If Women Had Written the World

how our perspective shapes the stories we tell

There have been some requests to hear more about what I am studying in seminary here on this Substack. Here’s the teensiest slice, certainly not the most consequential but perhaps the most entertaining, chosen because of a choice quote in Willie Jennings. In the end, I bring it around to story-telling and writing - how do we see, interpret, and present the world?

The quote comes from Willie Jennings’s The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race.

Again, as Columbus reflected on his discovery of a new continent and offered his famous observation that the earth is pear-shaped or like a “woman’s nipple on a round ball”…¹

This particular quote was new to me, and somehow, unsurprising (and made me laugh and send a text to a couple of friends who share my juvenile sense of humor. The text led to a delightful trail of messages of the kind that are necessary relief for PhD students.) This quote reads as one example among many that demonstrates how our world is shaped by the words and visions of men.

Here’s another example, and also how I attempted to reframe it through a woman’s words and vision:

There are two hills outside Hargeisa, Somaliland. They are known as Nasaha Hablood, or “Girls’ Breasts.” I’m not sure who named the hills, but I feel pretty confident that it was a man. Had it been a woman, based on what I observed when I climbed them, they would possibly be called something like “Happy Men” or “Missing Foreskin”.

As a grand finale, on my fifteenth wedding anniversary, I hike to the nipple tip of what is referred to as the younger of the Two Girls’ Breasts hills, ‘younger’ because it is slightly perkier than her twin to the west. I tell Tom later—he was stuck at the University of Hargeisa collecting surveys—that from the top, the breast looks more like a circumcised penis.²

Other examples of the male gaze on how the world has been crafted are more complex than the shape of hills or the shape of the earth (though one might argue that Columbus’s idea of the shape of the earth might be one of the more massively consequential ideas of history).

Here are just two from my Somali studies.

One scholar cites an example of how the erasure of women from colonial-era scholarship skews an understanding of women and broader societal realities and trajectories. From 1922 to 1941, while Italy controlled southern Somalia, colonial authorities forced adolescent and adult men to work on Italian estates all week. Deciding they would be more productive if they had wives along, Italians instituted nikaax talyiani (Italian wedding), which allowed a man to contact the Italian authorities and tell them his choice of wife. He could then take her as a wife without requiring her or her relatives’ consent. The result was social chaos remembered differently by men and women. Men recall the freedom in marrying without going through traditional constraints, and that they could both work and have women to sleep with. Women remember being married against their will or their parents’ will, before menstruation, before proper initiation, and without the usual gifts friends and relatives would provide (Declich 1995, 111-2).³

Failing to consider the women’s perspective led to the “misleading conclusion that ‘because women rarely had much of a choice of marital partners prior to the coloniya [colonial period] most marriages were arranged - this practice of forced marriage did not represent a substantially greater degree of oppression for the female labourers. Instead, the group which considered itself the injured party in this injustice was the family of the brides, who were denied a bridewealth payment for their daughters’” (Declich 1995, 112).

In other words, the conclusion that this arrangement was no big deal because arranged marriages had always been the norm ignored the women’s perspectives. Women were married too young, without proper preparation from their families, and without gifts and dowries, which were an essential part of the arranged marriage system.

Another example is from Somali studies scholar I. M. Lewis⁴, who developed an extensive clan lineage system in his book, A Pastoral Democracy. It includes charts and genealogical trees, highlighting how women’s fertility was transferred between families upon marriage, death, or divorce. Women become what Christine Choi Ahmed sardonically calls “womb[s] for rent” and she then wonders how Lewis can describe women this way and still claim Somali society as “democratic” (Ahmed 1995, 161).⁵

There are all kinds of issues with Lewis’s claims, from the limitation of his study being on nomadic populations in the north and ignoring urban realities which challenged his conclusions, to how his theories deny the impact of the historical colonial context within which he wrote.

But – my point here is that his male view couldn’t see how women being “wombs for rent” should have influenced whether a community is considered democratic.

I’m not trying to sound anti-man. I’m pointing out how one’s personal perspective and bias shape, literally, how we see the world, who we talk to in seeking understanding, which other perspectives we hole as more valid than others, and how we interpet our observations.

I have the same issue - I have a particular lens and see the world through a particular perspective. Much of the work of PhD studies is to try to see our lenses for what they are, and then to try and see something else, to strip them off as much as possible, and to put on other lenses, to compare visions, to interrogate conclusions, to question assumptions, to not take for granted that my view is the right one, or the only option.

It is hard work and it takes thousands of pages of mind-numbing reading. So when I come across great lines like “wombs for rent” or nipple-topped pear-shaped earths, I take a moment to giggle and reflect, and then I keep turning the pages.

As a writer, it is essential to be aware of one’s lens. It isn’t necessarily a negative thing, but being aware of it will help us to write more clearly and to ask better questions, to explore new territories. If your world is pear-shaped with a nipple on top, what might that mean for what you discover when you set sail?

How aware are you of the lenses you wear? How do you think they impact your interpretation of the world?

1. Jennings, Willie James. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300163087, 30.

2. Rachel Pieh Jones, The Proper Weight of Fear, in the Delacorte Review.

3. Declich, Francesca. “‘Gendered Narratives,’ History, and Identity: Two Centuries along the Juba River among the Zigula and Shanbara.” History in Africa 22 (1995): 93–122. https://doi.org/10.2307/3171910.

4. Upon his death, Said Samatar said of Lewis’s scholarship on Somalis, “he was not only the Founding Father, but also its reigning prince.” Said, Samatar, 2014. https://wardheernews.com/m-lewis-1930-2014-great-tree-fallen/

5. Ahmed, Christine Choi. “Finely Etched Chattel: The Invention of a Somali Woman.” In The Invention of Somalia, edited by Ali Jimale Ahmed, 157–90. Lawrenceville, NJ: The Red Sea Press, 1995.