Writing against the Grain: African Women's Texts on Female Infibulation as Literature of Resistance

Abstract

This article looks at representations of female infibulation in African literary texts, and offers analyses of three such texts: Nawal El Saadawi's The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World (1980), Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) and Sirad S. Hassan's Sette Gocce di Sangue: Due Donne Somale (Seven Drops of Blood: Two Somali Women) (1996). Writing from a location in the West to which we have migrated, this is an attempt to employ literature as a device of resistance, and it also refers to writing as a process through which women can become aware of their potentia (Foucault), thereby contributing to their own empowerment and that of their own community.

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