Women and Class Struggle in Sembene's "God's Bits of Wood"Author(s): Karen SacksReviewed work(s):Source: Signs, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Winter, 1978), pp. 363-370Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173032 .Accessed: 17/09/2012 11:03

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REVISIONS/REPORTS

Women and Class Struggle in Sembene's

God's Bits of Wood

Karen Sacks

The connection between the oppression of women and the central discovery of Marxism, the class exploitation of the worker in capitalism is still forced. ... But when the connection between class, colonial and sexual op- pression becomes commonplace we will understand it, not as an abstract concept, but as something coming out of the experience of particular women. [SHEILA ROW- BOTHAM]

To teach women's studies or anthropology of women, or to remember that humanity comes in two sexes when the course topic is class or cul- ture rather than sex, means at some point or other to be confronted by the knotty question of how women's struggles and women's conscious- ness relate to working-class struggles and working-class consciousness. And as a Marxist in a field whose stock in trade is cultural differences, I am also confronted by the interplay of culture (or ethnicity) and class, and its impacts on women's consciousness. But Rowbotham is right-we barely understand those relationships because conscious activity, the mother of understanding, is still in its infancy. This means that when such questions are raised in the classroom as well as in political activity, our answers in talk and in practice are hesitant-groping for something

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1976 meetings of the Northeast- ern Anthropological Association in Middletown, Connecticut. I would like to thank Lynn Olson for typing and Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Judy Hilkey, Bill Sacks, James Scully, and Gerald Sider for their very helpful comments and criticisms. The opening quote is taken from Sheila Rowbotham, Women, Resistance, and Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), p. 247. [Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1978, vol. 4, no. 2] ? 1978 by The University of Chicago. 0097-9740/78/0402-0013$00.81

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at once optimistic and encouraging, but experientially convincing and analytically sound. All too often in social science literature and in our daily experiences, class, culture, and sex seem somehow opposed-for example, we see working-class unity undercut by racism and sexism. However, we have also experienced Third World women fighting as women and as workers against imperialism, black and white uniting against capitalism and against racism. Of course, some experiences teach more, and more convincingly, than others. The experience of the Paris Commune showed Marx what the working class needed to destroy and to build in order to create socialism; it revealed a process which had been assumed, but not known. Henceforth, the transition from capitalism to socialism no longer seemed like a leap of faith, and it has since become reality. Just as Marxists since Marx have developed our understanding of class struggle and class consciousness by analyzing workers' efforts to transform their conditions of existence, so too must we examine wom- en's efforts to do the same and see how they relate to class struggle and consciousness. Is it because of a failure of vision that we cannot see Paris Commune-like lessons in working-class women's struggles? Or is it sim- ply that such struggles have not yet happened?

Ousmane Sembene's revolutionary novel, God's Bits of Wood, pro- vides that vision for us. Combining aspects of reality in ways that reality was not combined before, he lays out for us the revolutionary pos- sibilities with respect to women, colonialism, and class struggle that are inherent in our everyday lives. The oppressive conditions of imperialism under which working-class women live generate bonds for help in per- forming their unpaid labor of housework and child rearing, bonds which contain revolutionary potential. Although God's Bits of Wood tells us that class is more important than culture as a base for revolutionary consciousness, it is equally forceful in showing that African cultural heri- tages as well as European ones underlie working-class culture. In this novel, African workers learn from the written experiences of their class brothers and sisters in Europe, but they also have a great deal to teach European workers. Culturally, the working-class street is not one-way.

God's Bits of Wood is about a real strike which took place in 1947 in what was then French West Africa. At one level the book is about the conflict between African railway workers and the French capitalist- colonialists. The French do not figure prominently, however, because Sembene aims to explore the nature and development of working-class consciousness and its relationship to antiimperialist consciousness as it pertains to women and to men in a strike situation. He wants to show how men and women become conscious of their oppression as collec- tivities within a class. The men's strike is the necessary event that makes women act in their class interest. Just as the railroad pulled African male workers together against the French, the strike pulled women together, first with the men, then among themselves, and finally against the French. But the strike is also a process by which women and men act and

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thereby forge social relations based on their pragmatic, immediate needs to sustain the strike and to feed their families. In this process, women become conscious of their independent relationship to capitalism as well as of their particular kin ties and interdependence with male pro- letarians. Sembene, showing that consciousness is as much consequence as cause of action, lays out the dialectical relationship between them.

* * *

The action of God's Bits of Wood takes place in three cities along the railway. The actions and decisions in each town build upon those of the others, thus engendering a collective product. This is further empha- sized by the refusal to structure the novel around central "heroes" and a background chorus. Instead there are many central actors (and virtually no chorus) who create their own new understanding and articulate it for the reader. In this way, Sembene overcomes the frequent contradiction in novels between a revolutionary or collectivist message and a bourgeois or individualist style.

The book moves up and back along the railroad, from Bamako in the east, to Thies, home of the railroad maintenance shops, to the city of Dakar in the west. The entry of women into the strike is at first auxiliary and supportive: in Thies, when soldiers attack the strikers in the market, the market women join with the strikers in fighting the French. In Bamako, women support their men against a strikebreaker. The second round of women's struggles, born of foodless kitchens in Dakar, involves the women in battling the police more in their own right and on behalf of each other. But in the final part of the book, women unite Thiies and Dakar in a women's march and in so doing join the working class all along the line. Here women demand family allowances from the French in their own right as a self-conscious part of a working-class struggle. This is then a novel of the creation by African workers of social ties, groups, and institutions based on class along with the consciousness of what they have done and why they had to do it.

The opening scene, at Bamako, tells of the men's strike meeting and of the very separate household life of women. When next we return to the trial of Diara, the ticket collector who has been breaking the strike under French protection, women are already involved. The trial, in- spired by Malraux's Man's Fate, is repulsive to Tiemoko's comrades and particularly to Fa Keita, the "Old One," who finds the use of such a French institution debasing and humiliating. Tiemoko's obstinacy wins out not only with respect to the trial but also with his invitation to women to testify against Diara. For Diara's crime against the women was to force them off the trains because they supported the men. After a stormy expose, Diara is revealed as a traitor, but none of the comrades, includ- ing Tiemoko, clearly understands what the trial has accomplished. Only the Old One can tell them: "As for Diara, . . . you have struck him where

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every human worthy of the name is most vulnerable. You have shamed him before his friends, and before the world, and in doing that you have hurt him far more than you could by any bodily punishment. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring, but in seeing this man before me I do not think that there is one among us who will be tempted to follow in his footsteps. ... Diara, lift up your head. You have been the instrument of destiny here-it was not you who was on trial; it was the owners of the machines. Thanks to you, no one of us now will give up the fight."' The trial has created working-class ties by defining who is an enemy, a member, or an ally. The women are now recognized as allies.

Whereas the women are men's auxiliaries in Bamako, in Dakar they take on the French and define them as enemies of women as well as men. As the French cut off the water supply to the workers' quarter and cut off credit in the shops, they cause near famine among the populace. Ramatoulaye, head of N'Diayene, a large compound, begs her brother, el Hadji Mabigue, a floppish lackey of the French, for some grain and "disowns" him when he refuses. When she discovers that Mabigue's fat pet ram has destroyed the kitchen and the few bits of food which the women had collectively managed to get, she kills it to feed the household and neighborhood: "'Why did you do it?' Mame Sofi demanded.... 'I did it because we were hungry-we were all too hungry for it to go on. The men know it too, but they go away in the morning and don't come back until the night has come and they do not see . .' " (p. 122). All the women in the neighborhood turn out to rout the police and their re- inforcements who attempt to capture Ramatoulaye and the cooked ram:

What was the source of this energy so suddenly unleashed? It was not the war; Ramatoulaye was not a man and knew nothing of the rancors that well up in soldiers on the march. It was not the factory; she had never been subject to the inhuman dictatorship of machines. It was not even too frequent association of men; she had known only those of her own family. Where, then? The answer was as simple as the woman herself. It has been born beside a cold fireplace, in an empty kitchen. She took a step toward the white officer.

"Go way now," she said in French. "This is a house for us, not a house for white men. Vendredi ate the children's rice. I killed Ven- dredi, and now the children can eat again. We are even."

On all sides of her the other women began brandishing bottles filled with sand, flatirons and clubs of all shapes and sizes. In a few minutes the group of policemen was completely encircled. [P. 129]

Bound together by their shared need to feed their families, the women battle (successfully) against the cavalry even though many houses burn

1. Ousmane Sembene, God's Bits of Wood (New York: Anchor Books, 1970), p. 158. All other references to the novel will be cited in the body of the text.

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down in the fire they use as a weapon. When the police return, Ramatoulaye goes with them voluntarily, and all the women follow to protect her.

In the course of these struggles the women of Dakar enter the strike. But the strike still belongs to the men. It is only in Thies that the strike becomes fully the struggle of working-class women. At Thiess, site of negotiations, the African workers demand that they receive the family allowances which French workers won after World War II. The co- lonialists refuse: "'Very well then,' Dejean [French boss] said.... 'You certainly must recognize that the matter of family allowances cannot be considered.' 'Why?' Doudou asked. 'Simply because you are all polyga- mous,' Victor said. 'How do you think we could possibly recognize all of those children .. .?' 'And with the money you get, you would just go out and buy more wives and have more children. .. .' 'But in France every- one gets it ... !' But Victor just snorted, 'In France there are no such things as concubines ....'" (pp. 275-76). When this is reported to the men and women waiting for the outcome of the negotiations, the women decide to enter the strike in defense of their own rights: ". . . a little group of women managed to make its way through the crush and ap- proach the delegates.... it was Penda who addressed them. .... 'I speak in the name of all the women, but I am just the voice they have chosen to tell you what they have decided to do. Yesterday we all laughed together, men and women, and today we weep together, but for us women this strike still means the possibility of a better life tomorrow. We owe it to ourselves to hold up our heads and not to give in now. So we have decided that tomorrow we will march together to Dakar' " (p. 282).

As their march carries the strike to virtually all women between Thies and Dakar, women create new roles for themselves and from this creation become conscious of their own collective basis for inter- dependence and opposition to the French. In the last two stages of the march to Dakar the women are given a magnificent reception. At the entrance to Dakar, however, the soldiers try to stop the women.

"Go back to Thies, women! We cannot let you pass!" "We will pass if we have to walk on the body of your mother,"

Penda cried. And already the pressure of this human wall was forc- ing the soldiers to draw back. Reinforcements began to appear, from everywhere at once, but they were not for the men in uniform. A few rifle butts came up menacingly and were beaten down by clubs and stones. The unnerved soldiers hesitated, not knowing what to do, and then some shots rang out, and in the column two people fell-Penda and Samba N'Doulougou. But how could a handful of men in red tarbooshes prevent this great river from rolling on to the sea? [P. 304]

When the people in Dakar learn that the women will arrive early in the afternoon, they bring food and precious water to greet them. As the

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women enter the city, the strikers themselves desperately try to maintain order:

As they approached the grade crossing, Grandmother Fatou Wade pushed forward to meet them. She waved the cloth above her head and then spread it across the street in front of Mariame Sonko, who paused in astonishment.

"No, no!" the old woman cried. "Come ahead, come ahead, and walk over the cloth. In old times, that is how the warriors were received when they returned to their homes."

There were shouts of enthusiasm from the crowd, and the other women began to follow her example. In a few minutes the pavement was strewn with handkerchiefs, headcloths, and even blouses and the great multi-colored carpet made the arrival of the women seem like a kind of carnival. [Pp. 312-13]

At a mass meeting held at the race track, which the French with the collusion of corrupt leaders from the trade union confederation hope to use to isolate the strikers from the rest of the working class, the women make their triumphal entrance:

Never before had such an enormous crowd assembled at the race course in Dakar. In addition to the strikers, there were the dock workers, the fishermen from N'Gor, from Yoff, and from Kam- barene, and the workers and office staff of all the big factories. ... A few minutes later a murmur of excitement rippled across the crowd, as the women of Thies came in through the main entrance gate. Their long journey together had been an effective training school; they marched in well ordered ranks.... They carried banners and pennants printed with slogans, some of them reading, EVEN BUL- LETS COULD NOT STOP US, and others, WE DEMAND FAM- ILY ALLOWANCES. Behind them came the mass of the strikers, led by the members of the committee. They too were carrying ban- ners: FOR EQUAL WORK, EQUAL PAY-OLD AGE PEN- SIONS-PROPER HOUSING, and others. [Pp. 316-17]

The women's march has changed what began as a battle of railroad workers against the French into a working-class struggle of men and women against colonialists. The women sparked the general strike and the ultimate victory.

In the end, Maimouna, the blind woman from Thies whose child was killed by the French, stays in Dakar to nurse the orphaned baby, called Strike, whose mother was also killed in the struggle. As Sembene shows, working-class women depend on each other for carrying out "woman's work"-the unpaid labor of raising and caring for their families; they are not isolated. Like men of their class under ordinary conditions, they do not act on a consciousness of who makes their lives miserable, and this makes their interdependence critical. That kind of

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consciousness came into being here as part of an active process which requires conscious action based on total interdependence. In this, women have their own collective score to settle with the capitalists.

* * *

What bearing does Sembene's conclusion have on the lives, con- sciousness, and struggles of working-class women elsewhere? Does the strength and organization women exhibit in God's Bits of Wood come from precapitalist African traditions of female militancy? We know, for example, traditions of militant action in women's organizations were the wellsprings for anticolonial women's rebellions in Nigeria and Camer- oon.2 It is not clear whether Sembene intends to evoke these rebellions, nor do I know whether women's groups existed among the Wolof or Bambara peoples who are the central actors in this novel. There are hints of precolonial tradition that illuminate the battle of the sexes. Throughout the book, Maimouna, the blind woman, sings verses of the legend of Goumba N'Diaye, "the woman who had measured her strength against that of men" (p. 53). Its resolution ends God's Bits of Wood: "And fighting together, blood covered, they transfixed their enemies" (p. 360). By giving the song such prominence Sembene is perhaps telling us that there is a wisdom in precapitalist African cultural traditions which can illuminate, aid, and give new meaning to contempo- rary working-class struggles.

Can this new female and male egalitarian interdependence in class struggle be generalized? Does it depend on a cultural history of women's groups and militancy? On large collective households? Or is it a wide- spread response to pressures generated by capitalism? Sembene seems to suggest that it is the latter. The conditions of existence that capitalism imposes on the working class everywhere force women to rely on each other in order to perform the unpaid work they are assigned by the capitalist division of labor. Many social scientists have described net- works of interdependence among working-class women in different places and cultures, including those with solid traditions of nuclear fam- ily autonomy: among black Americans,3 and in Beirut,4 London,5 and

2. Kamene Okonjo, "The Dual Sex Political System in Operation: Igbo Women and Community Politics in Midwestern Nigeria," and Judith Van Allen, "'Aba Riots' or 'Igbo Women's War'? Ideology, Stratification, and the Invisibility of Women," both in Women in Africa, ed. N. Hafkin and E. Bay (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1976); Shirley Ardener, "Sexual Insult and Female Militancy," Man 8, no. 3 (September 1973): 422-40.

3. Carol Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Harper Colophon, 1974); Robert Staples, "Toward a Sociology of the Black Family: A Theoretical and Methodological Assessment," Journal of Marriage and the Family (February 1971), pp. 119-35.

4. Suad Joseph, "Does Poverty Have Public and Private Domains?" (unpublished paper available from author).

5. Elizabeth Bott, Family and Social Network (London: Tavistock Publications, 1957);

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the Dominican Republic.6 Not unlike Sembene, they have also tended to view the creation of such networks as working-class cultural responses to poverty and oppression generated by capitalism. This is not to deny that working-class-based networks exist under very different specific situa- tions, first and foremost differences among the particulars of capitalism. Nor is this meant to overlook the ways in which cultural traditions inter- act with the particulars of class. There are certainly differences between networks in cultures with a tradition of women's militancy and elabo- rated household organization, and networks in cultures with a tradition of isolated domestic organization. But such questions emphasize what holds us from struggle, what divides a working class, and blind us to the important fact that people have overcome obstacles and divisions. They blind us in particular to the very thing that Sembene bids us to liberate-the revolutionary potential embedded in very unrevolutionary daily life.

Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology Clark University

Michael Young and Peter Wilmott, Family and Kinship in East London (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1962).

6. Susan Brown, "Love Unites Them and Hunger Separates Them: Poor Women in the Dominican Republic," in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975).

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