Vaissnavi Shukl
Most women who menstruate dread the pain they experience during the first few days of their periods. It is during these days that the stomach cramps get unbearable and all that the body wants to do is curl up on a cosy bed. Turns out that historically, many communities around the world had spacialised this bodily function and integrated it within their architecture in the form of menstruation huts, often leading to the isolation and oppression of women as impure beings. Our guest today offers a slightly different perspective to look at the menstruation rooms. She argues that these spaces in the West African Benin Kingdom were intentionally designed for women to rest and recuperate, the isolation rooms were basically spas. So with the support of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, we have with us fellow Graham grantee, artist Minne Atairu.

I am Vaissnavi Shukl and this is Architecture Off-Centre, a podcast where we discuss contemporary discourses that shape the built environment, but do not necessarily occupy the centrestage in our daily lives. We speak to radical designers, thinkers and change makers who are deeply engaged in redefining the way we live and interact with the world around us.

Let’s just start with like the absolute absolute basics because this is something that I had to educate myself on, and I’m sure not a lot of people know about it, but if you could just tell a little bit about like, give an elevator pitch history on the Benin kingdom. Its people, its social hierarchy, its architecture. That’s a loaded question.

Minne Atairu
Yeah. So the Benin Kingdom is a pre-colonial West African state that existed until about the late 19th century when the British Empire colonised the area. So… But prior to colonisation, that kingdom was centred around the monarch who is known as an Oba and Oba is a Benin word for King and so it was such a centralised power system where he had control over every facet of society. And so where the Benin bronzes come in, is he was also in the art making space. He was also considered the sole commissioner of the arts, particularly if you were producing something in material that was not common to the land or was not native to the land. And so the Benin bronzes, the bronzes that were used to make the Benin bronzes. Most of them were imported into. Some of them were purchased from communities around the West African coast and then later on, as trade expanded in Benin kingdom we started collecting and purchasing from the Portuguese and so once the Oba purchased these bronze, the bronze material, he would store it in these pallets, basically your storage. And that was the only way as an artist that you would get access to the material bronze to then make a bronze item. And so that’s how the Oba monopolised particularly the making of items in bronze. But later on, fast forward into the future towards the colonial era. We were also producing palm products which was in high demand in Europe at the time because it was the industrial era as well. And so it was in high demand for soap making, production, measuring, machine lubrication as well, because as I mentioned earlier, the king monopolised every facet of society, including trade, he would open and close markets whenever he wished. He would raise taxes whenever you wish it was not a very conducive space to do trade, especially if you are travelling all the way from Britain, which is not an excuse for colonisation because we know the reality of colonialism is extraction, especially without paying communities. You know, the colonised community. And because it was, as the British say, very difficult to do trade, a lot of other things happened. Eventually the British Empire sent an army to invade Benin and colonised the kingdom,  torched the palace, poached the king, exiled the king, stole over 4000 objects, which were later exported to Europe, sold to various institutions and private collectors. The largest collector of Benin bronze we know today is the British Museum, which we talked about earlier. And then from that was also distributed to other institutions across the world. So at least 160 museums across the world have Benin bronze and it may not be like you know a full on sculpture, it could just be like them because it was just like it’s weird the kinds of things they collected some institutions just have like scraps is just like a scrap of metal but they collected anything. So that counts as Benin bronze and yeah.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So we’re actually here to talk about something very fascinating. That’s part of your research project within the Benin kingdom and since this season focuses on broadly the themes of care and health and contextualising it within the larger discourse of what we as a society, you know, look at as beyond just like healthcare as one word or medicine or whatever. Your particular project, which is also funded by the Grant Foundation, is looking at the menstruation isolation rooms or menstruation huts. And the moment I read read your proposal it it struck a chord because this is something we are familiar with as well in India because a lot of traditional Indian societies a lot of tribal settlements, even till date, have menstruation huts for women and this is something I mean, of course as time goes on as generations are no longer around as the idea is becoming a little more obsolete, but in the most rural parts of India, they still have communal menstruation huts. Now, for people who don’t know what menstruation huts are, these are essentially huts or rooms, which are typically constructed out of the house of the main house or at a community level outside of the main settlement or dwelling pieces where women who are menstruating for whatever five to seven days a week and go and live in because of whatever ideas of the societies back then whether it has to do with menstruating women being impure or you know them being considered as polluting or whatever that is, but this is something that you found in your primary research something that existed even within the Benin kingdom. So what was that about and how did you just come across this?

Minne Atairu
Yeah, that’s a good question. So I was researching architecture in Benin, something very unrelated to like menstruation huts, but then I came across this paper which I sent to you and I saw this little diagram showing a chiefs like just the design of a chief’s house and precolonial Benin and administration’s thought that women’s were that women would usually isolate during their period. So that’s how the research started, but a primer. So in Benin Kingdom at least every bit more, but and once you start menstruating, there’s this law we know that if you are menstruating or a woman you probably don’t want to go and this is like our primer go to the king’s palace because they say there’s a part of the king’s palace that if you access then you will continue to menstruate forever but it’s just a way of preventing women from like circulating the Kings, you know, space. So that’s where it’s all started for me.

Vaissnavi Shukl
What I find more interesting in the way you describe it is quite contrary to the way it is perceived. Right? So in India, even if you read a lot of literature on menstruation huts or menstruation rooms, it has to do with terrible living conditions. In fact, there are reports of women being bitten by snakes. In tribal areas they actually die and go snake bites because these menstruation hearts don’t have the kind of infrastructure that is conducive to healthy living at least during those few days. The way you look at it is quite radical and maybe there’s some that after deck here because he said these are actually places of self care. And the way you frame it is almost like these spaces had a potential of I don’t know like fostering a certain kind of sisterhood of sorts or really looking at these rooms or menstruation hearts as potential places of acting as a spa. What is that about? I mean, it’s a thought exercise. I know but…

Minne Atairu
It’s research in progress. So the first diagram I found and so far what I know about menstruation cuts in Benin context is that they aren’t structures that live outside of the family complex. They’re built into the living space but then the living space itself is sectioned into a woman’s quarters and then the menstruation huts is then placed towards the end. So every Benin like architectural complex will have like the front entrance and the back entrance, especially for the women to access the huts when they are menstruating, so they don’t have to go through the front. But I was also very interested in the menstruation hut as a spa because in Benin, but women aren’t. And I guess this is the case for a lot of communities that have pre-colonial times. So what we know about the literature we read, which is not written by us but by someone else is that women were isolated they were not active participants in politics, and much of your life is dedicated to caring for the family and cooking and cleaning and wiping the after men but during this time of menstruation they are then not required to do all of that housework. This gives them time to yourself to commune and convene and to think and to just care for yourself. Like it’s during that period that you’re braiding your hair, during that period that you really have time to just be you without the burden of the patriarchy.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I mean I was very young and you know when puberty hits and you have your first period, you know, it’s in a lot of Indian culture. It’s almost like a moment of celebration, you know, when the family or your mother would usually be like, “Okay, now you’re not a girl, you’re a woman now”. I remember having this conversation. I think it was with my mother a long time ago. She used to mention how in those few days of the month a lot of Indian households have like shrines and temples, where you go and pray that women are not allowed to enter those sacred spaces in the house or even for that matter use the kitchen during those few days. And her way of talking about this was to kind of justify and include this as part of an overall mythmaking where by creating these barriers, much like what you said creating these barriers to entry into certain spaces, you’re actually creating or carving out time for women to rest because I mean, let’s let’s agree all the earlier like older societies were places and households were places where women were restricted to domestic work. And so by limiting their entry into these places, you will limiting the work that they had to do and allow them to get dressed during those periods. And it made me I mean, I was thinking about that while preparing for a talk today. It’s like okay, maybe there had to be a little bit of mythmaking in order to ensure that the purpose of these menstruating huts as places for self care or as or as far as like you mentioned that could be made possible. I’m not sure if in the in your research till now if there has been any evidence of self care or of I don’t know testimonials where people said yes, like they did get the time off during those few days of the week, or I don’t know what the physical infrastructure of menstruating huts really looked like.

Minne Atairu
Right. And that’s what my research is about. I’m going to… I haven’t travelled to Nigeria yet. So I’m going to Nigeria to see if there are any existing  huts, what they look like, what implements or tools that women might have used and what that tells us about self care within that space.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Are there any that are existing right now?

Minne Atairu
I am not sure. I’m not sure. Probably in more of the rural areas, because they are, for example, the diagram that you saw that building is still in existence because they tried to preserve it. So I’m sure the hut is there. But I don’t know if the women use it

Vaissnavi Shukl
to talk about your methodology a little bit. So you’ve done a little bit of archival research, what does fieldwork look like?

Minne Atairu
Fieldwork involves visiting first, the house of the chief that’s still in place, and it was built during the pre-colonial era. So we know that the House of menstruation is still in existence. So visiting there to see what that space looks like, if there are any implements or tools and if the chief because the chief still lives in the structure, so to ask his wives if they still use it. And I’m sure there’s a lot to learn from them, even if they don’t because they have, you know, intergenerational knowledge and whatever. Oral History exists in that space.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Are  there, I don’t know, any direct descendants of the king that are still alive?

Minne Atairu
Oh yeah, we still have so the Oba is still like the monarchy is still very much alive and well and it was reconstituted in 1914. That’s 14 years after the exile of the king. They had to reconstitute the monarchy because Benin was such a complex political system prior to colonialism. And they found that it was very difficult to work with a British like operate in the kingdom so they had to restore the monarchy. The King is still there. But that’s the problem. So I mentioned earlier that I can’t wait, at least my dad will just lose his mind if I attempted to go into the king’s palace because of this myth we have about women accessing the palace and the fact that you would menstruate for the rest of your life. do and that’s what prevents women from just I don’t know what it is. I’ve never been to the palace for that reason. Only men are allowed to go there. At least my brothers have been

Vaissnavi Shukl
Oh like in all of the palaces?

Minne Atairu
Yeah, I have never been because of this.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, because they said

Minne Atairu
Well, they said we don’t know where the exact location is of the space where a woman stepped off on to the administrator for the rest of her life. So you probably shouldn’t go in to the gates.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I would love If somebody could like, if you know if we could dig into how this story or this legend came about, because it seems like it has I mean, there’s a lot of things that could happen if you go into a forbidden place, right like the fact that you would menstruate for the rest of your life if you entered a palace seems very, very specific.

Minne Atairu
Yeah. So I mean, ideally, if as a woman you wanted to access the palace, you probably want to have maybe a princess or whoever or the woman who lives there so they can direct you towards the back. But that’s not forbidden. That would be a way for you to access it and I don’t believe in all of these things, but it just makes my family feel you know better. So everybody doesn’t go berserk if I do something crazy but also to respect the culture because I think that’s important, regardless of what my beliefs are.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I mean up until I really read up on this and you know, so ingrained even in the Indian culture and then once I got it, it seems like it’s, it’s a fair part of a lot of SouthEast cultures. So you have menstruation hearts up in the northeast of India, you have some in Nepal, a lot of them still are active and alive in rural areas. But up until that I never really connected the idea of menstruation as something that could have an implication and manifest itself as a physical space, right? I could never connect the idea of female health to architecture and then suddenly when you look at it, like, “Oh, I mean, there was a way that somebody created a space that directly correlated to women’s health and thought of constructing it like not just metaphorically but like physically constructing the space” and I don’t think it’s even to think about in like modern day and age seems obtuse because you have women menstruating day in and out but apart from a sanitary disposal bin in the women’s washroom there’s there’s not much that you see as I’m sure that there’s stuff but I just don’t know about like, I don’t know what the current modern day healthcare discourses on menstruation are do you know of anything that comes like as a contemporary equivalent?

Minne Atairu
Not much, just basically what you said. But like something I wanted to point out also about my research because I’m also very interested in looking at other knowledge systems is that in colonised communities, especially somewhere like Benin which is a case and study, a lot of what we know about ourselves are written by the people who colonised us, right? Or written by foreign researchers who came to me with this sense that if a woman is isolated in the room, she’s an oppressed woman. And so that room is basically a prison or whatever else is. It could look like to say a westerner who sees someone being locked up in a space as a prison, whereas, you know, we just in our nervous system, it could be the opposite. And so what are other ways of thinking that’s what also started what are other ways of thinking about the menstruation hut that has not been written by a Western researcher or has not been hinted at in another literature, because not much is known about the Hutts. If I continue to apply these theories that exist in other centres, especially in the West to a place that they don’t fully understand and to a culture that they don’t actually believe in and a culture that is tried to, like, you know, walk away for such a long time. Then how much can we truly know about ourselves and that’s why I’m going to the field to do more oral history to visit the sites and start thinking of writing about it based on you know, what I can find.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Yeah, so based on empirical evidence, rather than, like, colonial narration. I love it because there’s been plenty of stuff written on colonising brown black and brown bodies right on how they were used for labour in India, Africa is used for farming cultivation of opium and anything like from right from cotton to grain, so everything and of course, US has a history of using the black bodies in the in the fields. Okay, now it makes sense to what I did not think about was even the way history is written from that colonial lens runs the risk of portraying the female body and its functions as something that is perpetually oppressed and not giving it the chance to be seen as something that is, in fact working in the benefit of women. That is very interesting. I did not connect the points like I did not think of it as something that could have been a colonial construct. You take it as it is right until you start questioning and so I would, I would really be interested in seeing how, how this changes and how this shapes up. Once you’ve done your fieldwork, it’s almost like… But also when you’re looking at against the grain rather than taking it top down as somebody’s reading office space that exists, but if I were to push you a little bit more and just think through it almost as the optimistic Black Mirror view, if we had to look at menstruation huts or menstruation rooms today or in the future, what do you think they could look like? Do you think spaces like these have the potential to exist in our day to day lives? Or do you think it’s, it’s an infrastructure of the past and that it’s something that just will be found in texts and historical UNESCO sites as like, oh, when you’re going on a tour, you show tourists like “Oh, this used to be a menstruation hut, something that doesn’t exist anymore.”

Minne Atairu
I mean, I like during my period, I think I have at least like 24 or 48 hours of just like rolling in my bed and being lazy and losing my mind because I’m in so much pain, and it would be nice to have a space where other menstruating women I don’t know how that would function in reality, but people who are experiencing the same I don’t know cramps, what’s, where could we gather and how could we convene and just ease our pain and I don’t know live through this natural phase of being a woman. I do see it in the future. It’s possible. I just don’t know how it would operate but it’s possible. And it was sometimes when I’m at work, and I’m having cramps and my colleague is having cramps and we’re just drinking coffee and talking about I mean, it’d be nice to have like a much larger space with a registration system where you could go when your period starts maybe the first few days when you’re losing your mind.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I know that it’s like it’s a startup idea, right? Like creating a sorority or just people who menstruate, you know, whatever body they live in, but yeah, why not? Since you’re going to go on your field study. What is the future of the project look like? And what is the potential outcome of this research if you’ve given it any thought, no pressure.

Minne Atairu
I mean, for the research is interdisciplinary. It’s like this intersection of architecture and also researching objects research. So when I learn more about the menstrual hot as an architecture and is a space that women use, you know, to care for themselves, what objects from the Benin bronze collection, particularly the domestic objects that most museums don’t have information about, that I just simply labelled as cups and bowls and very random names, generic names, we don’t quite understand what they were they were used for. So how can we associate those domestic items within the Benin bronze corpus to the menstrual so that we better we can better understand domestic items in the Benin bronze corpus because if you don’t know much about the importance corpus, Benin bronzes is just it’s an art historical category that refers to these objects that were stolen. Most of the items in the objects and not actually in the collection are not actually made of bronze. It’s made of wood..

Vaissnavi Shukl
…copper I would say…

Minne Atairu
Potter, iron, copper, various items. And so especially items that are not made of bronze, not much is known about the non bronze items, particularly the domestic ones. I’m very interested to understand how women use those domestic items in the menstrual hut if it’s even worth used.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Well, I think maybe we’ll have part two to this episode. Once you’ve, you’ve done your fieldwork but I really just wanted to get the conversation started because while you’re looking at health and care and it’s difficult to not talk about female health like reproductive health, or an part of it, of course it’s menstruating of of people and so it just seemed like such a direct connection between between the body and a space beyond just using a washroom. The space there was just like carved out for a specific reason for rest for recuperation for being at ease. So thank you for getting the conversation started. I must say that.

Minne Atairu
You’re welcome. And thank you for inviting me.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Yeah, and thank you to the Graham Foundation for making this happen.

Special thanks to Ayushi Thakur for the research and design support, and Kahaan Shah for the background score. For guests and topic suggestions, you can get in touch with us through instagram or our website through our website archoffcentre.com, both of which are ‘archoffcentre’. And thank you for listening.