Punctured Hope Reveals the Agony of Trokosi Through the Eyes of an Irrepressible Survivor

Premiere Issue (P. 48)

By Jane Delson

Throughout a lifetime, every human being moves between levels of belief, acceptance, disbelief and denial. It is the function of our innate sense of self protection and psychological survival.

Whether one is a victim of horrific war crimes, secretive sexual assault and/or abuse, psychological trauma resultant of accidental or deliberate actions, or merely the incidental target of uncontrollable rage, victimization offers two paths of response: one of no resistance, predicated on hopelessness, or the immobilization brought on by fear. The other response is forceful and strong, directed around the factors of unrelenting hope, courage and vision.

For Belinda "Edinam" Siamey of Ghana, that choice was always clear, so clear as to constitute a moral obligation. It is her personal story of innocence compromised by entrenched cultural repression that is the subject of Toronto Pictures' forthcoming feature film, Punctured Hope.

Filmed just outside Accra in Ghana, Punctured Hope is the wrenching story of Ms. Siamey's torturous experience of Trokosi, the startling ages-old tribal cultural practice that promotes the continued enslavement, mutilation and sexual abuse of thousands of West Africa's young girls and women.

My interview with Ms. Siamey took place in late August when Punctured Hope was in the final stages of production. And despite the distance between Los Angeles and Accra, my conversation with "Bel" could not have been more intimate, both in its subject matter and the gracious candor with which she answered each searing question. Our phone interview lasted well over an hour, and at its conclusion, I was leveled by the horrors she had recounted - and more appalled still that this horrific practice continues to haunt the young girls and women of Ghana and other parts of West Africa.

To distill Bel's experiences as a victim of Trokosi takes time and reflection, and I was not at all prepared to put to the page the nightmares she had shared with me until several weeks following our conversation. The degradation, humiliation and terror she endured can barely be imagined, yet alone accurately recounted. But as with survival stories of the Holocaust, within Bel's story resides the spirit of indomitable courage...and in that courage lies the hope for the thousands of current Trokosi victims who continue to waste away in the dungeon-like shrines of Ghana. It is a story, Director Bruno Pischiutta, knows must be shared with a global audience.

Bel's introduction to the horrors of Trokosi began when she was just thirteen years old, an age when her innocence was abruptly and brutally taken away from her. I asked her to share with me how her victimization came about. The details of her story make almost no sense to the Western mind inculcated with glib assumptions about personal independence and dignity and the role society plays in ensuring that independence and dignity.

Essentially, Bel's family relinquished her to the local shrine and its priests as a sacrifice for the presumed sins of her uncle. Her uncle, as she recounts the events leading up to her sacrifice, found a package of money while on his way to visit a friend. Rather than calling this to the attention of the chief priest, as is the prescribed behavior in such instances, he kept the money to help his family. Circumstantially, several people in her family were taken ill, and a family member died, leading the chief priest to suspect something was amiss. Believing "the gods were killing members of my family to avenge my uncle's crime," Bel explains, the chief priest learned of the found money and accused her relative of thievery.

In keeping with the centuries-old traditions of Trokosi, when a family member has sinned or allegedly committed a crime, a virgin female child must be surrendered to the chief priest and sacrificed to the shrine in atonement. She literally becomes a "wife of the gods," and the chief priest is his Earthly representative.

Bel's mother, who herself was not in good health at the time, collapsed upon hearing from her husband that their daughter must be sacrificed according to the rules of Trokosi. Rather than explaining to his daughter what her uncle had done and attempting to brace her for the event that was about to occur, Bel's father told her that she would be going to the shrine to help the priests with various chores, while her mother regained her health, and that doing this would please the gods and speed her mother's recovery.

This cowardly ruse left Bel terrified. She explained to me that she was very scared of what was to become of her. "I didn't know what I would have to do at the shrine, and I didn't understand how going away from my home and family could help my mother…I was very young, and it was terrifying."

Several days after learning of her imminent trip to the shrine, which had been couched as being temporary in nature, Bel was taken to be sacrificed to the chief priest by her father and her aunt. It was roughly ten miles from their village, and they walked. "All the time we were walking to the shrine I was becoming more and more frightened," she says. A combination of fear of the unknown and an intuitive sense of foreboding caused her to internalize her fears, and the absence of any explanation - coupled by the stony silence of her father and aunt - only compounded her panic and anxiety.

Standing outside the picture of this young child encountering the unknown absent any explanation or compassion from her family, one begins to move inside her private nightmare.

The chief priest who "received" Bel as the sacrifice for her family's crimes was approximately fifty years old. She was left with him - still with no explanation other than that her sojourn at the shrine would ultimately help her mother regain her health - and it is clear that the first day or two of Bel's arrival at the shrine remains a literal blur.

Not more than three days later, the rites of sacrificial passage began for Bel, and her agony can only be imagined. Her head and pubic hair were shaved, and a primitive and ritualistic clitoral excision was performed openly before attendant male priests of the shrine. It is a scenario predicated on abject humiliation made all the more horrific by physical mutilation.

In keeping with the custom, she was forced to drink an unknown concoction of blood and other fluids, intended to make Trokosi victims "faithful and dedicated slaves" and to mitigate against their escape. "That is when the real abuse begins," recounts Bel.

Following her initiation into the life of the shrine, Bel was denied food for several days and then subjected to the constant sexual demands of the chief priest and his priestly minions. "If any of us objected to their demands, we were flogged, starved and raped brutally," she states. "Sometimes, after the chief priest had had his field day on our bodies, his workers were allowed to make similar demands. At times we might be forced to have sex up to fourteen times a day. The balance of the time, we were expected to perform hard labor in the fields or in the market from roughly 5:30 in the morning until 6:00 or so at night." Trokosi slaves are never given any medical care, despite being subjected to chronic health problems complicated further by repeated pregnancies, and the delivery of their babies is always carried out in front of the priest, his colleagues and male shrine workers.

Still in shock - both physically and emotionally - from the trauma she had been forced to endure during her first weeks in the shrine, Bel turned to another young woman for guidance and understanding. At age twenty-three, the young woman was, herself, a Trokosi slave. Not unlike a prison inmate who explains "how it is" and "what it takes" to survive, she offered Bel comfort and advice as she tried to adjust to the brutal shrine life.

Known also as female circumcision and female genital mutilation, clitoral excision is one of several forms of genital mutilation which accost the physical and psychosexual integrity of girls and women, and its practice remains unabated. The medical complications which frequently ensue, given the unsterile conditions under which the procedure is virtually always performed and the random tools with which the excisor cuts the body, can cause serious lifelong health complications and - not infrequently - death. Yet such health issues and/or deaths are never attributable to the surgery's perpetrator…but rather, to evil spirits, angry gods or fate.

London's Womenaid International cites "acute pain, shock, haemorrhaging, ulceration of the genital region, retention of urine, damage to the urethra, anus and adjacent tissue, fractures or dislocations (when a struggling girl is restrained) and a series of bacterial infections" as immediate consequences of such procedures. Making matters worse still (if imaginable) is the fact that many excisors apply such traditional medicines as local herbs, earth, cow-dung, ash or butter, which can readily lead to tetanus and general septicaemia.

Long term effects of the practice include difficulty in passing urine, chronic pelvic and urinary tract infections, incontinence, keloid scarring formation and sexual dysfunction, among many others. Obstetric complications are the most frequent health problem, resulting from vicious scars in the clitoral zone after excision. These scars open during childbirth and cause the anterior perineum to tear, leading to haemorrhaging that is often difficult to stop, and although little reliable data is available, it is likely that the risk of maternal death and stillbirth is greatly increased, particularly in the absence of skilled health personnel and appropriate facilities.

As damaging as the physiological fallout from such barbaric "surgeries" is the psycho sexual and psychological damage done to girls and women who do manage to endure and survive the procedure. The removal of the clitoris, which is the main female sexual organ, can cause painful sexual intercourse and greatly reduced sexual sensitivity. For most women who have undergone the procedure, genital mutilation, in any of its forms, can cause deeply embedded emotional trauma which may manifest itself in anxiety, depression, loss of trust and on-going fear. Many survivors simply suffer in silence, having no acceptable venue in which to voice their outrage and pain.

"I felt totally isolated, totally alone," says Bel of her shrine existence. And today she continues to feel "locked up inside." There are few places she goes where she feels comfortable around people and at peace. "Ironically, I'm really only comfortable around people when I'm in a new place with strangers who can't possibly know about what has really happened to me. And there is absolutely no prospect of my ever establishing a relationship with a man in my life after what has happened to me" she affirms emphatically. "A part of myself can never depart from where I have been."

In 1997, the World Health Organization, the United Nations Children's Fund, and the United Nations Population Fund issued a joint statement confirming the universally unacceptable harm caused by female genital mutilation, or female circumcision, and called for the elimination of this practice in all its forms. The clear position of the three agencies was presented in the hope that this harmful practice will end when people understand the severe health consequences and indignity it inevitably causes.

That Ghana's Constitution of 1992 and its Criminal Code outlawed the practice of Trokosi on paper, and yet it continues with no end in sight, is testimony to the deeply entrenched nature of this phenomenon and the magnitude of the challenge of ending it. For Bel Siamey, her initial encounter with Bruno Pischiutta and Daria Trifu signaled a rarified opportunity to become a part of that process. "When I first met Bruno and Daria," she recalls, "it was as if it had been fated. Their mission was to produce a world-class film about the practice of Trokosi, and as it became clear to me that I might become a part of the film, I knew I had to embrace the opportunity, even though it meant reliving a very painful part of my past."

"Our first encounter with Bel was through Kinglsey Sam Obed, an Evangelical Pastor in Ghana and writer of the screenplay for Punctured Hope. Kingsley had heard the story of Bel's remarkably courageous escape from the shrine and wrote the screenplay based on Bel's actual experiences. When we heard Bel tell her story in her own words, we knew immediately that only she could portray herself on camera for us," says Pischiutta.

"Punctured Hope has given me a platform I had never dreamed might be possible for me. It has become a way for me to make a political, cultural and social statement that may help the thousands of young girls and women who continue to suffer as I did. This is my opportunity to be their voice…to say to the global community, this type of sanctioned slavery cannot continue."

Unlike the vast majority of Trokosi slaves, Bel Siamey managed to escape with her life and that of her unborn child. Befriended by a sympathetic teacher from her home village, she and her young woman friend were smuggled out of the shrine deep in the night…braced against the probability that they and their rescuer would be killed immediately, if caught. Shortly after fleeing the shrine, Bel bore a son. He is her legacy of courage and endurance.

My interview with Bel concluded with a discussion of what she hoped to teach her son in the years to come and the values she hoped to instill in him as a man. She told me - very deliberately - that she hoped to teach him humility and gentleness. That she wished to teach him how to treat a woman with love and respect. That she wished to teach him how to find peace in himself and offer peace to others. That she wished him to believe that we are all equal, regardless of gender, race, religion, education or economics. That spiritually, "we are all One."

Bel hopes to continue her education and perhaps eventually enter the legal profession. She has already liberated herself in ways few persons learn to do in a lifetime. D

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