Abstract
Films on trauma function as a form of social awareness and serve a historical purpose of reconciliation, memorialisation, and witnessing catastrophe. This chapter analyses two films: Grass between my Lips (2008) and Like Cotton Twines (2016) as sites of trauma and memory. The chapter contends that, by incorporating historical and contemporary narratives specific to many West African cultures in their narratives, the directors of these films (Amardeep Kaleka and Leila Djansi, respectively) deploy overtly disturbing images of female genital cutting and Trokosi (deity servitude) not only to create shock, but also to evoke empathic distress and engender disquieting effects necessary to transform viewers’ perceptions and attitudes and to instigate a process of social reformation.
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Notes
- 1.
In this article, I adopt the term female genital cutting or excision, a much more neutral, non-partisan, and ideologically decoloured variant, for the ritual practice of female genital removal/operation instead of the semantically deceptive variant—circumcision—or the pejorative option—mutilation. I avoided the notion of ‘circumcision’ for two reasons. Pragmatically, the mechanics of female genital cutting is no way comparable to the male counterpart where only the foreskin is removed. Also, within the context of the films, the Akan and Ewe variants, ‘twa’ and ‘tsò’ respectively, used by the narrative agents denote ‘cutting’ instead of mutilation or circumcision. I later address, albeit briefly, some of the challenges and dangers with these political variants.
- 2.
FGC is also practised in some ethnic groups in the Middle East and Asia. However, it is rather prevalent on the African continent for various ethnic, religious, and cultural reasons, with Somalia, Djibouti, Guinea, Egypt, Eritrea, Mali, Sudan, and Sierra Leone being the most endemic. Isolated cases are also reported in Europe, Australia, and North America, particularly among migrants from countries where the practice is still prevalent. See UNICEF (2016).
- 3.
Depending on the extent of tissue removal, the WHO has identified four types: clitoridectomy, excision, infibulation, and other. According to the WHO, of all these types of circumcision, infibulation—the removal of part or all of the external genitalia and stitching or narrowing of the vaginal opening—is the most dangerous.
- 4.
In a recent BBC News coverage, Brigitte Sossou Perenyi, a former trokosi whose freedom was paid for by an American philanthropist, returned to Ghana to confront her parents and seek understanding into the century-long tradition, and why she was given out in atonement for a crime she did not commit; see BBC (2018).
- 5.
The practice is known by different names across the West African coast. In Ghana, variations such as Trokosi , Woryokwe, Troxorvi, or Fiashidi exist. Among the Fons of Benin and Togo, for instance, the practice is referred to as Voodoosi or Vudusi. Ontological perspectives on the practice are contained in Botchway (2008). In the context of this chapter, Trokosi refers to the practice of atonement with virgin girls, while trokosi refers to a person offered to a shrine in atonement for offences committed by her family.
- 6.
The term ‘fetish priest’, though derogatory, refers to revered traditional diviners who perform rituals with money, liquor, animals, and in some places, human slaves—trokosis . The fetish priests, the leaders of the Trokosi system, are considered the mediators between the living (in some cases the dead) and the gods; a virtue by which their pronouncements are considered unquestionable by the living.
- 7.
These girls are practically raped under the guise of religious and spiritual symbolism. In the event of conception, the child fathered by a priest is subject to the discretionary use of the priest—often exploited sexually and physically, see Wiking (2009).
- 8.
Aside international conventions, Ghana’s 1992 Constitution and other statutory provisions like the 1998 amendment to the Criminal Code 1960 (Act 29), the criminalisation of other harmful cultural practices—child betrothal and widowhood rites (1998), female genital mutilation (FGM) (1995), child abuse (1998)—and the Domestic Violence Act, 2007, Act 732 protect against gender-based violence.
- 9.
Recent documentaries like The Cut: Exploring FGM (2018), Cut: Exposing FGM Worldwide (2017), and Trokosi (2014), treat FGM and Trokosi as developmental issues, often without local specificity. By abjectifying these practices, they also paradoxically abjectify the women who have undergone such procedures and, again, reify them as always already mutilated, which as well implies a ‘mutilated’ subjectivity or agency. Leila Djansi’s Like Cotton Twines (2016), for instance, falls victim to some of these ideological accusations. However, since this is not the focus of this chapter, I would reserve such for later exploration.
- 10.
Stanlie M. James and Claire Robertson (2002) explore these debates in their edited volume Genital cutting and transnational sisterhood: Disputing US polemics, and how the Western feminist representations often deny agency to African women, ignore their role in cultural institutions reproduced in part through FGC, and refuse to acknowledge the necessary leadership role they can play in any debate, discussion, or campaign as regards the possible transformation or elimination of the practice.
- 11.
Grass Between My Lips is a Master of Arts Thesis film written and produced by the Ghanaian-American filmmaker Leila Djansi but directed by Amardeep Kaleka for the Film and Television Department, Savannah College of Arts and Design (2008). Available at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSMPo1MEgoA>.
- 12.
This is one of Djansi’s overtly political films. Its critical exploration of culturally contestable issues positions her as political filmmaker. Filmed in the Volta Region of Ghana, the home of the Trokosi practice, the film was screened in the regional capital, Ho, after its theatrical release.
- 13.
Although there are significant variations in the theorisation of spectatorial affective engagement with fictional characters and the modalities of its evocation, scholars recognise the relationship between film, spectators, and context to modulate pro-social behaviour.
- 14.
Hysteria, in this context, refers to the physical manifestations (anguish, helplessness, frustration) of unconfronted traumatic memory of genital cutting (Freud and Breuer 1895).
- 15.
Calabashes, made from the fruits of the white-flowered gourd or what is popularly known as long melon or Tasmanian bean, are receptacles or utensils typical of many West African households.
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Lotsu, DB.P. (2020). Cultural Practices as Sites of Trauma and Empathic Distress in Like Cotton Twines (2016) and Grass between my Lips (2008). In: Hubbell, A.L., Akagawa, N., Rojas-Lizana, S., Pohlman, A. (eds) Places of Traumatic Memory. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52056-4_12
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