That's because no one uses it, says Adam, fingering the dusty unopened Bible, whose gilt-edged pages have been gnawed by moths.

It is even cool here, in the evenings; the windows are large and nothing, not even shutters, blocks the breeze. There are no bars, presumably because it is too high to jump.

Since the trial, Olivia has volunteered to work mornings downstairs on the AIDS floor. Adam, Benny and Pierre have rented a jeep and explored the countryside. We've filmed everything, says Benny, and now we want you to see it.

Adam starts the projector; at first there are slides. Pictures of the northern territory and its petroglyphs and faded paintings of celebrations and hunts. But then there is a film. I know they are trying to prepare me for it because Olivia is suddenly handing me a gla.s.s of water and Adam is holding my hand.

Pierre, who has said he wants to be the first anthropologist to empower and not further endanger his subjects, now stands quietly beside the machine.

At first I think they are showing me a human settlement, a village. The shapes are the same. Huts with umbrella-shaped tops. Huts like mushrooms. But then there is a close-up of the "huts" and a man's feet and legs rising above them. I recognize Adam's hiking boots. Then, when the picture is opened up, I see that the settlement is vast, but the "huts" are tiny, only three to six inches high.

Hah, says Adam, squeezing my hand. Fooled you!

I thought it was a village, I say, turning to Olivia and Mbati. Didn't you?

Mbati smiles. Olivia says, Yes, I did. Though I did wonder about that short lumpy hut that leaned so drastically to the left.

But what is..., I start to say, but am choked by the desperate surge of my heart as it makes a sudden attempt to leave my chest.

It's ok, says Adam. You are not alone. We are all here with you.

You're not alone. You're not, you're not, I hear from Raye. Her perky voice seems to come to me from another age. Women who are not gelded have a different sound, I think. They can sound perky. A gelded woman can not.

I think this in a flash. My mind in despairing flight from the sight of a tall, rough, earthcolored column on the screen before me, Benny, dwarfed beside it, smiling uncertainly into the camera. My bag of clay! I think.

Pierre clears his throat. It is my belief, he says, after stopping the projector on the image before us, that human beings in Africa (the first ones on the planet, it is a.s.sumed), because of the heat and humidity, imitated the termite when they looked about for housing that would be comfortable, long-lasting and easily built. That is why many traditional African houses, even today, and all adobe houses anywhere, resemble those of termites. It was termites who taught early humans about natural air-conditioning, with their long vaulted pa.s.sageways and great domed storage rooms. Termite houses, like mosques, are always cool, no matter what the outside temperature. Termite houses are made from the earth itself, from clay, the cheapest and most plentiful substance around.

What surprises me is that I can hear Pierre, and even understand what he is saying. It is true my heart leapt painfully once, but now it is beating normally. I glance around the room at the faces gathered about me. They are each as intent as my own.

I look at Pierre and think: Yes, it is a good thing that we train our children to help us. We who need so much help. I send a flash of grat.i.tude to those schools I've never set foot in, Berkeley and Harvard. If I should live, I think, I would visit them as shrines.

I believe, he continues, that over time there was a strong identification with the termite, which Africans call "white ant" even though it bears little resemblance to an ant. Unlike the ant, and most other insects, the termite has kept a place for males in its society. There is a queen, but also a king. Perhaps this is why, also, the people felt an affinity for it. White ants, as you know, are eaten by the people in the country, who prefer them fried.

And in the city too, if they could get them, says Olivia. She glances sharply at Mbati. It is disgusting to see how the youth are gorging on potato chips!

Adam laughs. Mbati pushes her bag of Fry-O potato chips deep in her string bag.

Their religious symbology became completely reflective of termite behavior, continues Pierre. Their grat.i.tude, for having been taught so much by the termite, was great.

And of course the termite was so delicious, says Raye.

The termites, continues Pierre, would have taught them to make pots, which would have led inevitably to the notion that the first human beings were themselves fashioned out of clay. And that something or someone so fashioned them.

But, says Pierre, running slender brown fingers through his sunbleached dark curls, not to run on and on about this...This, Madame Johnson, is your dark tower. You are the queen who loses her wings. It is you lying in the dark with millions of worker termites-who are busy, by the way, maintaining mushroom farms from which they feed you-buzzing about. You being stuffed with food at one end-a boring diet of mushrooms-and having your eggs, millions of them, constantly removed at the other. You who are fat, greasy, the color as you have said of tobacco spit, inert; only a tube through which generations of visionless offspring pa.s.s, their blindness perhaps made up for by their incessant if mindless activity, which never stops, day or night. You who endure all this, only at the end to die, and be devoured by those to whom you've given birth.

Ah, says Olivia. The termite as Christ!

But how did I know this? I ask my little band of intent faces. No one told me.

We think it was told you in code somehow, says Raye. Not told you directly that you, as a woman, were expected to reproduce as helplessly and inertly as a white ant; but in a culture in which it is mandatory that every single female be systematically des.e.xed, there would have to be some coded, mythological reason given for it, used secretly among the village elders. Otherwise they'd soon not know what they were talking about. Even today there are villages where an un-circ.u.mcised woman is not permitted to live. The chiefs enforce this. On the other hand, circ.u.mcision is a taboo that is never discussed. How then do the chiefs know to keep it going? How is it talked about?

My mind is blank. Surely no one ever told me anything except that...this thing M'Lissa did to me expressed my pride in my people; and that without it no man would marry me.

Perhaps, says Raye, you had a nursery rhyme when you were small, as innocuous as "Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater / Had a wife and couldn't keep her / Put her in a pumpkin sh.e.l.l / And there he kept her very well."

What? asks Benny. Puzzled.

It is about keeping a woman pregnant, says Pierre, stretching out his arms and curving them into a pumpkin shape. Enslaved by her own body.

Oh, says Benny. Appalled.

We know, from Griaule's work, that among the Dogon it was precisely the elders who were the guardians of the knowledge of the beginning of man. The Creation itself began with mutilation and rape...I wonder if you remember our little lesson, from Griaule's book, Madame Johnson, Pierre says, looking at me.

Much to my surprise, I do remember it. G.o.d wanted to have intercourse with the woman, I say. And the woman fought him. Her c.l.i.toris was a termite hill, rising up and barring his way.

Good, says Pierre.

Oh my G.o.d, says Raye. I know this sounds ridiculous, but the erect c.l.i.toris sort of resembles a little termite hill, or house.

Well, says Pierre, pointing to the giant one on the screen beside which Benny is standing, one like that clearly resembles a phallus.

When the c.l.i.toris rose, I continue, G.o.d thought it looked masculine. Since it was "masculine" for a c.l.i.toris to rise, G.o.d could be excused for cutting it down. Which he did. Then, I said, G.o.d f.u.c.ked the hole that was left. Of course I remember, I say to Pierre, that Griaule said G.o.d had intercourse. It is I who say G.o.d f.u.c.ked.

And this is how people who mutilate little girls see the beginning of life, groans Olivia, dropping her head into her hands.

Religion is an elaborate excuse for what man has done to women and to the earth, says Raye, bitterly.

But there were other religions, I say, thinking of the little figure blissfully loving herself.

Pierre shrugs. They were destroyed. Your little smiling G.o.ddess was destroyed.

I turn to Mbati. Her lovely face is filled with horror. n.o.body knows this story, she says. I am convinced. Which means, she says, visibly angry, n.o.body even knows why they do this thing. I certainly never had any idea why it was done to me. If my s.e.x organs were unclean, why was I born with them? I asked my mother this once, before I was circ.u.mcised. She just said everyone knew a woman's v.u.l.v.a to be dirty. And to need to be removed. That was all there was to it. No termites, no "white ants," no structural similarities between genitals and insect dwellings were discussed.

And who would not laugh at the notion that a c.l.i.toris, like a p.e.n.i.s, can rise?

Olivia asks if I am hungry or would like more water to drink. I am not sure. The sight of Mbati's anger has split me in two. Only a part of me is sitting in the midst of my family and friends. Another part is watching myself as a small child bring a tray of food and water to the elders of the village. They sit beside a baobab tree and gaze wisely out over the plain. The heat is intense but does not bother me. The earth is red. There are flies. Because I am small, they do not completely stop their talk.

Number one: What is a man?

All: Huh!

Number two: A man is blind.

All: Huh!

Number three: He has an eye.

All: Huh!

Number four: But it can not see.

Number one: Man is G.o.d's c.o.c.k.

Number two: It scratches the furrow.

Number three: It drops the seed.

Number four: But its offspring...

All: The crop!

Number one: Excrement!

Number two: It cannot identify.

Number three: G.o.d's blind c.o.c.k produces G.o.d's blind eggs.

Number four: Is an egg not blind?

Number one: It is so.

Number two: The tsunga's st.i.tch helps the c.o.c.k to know his crop...

All: Which after all belongs to G.o.d.

Number three: That is why it is said...

Number four:...the tsunga though herself a woman...

Number one:...helps G.o.d.

All: Is it not so?

All: It is so.

All: Woman is queen.

Number one: She is Queen.

Number two: G.o.d has given her to us.

Number three: We are thankful to G.o.d for all His gifts.

(They do not, however, thank the child for bringing the food or send thanks to her mother for preparing it.) Number four: Since G.o.d has given her to us, we must treat her well.

Number one: We must feed her so that she will stay plump.

Number two: Even her excrement will be plump.

(They laugh.) Number three: If left to herself the Queen would fly.

Number two: True.

Number three: And then where would we be?

Number four: But G.o.d is merciful.

Number one: He clips her wings.

Number two: She is inert.

Number three: And even her excrement is sweet.

Number four: Because she is Queen!

Number one: And we are only workers!

Number two: Blind, it is true, but that is G.o.d's will.

Number three: Did He not make us so?

Number four: True.

Number one: And did He not put the Queen's body there to make our offspring?

Number two: And to be our food?

Number three: It cannot be denied.

Number four: And when she rose up...

All: Hah!

Number three: Rose up indeed.

Number four: As a man would!

Number one: She did not see G.o.d's axe.

Number two: No, she was blind like us then. She did not see it.

Number three: G.o.d struck the blow that made her Queen!

Number four: Beautiful enough for him to f.u.c.k.

Number one: G.o.d liked it fighting!

(Laughter) Number two: G.o.d liked it tight!