(This volume is an abridged and edited translation of Entre absence et refus d'enfant. Socio- anthropologie de la gestion de la fécondité féminine à Niamey, Niger, by Hadiza Moussa, published in French by coédition L'Harmattan/La Sahélienne, copyright: La Sahélienne, 2012.)
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197662113.001.0001
Hadiza Moussa's Yearning and Refusal is a sensitive ethnography of the reproductive lives of women living in Niamey, Niger. The title refers to the author's twin themes; the yearning that women have for children within a larger politics of fertility and the methods and stratagems that women use to refuse falling and staying pregnant. Moussa frames yearning and refusal as practices of infertile sexuality, drawing attention to the seriousness and extent of this under-researched subject.
In current format, the book begins with a substantial English introduction and updated, explanatory endnotes by Alice Kang and Barbara Cooper, both of whom have written important and related works on the region. A year after her doctoral thesis was published in French, Moussa died sadly and untimely in a 2013 car crash. Colleagues and friends, Kang and Cooper secured the publishing rights and rearranged and edited the book for an English-reading audience. Their introduction is an excellent overview of the book but also – together with the translated French introduction, by Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan – an elegant exercise in contrasting Anglophone and Francophone politics of ethnography. Moussa's theoretical life was spent reading and writing in French. I was excited by the references to a much broader canon of French scholarship on Africa. I consider myself an African historian and the book is a salutary and shameful reminder that I am really only a scholar of Anglophone Africa.
The current work is organised into three sections. The first deals with infertility, the second with the space of the clinic and the third with birth control. This arrangement was chosen by the book's editors, and while it makes for unevenly sized sections it does allow for the book's content to cohere well. The middle section, a single chapter, on the clinic and biomedicine, is part of the book's translated rearrangement. It is largely about the experiences of women who sought help for fertility or gave birth at the Central Maternity Hospital in Niamey.
The first section is the longest, at four chapters, and can be viewed as a close and extensive ethnography, based on numerous conversations with the women who feature in the book, of infertility. The book's often-heartbreaking detail positions infertility in relation to shame and the stigma women who do not fall pregnant or fail to bear living children suffer. Moussa analyzes different categories of infertility, like those described in the previous sentence. These categories are not equally consequential. In this section, as in the rest of the book, Moussa situates infertile sexuality at the centre of family life, moving outwards to the involvement of broader Nigerien/Muslim therapeutic traditions in solutions to infertility, with biomedical solutions sought as a final resort (52).
Moussa is particularly skilful in outlining the difficulties and social silencing that infertile women experience: ‘no child, no social existence’, is one of the sub-titles in her conclusion (213). Most of the women that she interviewed had husbands who took additional wives and then found themselves treated as lesser or cast off. Often, co-wives were more adversarial than husbands, and husbands sometimes found themselves married without much action on their part, presented with ‘ready-to-wed’ wives without having pursued any aspect of the remarriage themselves (64). Some of the flavour of the shame and emotional anguish that women feel as a result is captured in a discussion that Moussa had with Halima, whose co-wife would taunt her by saying ‘Aren't you a woman’? Her married life was ‘almost a nightmare’ and full of ‘shame’ (79).
In the final section of the book, Moussa moves to practices like birth control and family planning or negative fertility. If infertility is shameful, so too is having too many children too closely together. Many married women resort to local therapeutics or biomedical contraception in order to achieve a socially acceptable birth spacing. Moussa's description of the history of itinerant and market peddlers of contraception, street pharmacies, ties in with Jannick Jaffré's research on ‘the medication of cultural proximity’ (164). This work details a history of the commodification of contraception, but also the relationships that peddlers develop with women, to the extent that they visit women to deliver contraceptive pills when they know women's husbands are away (180). The final chapter of the book concerns abortion. Here, Moussa's research supports what many already know about abortion in Africa, which is that it is often the preferred method of birth control, rather than a last resort.
Like Kang and Cooper, I do wonder at the almost complete absence of any overt discussion of sexuality – of sex – in the book. Moussa notes this but does not further pursue the possibility that the presence or absence of sexual pleasure might complicate some of her narrative. As she notes, ‘Conjugal sexuality, despite its omnipresence in women's lives, is absent from everyday language’ (7). Sex is safe, sex is a sin, it is labelled pre-marital, but it often seems incidental when it surely cannot be. Sadly, Moussa did not live to take this element of her work further.
