The Books: “Possessing the Secret of Joy” (Alice Walker)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Possessing the Secret of Joy: A Novel, by Alice Walker

I read this wrenching book in a couple of days in a cold winter when I was living in Chicago. I remember particularly sitting on the Clark Street bus, travelling uptown, reading the excerpt below and feeling a burning sensation in my heart and chest, like I thought I might have to get up and get off the bus. I will never read this book again. I don’t have to. And sometimes I feel like I want to throw it out, or give it away … why keep it around? But, like a couple of books on my shelves, it is completely representative to me of a certain time in my life, a difficult time, and sometimes I like to have those books around, just as a reminder. Not just of a bad time in my life, but of how far I have come. I was in agony when I read the book. I cannot remember how it came to me, or who recommended it. I’m not a big Alice Walker fan. I had read The Color Purple in high school, and yes, I remember it moving me – but it didn’t propel me on to read all of her stuff. She wasn’t that good. She wasn’t, say, Max Shulman (excerpt here)!! No, just kidding. A friend of mine in high school was a huge Alice Walker fan. I remember sitting in the library with her, during our first period, and the announcements and Pledge of Allegiance were coming over the loudspeaker from the principal, and my friend sat at our table, with tears streaming down her face because she had been reading The Color Purple. It just didn’t hit me, in the way it did her. But somehow Possessing the Secret of Joy came into my life during that grim winter, and I’ll never forget my experience reading it. I felt named by the book. That has not happened often. It’s not that I “related” to the book. It is, after all, about an immigrant woman from Algeria. It has nothing to do with my life. But its message named me. It called out to me. Specifically. That’s why I almost had to get up and get off the bus. It was unbearable.

It tells the story of Tashi, an African woman who has emigrated to the United States. Many of the details are lost to me. She has married an American man – Adam. She had fled the oppression and war in Algeria, and is now living a comfortable American life. But she is on the run from her memories. The book is told in different voices – her voice, Adam’s voice, her friend Olivia – there are a couple of more characters who chime in as well. Alice Walker’s strength is not in realistic writing, obviously – she’s more of a political writer, more interested in the points she wants to make, rather than creating a realistic framework. That’s one of the main reasons why I can’t get into her work. I like more realistic stuff. But in Possessing the Secret of Joy it works, because all of the different voices (and they actually AREN’T different voices – they may be different characters but they all have the same voice) pour every side of the argument into a big pot in the middle – nothing is left out … So it’s a deeply complex book, in a way (and I don’t think complexity is Walker’s strong suit) – and I think is essential reading for anyone interested in learning about female circumcision (the topic of the book). Of course there’s plenty of non-fiction stuff available too, but Walker’s book – with its solemn Greek chorus of differing views and opinions – is a huge part of the literature. Tashi’s sister bled to death during her circumcision “ceremony”. Tashi herself somehow did not have the procedure done – but instead of feeling relief that she had escaped such a fate – it starts to bother her. It becomes a political and cultural symbol to her, especially living in the West. Africa is in upheaval and so Tashi, in an act of solidarity that is insane (if you look at it rationally), goes back to her village and has the procedure done. Things go downhill pretty quickly and Tashi goes mad. The thing about the book that can be grating but is also its greatest strength is the multitude of voices weighing in on Tashi’s choice – her husband, her friend, her husband’s lover – all of these people are invested in what has happened and, of course, have different views – not just about Tashi’s choice but about the tradition, in general. My memories of the book are vague, in terms of specifics – I mainly just remember that burning sensation on the bus, with the fogged-up windows and the snowy sidewalks going by outside … but I do know that Tashi returns, again, to Africa and murders M’Lissa – the village woman in charge of clitoridectomies. She’s an illiterate ancient woman, but puffed up with her position of upholding the tradition. She is the one who allowed Tashi’s sister to bleed to death. The book goes back and forth between the trial of Tashi for murder – and all the events leading up to the murder.

Much of the book has to do with the inherent danger in even talking about any of this. Now, with people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and many others, writing openly about their experiences – it doesn’t seem to be as taboo. Or, of course it still is taboo – it is a hot hot topic – but it can be talked about. Alice Walker was writing about a character who felt guilty about “revealing” the fucked-up nature of her native culture. Who was she to live in America and JUDGE Africa? No. This is her tradition. It has always been done. There are reasons. It is part of her culture. Having not had it done, she feels somehow outside of her own traditions. This is craziness talking, of course – but that’s the whole thing … The book makes you ponder your genitals. I mean, that sounds ridiculous – but it’s true. Not in a sexual way – just in the FACT of them … and in doing so, we come to the heart of who we are. I’m not talking about being defined by them – but they are hugely important and the book is so relentless it made me openly BAFFLED at the hostility towards the genitals and what they represent … The book certainly makes you cherish them, and thank God you have them (in the same way that Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s books do – you just read some of that crap and think, ‘Thank you, Lord. Thank you for making me live HERE and not in Somalia or the Sudan”) And to contemplate being robbed of them … for what? for why? why is female sexuality so feared? so LOATHED? Whether or not clits are cut off, that feeling is “out there” … I had internalized it. It was mine as well. The pleasure one can get during sex – the way everything works … seems to me to be a gift from God. It is to be cherished. But I was tormented back then, and that was one of the reasons I felt named by the book. It went down into the very core of identity. Who we are, who I am. … But I won’t go into that further. Tashi knows that by even opening up the conversation – by talking about what a bogus “tradition” this really is – perpetrated mainly by old ignorant women – she will be seen as betraying her culture. Telling the secrets to a world that will not understand. She takes that risk. The book becomes about “taboo” – and what it means to break taboos. You are rarely congratulated for it. And Tashi loses her mind after breaking that cultural taboo. She is not sorry she murdered M’Lissa. It was long overdue, as far as Tashi is concerned. But that, in its way, is madness as well.

It’s one of those books I can’t ever stand back from and evaluate, saying, “This worked” or “That didn’t work”. It’s a tough book to take, and I suppose the Greek chorus aspect of it would be tremendously boring to some – but for me, it just pierced through the pain I was in, speaking directly to it – in a profound way that truly changed me. So I can’t really evaluate a book like that. I put it down, when I finished it, feeling like I had been crying for a week straight, even though my eyes were dry. I was drained, depleted. “Good” book? Seems like an irrelevant question when my experience had been the kind that it was. There aren’t too many books I can say that about.

Here’s an excerpt. This is what almost made me get up and exit the bus. I was dreading coming to this book on the shelf. I had no idea what to say. So I will press Post now without over-thinking it or reading it again.


EXCERPT FROM Possessing the Secret of Joy: A Novel, by Alice Walker

Tashi-Evelyn

At night The Old Man played music for us. Music from Africa, India, Bali. He had an amazing record collection that occupied one wall of his house. He showed us grainy black-and-white films, made on his trips. It was during the showing of one of these films that something peculiar happened to me. He was explaining a scene in which there were several small children lying in a row on the ground. He thought, first of all, that they were boys, which I could see straight off they were not, though their heads were shaved and they each wore a scanty loincloth. He assumed, he said, he had inadvertently interrupted a kind of ritual ceremony having to do with the preparation of these children for adulthood. Everything, in any case, had stopped, the moment he and his entourage entered the ritual space. And what was also odd, he said, was how no one spoke a word, or even moved, as long as he and his people were there. They literally froze as the camera panned the area. The children on the ground in a little row, lying close together on their backs, the adults simply stopped in midactivity, unmoving, even, it appeared, unseeing. Only – he laughed, relighting his pipe, which had gone out, as it frequently did, while he talked – there was a large fighting cock (which we now saw as it stepped majestically into the frame) and it walked about quite freely, crowing mightily (it was a silent film but we could certainly perceive its exertions), and that was the only sound or movement while we were there.

The film ran on, but suddenly I felt such an overwhelming fear that I fainted. Quietly. Slid off my chair and onto the bright rug that covered the stone floor. It was exactly as if I had been hit over the head. Except there was no pain.

When I came to, I was in the guest bedroom upstairs in the turret. Adam and the old man were bending over me. There was nothing I could tell them; I could not say, The picture of a fighting cock, taken twenty-five years ago, completely terrorized me. And so I laughed off my condition and said it was caused by too much happiness, sailing in the high altitude.

The Old Man looked skeptical and did not seem surprised when, the next afternoon, I began to paint what became a rather extended series of ever larger and more fearsome fighting cocks.

And then one day, into the corner of my painting, there appeared, I drew, a foot. Sweating and shivering as I did so. Because I suddenly realized there was something, some small thing the foot was holding between its toes. It was for this small thing that the giant cock waited, crowing impatiently, extending its neck, ruffling its feathers, and strutting about.

There are no words to describe how sick I felt as I painted. How nauseous; as the cock continued to grow in size, and the bare foot with its little insignificant morsel approached steadily toward what I felt would be the crisis, the unbearable moment, for me. For, as I painted, perspiring, shivering, and moaning faintly, I felt that every system in my body, every connecting circuit in my brain, was making an effort to shut down. It was as if the greater half of my being were trying to murder the lesser half, and as I painted – by now directly onto the wall of the bedroom, because only there could I paint the cock as huge as it now appeared to be: it dwarfed me – I dragged the brush to paint each towering iridescent green feather, each baleful gold fleck in its colossal red and menacing eye.

The foot grew large too. But not nearly as large as the cock.

When The Old Man looked at it he said: Well, Evelyn, is it a man’s foot or a woman’s foot?

The question puzzled me so profoundly I could not answer, but only held my head between my hands in the classic pose of the deeply insane.

A man’s foot? A woman’s foot?

How could one know?

But then later, in the middle of the night, I found myself painting a design called “crazy road”, a pattern of crisscrosses and dots that the women made with mud on the cotton cloth they wove in the village when I was a child. And I suddenly knew that foot above which I painted this pattern was a woman’s, and that I was painting the lower folds of one of M’Lissa’s tattered wraps.

As I painted I remembered, as if a lid lifted off my brain, the day I had crept, hidden in the elephant grass, to the isolated hut from which came howls of pain and terror. Underneath a tree, on the bare ground outside the hut, lay a dazed row of little girls, though to me they seemed not so little. They were all a few years older than me. Dura’s age. Dura, however, was not among them; and I knew instinctively that it was Dura being held down and tortured inside the hut. Dura who made those inhuman shrieks that rent the air and chilled my heart.

Abruptly, inside, there was silence. And then I saw M’Lissa shuffle out, dragging her lame leg, and at first I didn’t realize she was carrying anything, for it was so insignificant and unclean that she carried it not in her fingers but between her toes. A chicken – a hen, not a cock – was scratching futilely in the dirt between the hut and the tree where the other girls, their own ordeal over, lay. M’Lissa lifted her foot and flung this small object in the direction of the hen, and she, as if waiting for this moment, rushed toward M’Lissa’s upturned foot, located the flung object in the air and then on the ground, and in one quick movement of beak and neck, gobbled it down.

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9 Responses to The Books: “Possessing the Secret of Joy” (Alice Walker)

  1. The Books: “Possessing the Secret of Joy” (Alice Walker)

    Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt: Possessing the Secret of Joy, by Alice Walker I read this wrenching book in a couple of days in a cold winter when I was living in Chicago….

  2. ted says:

    How can I never have even heard of this book? It is completely off my radar.

  3. red says:

    Ted – It’s not one of her most famous, is it? I think Color Purple and Temple of My Familiar are her most well-known books – but I’m not really up on the whole Alice Walker thing.

    This book was like a hot sword going into my side, dammit!! I can’t even judge the writing – I’m just glad she wrote it, in a weird way.

  4. Shasta says:

    I haven’t read this book either, but I may. But I have read The Color Purple, and these names sound familiar. Maybe I’m completely off my rocker, but wasn’t Tashi the name of the girl in The Color Purple that married Celie’s boy Adam, and his sister was named Olivia? They had been taken away from Celie, adopted by a missionary couple and raised in Africa, I believe. At the end, they come back with Nettie and meet their mother Celie, and I could swear those were their names, Adam, Olivia and Tashi. So I wonder if this is their story…

  5. red says:

    Shasta – yes. Same characters!

  6. tracey says:

    Good God. There’s nothing else to say.

  7. The Books: “Decline and Fall” (Evelyn Waugh)

    Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt: Decline and Fall, by Evelyn Waugh I just read this book a month or so ago (thoughts about it here). It made me laugh out loud. From page…

  8. red says:

    Melissa – I think I know what the ellipses mean – the wordlessness that was also my response to the book … but just wanted to doublecheck!!

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