Postmodern Ethnography and the Womanist Mission: Postcolonial Sensibilities in Possessing the Secret of Joy

Abstract

Reading Possessing Secret of Joy is a dual exercise in reading culture. First, novel's actions focus on cultural rite of female circumcision. Second, creator of fictional world within which novel's African protagonist lives is an African American woman. Furthermore, protagonist is an African recently emigrated to United States with her black American husband. The last offers ideal African American, embodying culture of Africa and inhabiting geographical space of United States. Tashi's serves as stage upon which opera of African American cultural/ethnic identity can be performed. Both African American women's voices - those of author and her heroine - are present in text and confront cultural text of female circumcision from their various culturally and ethnically embodied spaces. Tashi is an African and an American. She seems fully aware of consequences inherent in pledging full allegiance to either or both, but is also aware are different - connected but separate. It is through lens of this connected separateness her experiences with ritual female circumcision are examined. In novel we get this sense of Tashi's biculturalism from varying references to her as renamed in America Evelyn, Evelyn Johnson, and Tashi-Evelyn. Clearly, last represents Du Bois's twoness, idea of two souls, unreconciled strivings; warring ideals in one dark body (Du Bois 5). Alice Walker examines African soul of her protagonist, and ritual female circumcision is vehicle for this examination. Walker views practice as a means through which African women are rendered joyless and spiritually dead, and she struggles to reconcile warring cultural consciousnesses - her American one and Tashi's conviction ritual female circumcision defines her as an Olinkan woman. Unquestionably, this is a novel by a woman, about women which argues for rights of women. The particular right Walker champions, struggles to protect/defend/encode is which insures African women will continue to secret of joy. For Walker, this possession and its joy are both threatened by literal destruction of most crucial external sign of womanhood: vulva itself (Warrior 21). Possessing Secret of Joy is story of kinds of women: those who are forbidden this possession, right to own their bodies in natural totality, and those who forbid others this right. Walker constructs both archetypes - the mother who betrays and the daughter so betrayed (Warrior 21) - and through these constructions, she places proverbial feminist personal-is-political into direct conflict with that notorious black manifesto - we will not have our business put into streets (Dent 3). The conflict is embodied in relationship between Tashi and M'Lissa, who destroy themselves and each other because of their beliefs in and questionings of ritual female circumcision. Vicariously, on pages of Possessing, they also destroy Africa. The title of Walker's novel is taken from African Saga, memoir of an Italian woman raised in Kenya. Walker adapts for her first epigraph passage from Mirella Ricciardi's work wherein she writes: I had always got on well with Africans and enjoyed their company, but commanding people on farm, many of whom had watched [me] grow up, was different. With added experience of my safaris behind me, I had begun to understand code of birth, copulation and death by which they lived. Black people are natural, they possess secret of joy, which is why they can survive suffering and humiliation inflicted upon them. They are alive physically and emotionally, which makes them easy to live with. What I had not yet learned to deal with was their cunning and their natural instinct for self-preservation.(1) Interestingly, incredulity inherent in Ricciardi's novel is shared by Walker and guides her construction of Tashi, who emerges at novel's end spiritually intact despite physical devastation of her circumcision. …