Sia Amma
written by Kay Dover
Sia Amma sweeps into the Starbucks on Fillmore, shopping bags in tow, and takes a quick spin around the room to look for me. I’m sitting outside in the brisk San Francisco afternoon, and when I rush in to greet her, she twirls around and receives me with a huge smile and a hug. As we place our orders, she chats loudly and comfortably with the baristas. If she’s not a regular here, we all feel like she is.
We sit at an outdoor table, her with a packet of almonds (her favorite, she tells me) and me with a black coffee. She’s been running around all morning posting flyers for her show, and she has the breathy presence of someone who’s truly excited about what she does.
After leaving her native Liberia in the early 90s to live with a cousin in the States, the comedienne got her first taste of American standup watching Robin Williams, Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg on their television special, Comic Relief.
“I was watching this show,” as she recalls the HBO fundraising showcase, “and every time this black woman would say something, people would laugh! So I asked my cousin, ‘What is she saying?’ And she said, ‘She’s telling jokes.’ I said ‘What does she do?’ And she said, ‘She’s a comic.’ And I said, ‘She gets paid?’ And she’s like ‘oh, YEAH, she gets LOTS of money!’ And I was like, ‘Can I be like her?’ And she said, ‘Weeeeellll, you don’t speak English, so that’ll be kind of hard!’ Amma leans back and laughs, and it’s rumbling and hearty. The laugh of someone who’s been told ‘no’ and done it anyway. There’s no feeling of I-told-you-so; she’s just pleased at her success.
“So I just made up my mind,” says Amma, “but I didn’t really know what comedy was about. And I just kind of fell in a trap by hanging out with people. A friend of mine was going to a comedy place at the time called The Holy City Zoo that used to be in Clement Street. I followed her. The people were just telling these corny jokes. Nobody was paying attention, everybody’s was just doing their own thing at the bar, you know? I went there for a whole month and finally I got the balls to get up! And from that day, I just fell in love with it. I started performing, and then I developed my show, In Search of My Clitoris.”
In its early days, that show was an alarming dramatic production, including a graphic portrayal of the ritual of female circumcision, an experience Amma endured as a child. It was upsetting for her audience, with members often walking out in horror mid-performance. More importantly, the realism of her show began to take its toll on the comic.
“I had a director that said, ‘This is what the people want, you’ve got to do it.’ It was reenacting the whole procedure on stage. Every time I did that,” Amma recalls, “I felt like I was being mutilated or circumcised, every time. It was really heavy for me. I didn’t want to do it. So what I did was create another show, called Clitoris Celebration: Think Outside the Box. It has a lot of monologues. Now, every March, women get together and they perform it.” Amma’s Clitoris Celebration show has become part of an annual event in the San Francisco Bay Area, bringing together theater, sex education, music, and dance from an international cast of performers. “It’s mostly fun, it’s celebratory,” she says. After the harshness of her first show, that’s a change she’s embraced.
“I’m going back gradually to In Search of My Clitoris, but not with that... intensity. After so many performances, I’m really happy now with what I do. I can take it on the road again, and now it’s mostly stand-up. That subject matter is so heavy, so sensitive and so touchy that if I slow down a minute, it just breaks people down.” Keeping the mood light keeps her topic accessible, and that’s essential to her goal of promoting open discourse about female circumcision.
Finding that balance between communicating a serious message and making people laugh can be tricky. At a recent performance, Amma good-naturedly scolded an audience member for feeling sorry for her. “People go there with a notion of pity for me,” Amma says, “and if I get sucked into it, the show gets so fucked up! So I have to really manipulate it and make it a comedy and make sure my audience is there with me. It’s a very interesting thing.”
On stage, she’s constantly interacting with the crowd; asking questions, poking fun, enticing them to sing. When they seem in danger of getting too somber, Amma whirls things back around to the bright side with a joke and that infectious laughter. It’s important for her message, but it’s also just important for her.
“Comedy has a sense of freedom,” Amma says, “and a sense of forgiveness to it. You can really have a bad day, and shit happens, but you can just go and let it out on stage. I think it’s a therapeutic thing for people...for me, especially. You think, ‘Something really terrifying can happen to you, like being mutilated at the age of nine, raped at the age of 16.’ Those things, they have some kind of psychological effect on you. But if you’re a comic, you can just take it in stride, change it around, and make fun of it.”
That attitude is invaluable to Amma, offstage and on. “When I bomb I go, ‘Oh fuck it, maybe they’ll get the jokes later,’” she laughs. “They don’t have to get it right now! And then I move on to the next stage and do it again.”
Amma’s latest production, which premiered this June at Our Little Theater, is called Uncle Sam’s Children. It’s a step away from comedy, and from her usual subject of choice. It deals with a story that’s painfully close: the Liberian civil war that began in 1989, and the history surrounding it.
“It’s heavy. I’m doing it because I lost my entire village during the war. It’ll be like paying a tribute. There were a lot of people that died in the war in Liberia, and nobody really talks about them. It’ll also be for my relationship with my mother. She passed away in 2006, and there were a lot of things we didn’t talk about, a lot of regrets. Everything is tied into the war, and the history between America and Liberia. I want to touch on that, and get away from the vulva thing a little bit!”
Sia Amma (pronounced seeAHmuh), by the way, is her middle name (Sia) and her given first name (Amma). She found out while working on In Search of My Clitoris that, for the Dogon tribe of West Africa, ‘amma’ means ‘clitoris’. “It’s just kind of fate,” she says matter-of-factly, munching her almonds.
When she’s not performing, Amma is busy with her nonprofit organization, Global Women Intact. Founded in the late 90s, its goal is to educate both Africans and Americans about female circumcision and work towards ending the practice. In Africa, this involves conversations, lessons and workshops with children and adults. “I talk to the women, one by one, or I go to the schools,” she explains.
She teaches girls about the value of their bodies, circumcisers about the lifelong consequences of the procedure they perform; all the while, tuning in to what they have to say so she is not doing all the talking. In the U.S., Amma’s performances serve as conversation-starters on these important issues, which she feels don’t get the attention they deserve in our culture.
Global Women Intact also provides tuition for schoolchildren in African countries. “Paying their school fees is not a lot of money,” Amma says, “but it makes a lot of difference to keep them in school and help them get an education. The little that I’m able to do, I do it.” Her activism in Africa is supported with donations, but it’s primarily funded with proceeds from her own work in the States. And she beams when she tells me its work she enjoys. “Every cent that I make goes into that and paying the rent. So, I’m making it. I think I would die if I had a 9 to 5!”
She doesn’t have a 9 to 5, but she’s working on so much you’d swear she never sleeps. In addition to writing, performing, and Global Women Intact, Amma runs a 25-seat performance space, Our Little Theater. The intimate venue hosts stand-up comedy showcases as well as Amma’s own productions. She plays a major role in organizing and sponsoring the San Francisco African Dance and Drum Festival. As a day job, she braids hair. She sings at a local bar on Mondays, and this year she’ll be participating in the 3rd Annual San Francisco Multicultural Stand-up Comedy Festival.
To Sia Amma, this busy life is well worth it. Performing, especially comedy, has had a cathartic effect for her. “I do it for the fun of it, and I do it for the love of it,” she says. “I do it because it helps me deal with a lot of situations. It also has helped me to become an activist and be able to do something for the world. I think I would have been a very bitter person had I not discovered the comedy scene.”
Today, Amma wears black clothes on deep chocolate skin, and it makes for a stunning contrast with those sparkling eyes, with her laughing mouth and its infinite white teeth. As we talk, I realize that her comedy is the same way. Light against a darker background, humor in the midst of hardship. And that’s not pity, Amma. That’s respect.
Kay Dover is a writer from San Francisco.
For more on Sia Amma, Global Women Intact and Our Little Theater, visit www.celebrateclitoris.com.