched.
That way the creative genius of the late playwright, Braide
could be better put to use in highlighting one of the plights women face in a
patriarchal society where the rule of male folk is supreme. Now, however,
Braide is suing for accommodation and a place for women so they could exercise
their fundamental rights of gaining sexual freedom through the abolition of
female genital mutilation!
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