Cover of the March 31, 1994 issue.

Timeline is a regular feature in each issue looking back to events and milestones that have helped us evolve into the community we are today.

March 31, 1994

Cutting off her husband’s penis garnered Lorena Bobbitt more attention than perhaps she deserved, or so Alice Walker and Pratibha Parmar may have felt when the story first broke. Bobbitt’s crime generated a media frenzy; her actions certainly constituted genital mutilation, but at the time of the incident, Walker and Parmar couldn’t help but wonder about the millions of other victims of genital mutilation who go unmentioned. In a Metroline interview Parmar spoke of the atrocity behind female mutilation.

Touching briefly on genital mutilation in her novel The Color Purple, Walker found herself exploring, at great length, the practice and its devastating effects on the women and girls who are its victims. Her book, "Possessing the Secret Joy." brought major attention to female mutilation. Considered a ritual in many Third World countries including Muslim cultures, female mutilation falls under the guise of “cleaning” women and girls. Unless the clitoris and labia are excised, women in these countries are looked upon like prostitutes— “impure” and “unclean.” However, most often, as Parmar shared, the incisions are performed with sharp knives, rocks or razors and without anesthesia. During the September 1993 International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women, a conference which took place in Geneva, female mutilation was listed as one of the top five most prevalent crimes against women.

Upon discovering that many countries still performed mutilation rituals, Walker contacted Pratibha Parmar, a lesbian feminist independent filmmaker.  The two writers/directors collaborated and decided to make a documentary film about female mutilation. In February of 1993, both women left for Africa to begin filming Warrior Marks, a riveting, haunting film that included interviews with survivors of genital mutilation, health care providers trying to eradicate the practice throughout Africa and the individuals who perform the practice.

Various types of genital mutilation, Walker and Parmar discovered, included: removal of the hood of the clitoris or removal of the clitoris and all or part of the labia. The most extreme type of mutilation involved removing the clitoris and all of the labia with the remaining sides of the vulva stitched together to close up the vagina. Only a small opening, preserved with slivers of wood or matchsticks, was left open.

Metroline learned that as the women filmed, both were faced with extreme reactions to what they were witnessing. Walker battled insomnia and Parmar had nightmares from which she woke sweating and screaming. “There’s no question that this was a painful and difficult journey to do,” said Parmar in the 1994 Metroline interview. “But there are so many people who don’t even know about this, that it happens, today, now, in our very own countries. This isn’t something distant and far away.”