Wasted Wombs

Erica Van Der Sijpt

Description

Central to this book are Gbigbil women's experiences with different "reproductive interruptions": miscarriages, stillbirths, child deaths, induced abortions, and infertility. Rather than consider these events as inherently dissimilar as women do in Western countries, the Gbigbil women of eastern Cameroon see them all as instances of "wasted wombs" that leave their reproductive trajectories hanging in the balance. The women must navigate this uncertainty while negotiating their social positions, aspirations for the future, and the current workings of their bodies.

Providing an intimate look into these processes, Wasted Wombs shows how Gbigbil women constantly shift their interpretations of when a pregnancy starts, what it contains, and what is lost in case of a reproductive interruption, in contrast to Western conceptions of fertility and loss. Depending on the context and on their life aspirations—be it marriage and motherhood, or an educational trajectory and employment, or profitable sexual affairs with so-called "big fish"—women negotiate and manipulate the meanings and effects of reproductive interruptions. Paradoxically, they often do so while portraying themselves as powerless. Wasted Wombs carefully analyzes such tactics in relation to the various social predicaments that emerge around reproductive interruptions, as well as the capricious workings of women's physical bodies.

Sujets

• Médecine
• Gynécologie et Obstétrique
• African Studies
• Political Science
• African
• CAB Direct (database)
• Anthropology
• Health
• World

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 27 mars 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780826521712
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Wasted Wombs
WASTED WOMBS
Navigating Reproductive Interruptions in Cameroon
ERICA VAN DER SIJPT
Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville
© 2018 by Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee 37235
All rights reserved
First printing 2018
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
LC control number 2016045189
LC classification number RG632.C17 S55 2017
Dewey class number 618.9320096711—dc23
LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2016045189
ISBN 978–0-8265–2169–9 (hardcover)
ISBN 978–0-8265–2170–5 (paperback)
ISBN 978–0-8265–2171–2 (ebook)
For Alex and Julia
Contents
Introduction
1. Terrains in Transformation
2. Pregnancies in Practice
3. Rural Respect
4. Urban Horizons
5. Discourses of Decision-Making
Conclusion
Appendixes
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Introduction
ON A HOT AND LAZY SUNDAY, toward the end of December 2004, I was informed that a young woman on the other side of Asung had lost her pregnancy. 1 I had already spent three months in this eastern Cameroonian village but had never witnessed an immediate instance of reproductive loss; so far, my anthropological explorations had consisted of mere hypothetical chats about what the local Gbigbil people called “wasted wombs.” Now, on this sun-drenched day, the news of Celestine’s pregnancy loss rapidly spread through the village and was eagerly told to me as well. Curious yet cautious, I decided to pay Celestine a visit. When I approached the compound people had pointed me to, I found a group of women, sheltering themselves from the sun in a thatch-roofed open hut—some combing and braiding each other’s hair, others lying down on the wooden benches, the oldest one preparing a reddish sauce on the smoking fire. The scene was far from exceptional.
After greeting all those present by respectfully offering my wrist to their outstretched hands and answering the usual questions about my health, the amount of sleep I’d had, and the well-being of my family members, I asked if the woman who had lost her pregnancy was there. I was surprised to see one of the lively young women sitting opposite me indicate that it was she. Celestine had a round, glimmering face and deep-set, sparkling eyes. She seemed friendly and willing to talk and immediately invited me to sit with her in her mother’s kitchen, “because it is so hot out here and the smoke of the fire might irritate your eyes.” Maybe she felt my discomfort in speaking of her “wasted womb” in public. Perhaps it reflected her own uneasiness with the situation.
Alone with me in the kitchen, Celestine offered me a leaf-wrapped cassava stick and, while she nibbled on a stick as well, began to talk about her experience. Sadly, but with a trace of pride, she told me how she had endured the pain all alone, how she had secluded herself behind the huts, and how she had panicked when she suddenly saw a little arm sticking out of her vagina. With the help of a neighboring mama , the five-month-old fetus—long since deceased—had finally been expelled and quickly buried. The decomposed corpse of the little baby boy had been a horrible sight. “Maybe it was the heavy work I have been doing in the fields, and I also suffer from jaundice in my belly,” she replied when I asked her what could have caused this. Though people had told me that Celestine herself had attempted to abort this pregnancy, I did not dare to pose further questions at that moment.
Many lengthy conversations ensued in the months after our initial acquaintance, while we prepared food in that same mud-brick kitchen or worked together in the field that she had carved out of the dense rain forest. Celestine shared her worries about her boyfriend, who was responsible for the pregnancy she had just lost but who seemed unwilling to fulfill his duties toward her and her family. She repeatedly indicated that she was suffering with him, and that she dreaded the prospect of marrying such a “good-for-nothing.” For this reason, she admitted, she had initially tried to get rid of the pregnancy. Several failed abortion attempts and a friend’s warning about the potential fatal outcome of her interventions, however, had made her decide to keep the pregnancy. After all, she had told herself, her previous baby had also died, and she wanted her only daughter to have at least one little brother.
But then the pregnancy ended nevertheless. Celestine insisted that this loss was not her fault, but due to the illness in her belly that she was now desperately trying to cure. On more than one occasion, she showed me the leaves and bark that older women in the village had given her to “wash her womb.” Though her boyfriend had initially financed a few hospital visits and injections “to evacuate the blood,” biomedical treatment had to be discontinued when both he and Celestine’s mother and siblings—left in poverty after the death of Celestine’s father—fell short of money. When I left the village a few months later, Celestine was still under indigenous treatment. Having become one of my best friends over this short period, she cried when I hugged her goodbye. Regretting that she did not have a phone that would allow us to keep in touch, she gave me one of her self-made bracelets and said, “Erica, there are so many things that I still want to tell you. But will you still find me here when you come back? Please take this as a souvenir from me.” It is as if she felt we would never see each other again.
One year later, back in the Netherlands, I received a phone call from an informant announcing that my friend Celestine had died. The illness in her belly had persisted and had made her thin and weak. She had gone to her maternal grandmother to seek another treatment, but now the news had arrived in the village that she had passed away. I was sad and confused. But when I called my informant one month later and inquired about Celestine’s burial, she told me that the news of Celestine’s death had been a false rumor; my friend was now back in the village but was still ill and suffering. The disapproval that I detected in her voice suggested that stories of Celestine’s attempts to induce abortion were still circulating, and had made outsiders critical of her suffering.
Expecting to meet my friend when I returned for another round of fieldwork in 2007, I was disappointed to hear that Celestine had eventually died. Her story was recounted many times by women who emphasized the risk of death after induced abortion. Celestine’s elder sister Sophie, who became one of my closest informants at this time, nevertheless denied all abortion accusations and told me her sister had fallen victim to witchcraft. She related how a family dispute had induced witches to fill Celestine’s womb with mystical water, how the two sisters had secretly visited several indigenous healers together, and how all these marabouts had told Celestine that it was already too late and that she would eventually die. 2 Exasperated, Sophie exclaimed, “If she had attempted to abort this pregnancy, the child would have come out immediately, not after five months, totally black and rotten. This was obviously the work of witches and not of Celestine!” Underpinning this witchcraft hypothesis, a maternal cousin confided that it was Celestine’s unwillingness to enter marriage that had upset her patrilineal kin. Eager to receive some matrimonial gifts but faced with Celestine’s refusal to leave her paternal home, they would “have made her leave” through occult forces—which, in turn, had made Celestine’s angry mother move out of the compound and settle among her own relatives. The wife of Celestine’s paternal uncle, however, countered such allegations by expressing her strong suspicion that Celestine herself had been a witch. Why else would her baby decompose in the uterus and get stuck on its way out? This, she claimed, could only have been the effect of the destructive mystical powers in her belly—which she had probably inherited from her mother, one of the most troublesome co-wives in the extended family.
Clearly, the “wasted womb” and lost life of my friend had caused a big stir in her family and the village. The rumors swirling around Celestine’s case remained heated and full of conflicting interpretations until I left the field at the end of 2009. Together, they revealed a complex set of reproductive fears and desires and constituted a powerful social commentary on wifehood and motherhood, gender and kinship, the body and its degeneration, and life and death. Together, they showed that so much more was at play than only the release of that particular five-month-old fetus. 3
This book is about this “so much more.” It examines not only moments of reproductive loss, but also the conditions and configurations that shape these moments and that affect how women give meaning and direction to their experiences. Through this examination, it aims to unravel what is actually at stake when reproduction goes awry, why that is so, and how women maneuver such stakes while leading their reproductive lives. Reproduction is a domain “in which people reconceptualize and reorganize the world in which they live” (Van Hollen 2003: 5). Consequently, instances of reproductive disruption —in which stakes may be multiple, contestations complex, and ambivalences ample, as Celestine’s story shows—are moments par excellence for understanding the dynamics of this reorientation. How do women and others evaluate, experience, and exploit such circumstances of heightened social ambiguity and bodily precarity? How do such maneuvers affect women’s further social lives and their future reproductive trajectories? And what does this tell us more generally about the meanings and management of reproductive insecurities? In providing answers to these questions, this book is ultimately about reproductive uncertainty and potential transformation. It is about