by Alice Walker
They circumcised women, little girls, in Jesus’s time. Did he know? Did the subject anger or embarrass him? Did the early church erase the record? Jesus himself was circumcised; perhaps he thought only the cutting done to him was done to women, and therefore, since he survived, it was all right.
Then there is Olivia. She has always thought so well of me. I find it impossible to disappoint her. I told her I did not kill the tsunga M’Lissa. I killed her all right. I placed a pillow over her face and lay across it for an hour. Her sad stories about her life caused me to lose my taste for slashing her. She had told me it was traditional for a well-appreciated tsunga to be murdered by someone she circumcised, then burned. I carried out what was expected of me. It is curious, is it not, that the traditional tribal society dealt so cleverly with its appreciation of the tsunga and its hatred of her. But of course the tsunga was to the traditional elders merely a witch they could control, an extension of their own dominating power.
Pierre has been such a gift to me. You would be proud of him. He has promised to continue to look after Benny when I am gone. Already he has taught him more than any of his teachers ever thought he could learn. I wish you could see Pierre—and perhaps you can, through one of the windows of heaven that looks exactly like a blade of grass, or a rose, or a grain of wheat—as he continues to untangle the threads of mystery that kept me enmeshed. Chère Madame, he says, do you realize that the greatest curse in some African countries is not “son of a bitch” but “son of an uncircumcised mother”?
No, I do not realize it, I say.
Well, he says, it is a clue to something important! Who, for instance, were these early uncircumcised women? There is evidence that they were slaves. Slaves of other indigenous Africans and slaves of invading Arabs who swept down from the east and north. Originally bushwomen or women from the African rainforest. We know that these people, small, gentle, completely at one with their environment, liked, if you will forgive my frankness, elongated genitals. Or, put another way, they liked their genitals. So much so that they were observed from birth stroking and “pulling” on them. By the time they reached puberty, well, they had acquired what was to become known, at least among European anthropologists, as “the Hottentot apron.”
Enslaved among people who never touched their genitals if they could help it, having been taught such touching was a sin, these women with their generous labia and fat clitorises were considered monstrous. But what is less noted about these people, these women, is that in their own ancient societies they owned their bodies, including their vulvas, and touched them as much as they liked. In short, Chère Madame Johnson, early African woman, the mother of womankind, was notoriously free!
This, Lisette, is your son. I still find him absurdly small for a man, but he is big in mind. On the day of my execution, he says, he will rededicate himself to his life’s work: destroying for other women—and their men—the terrors of the dark tower. A tower you told him about.
You and I will meet in heaven. I know this. Because through your son, to whom my suffering became a mystery into which he submerged himself, we have already met on earth.
Now it occurs to me to wonder how you died. If I had been able truly to understand that you would die, and cease to write to me and to exist, I would have paid better attention to you before you died. However, I was not able to comprehend death except as something that had already happened to me. Dying now does not frighten me. The execution is to take place where this government has executed so many others, the soccer field. I will refuse the blindfold so that I can see far in all directions. I will concentrate on the beauty of one blue hill in the distance, and for me, that moment will be eternity.
Blessed be.
Tashi Evelyn Johnson
Reborn, soon to be Deceased
TASHI EVELYN JOHNSON SOUL
THE WOMEN ALONG THE WAY have been warned they must not sing. Rockjawed men with machine guns stand facing them. But women will be women. Each woman standing beside the path holds a red-beribboned, closely swaddled baby in her arms, and as I pass, the bottom wrappings fall. The women then place the babies on their shoulders or on their heads, where they kick their naked legs, smile with pleasure, screech with terror, or occasionally wave. It is a protest and celebration the men threatening them do not even recognize.
At the moment of crisis I realize that, because my hands are bound, I can not adjust my glasses, and therefore must tilt my head awkwardly in order to locate and focus on a blue hill. It is while I am distracted by this maneuver that I notice there is a blue hill rising above and just behind the women and their naked-bottomed little girls, who now stand in rows fifty feet in front of me. In front of them kneels my little band of intent faces. Mbati is unfurling a banner, quickly, before the soldiers can stop her (most of them illiterate, and so their response is slow). All of them—Adam, Olivia, Benny, Pierre, Raye, Mbati—hold it firmly and stretch it wide.
RESISTANCE IS THE SECRET OF JOY! it says in huge block letters.
There is a roar as if the world cracked open and I flew inside. I am no more. And satisfied.
TO THE READER
IT IS ESTIMATED that from ninety to one hundred million women and girls living today in African, Far Eastern and Middle Eastern countries have been genitally mutilated. Recent articles in the media have reported on the growing practice of “female circumcision” in the United States and Europe, among immigrants from countries where it is part of the culture.
Two excellent books on the subject of genital mutilation are: Woman Why Do You Weep?, by Asma el Dareer (London: Zed Press, 1982), and Prisoners of Ritual: An Odyssey into Female Genital Circumcision in Africa, by Hanny Lightfoot-Klein (Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park Press, 1989). For a look at how genital mutilation was practiced in the nineteenth-century United States, there is G. J. Barker-Benfield’s book The Horrors of the Half Known Life: Male Attitudes Toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).
Though obviously connected, Possessing the Secret of Joy is not a sequel to either The Color Purple or The Temple of My Familiar. Because it is not, I have claimed the storyteller’s prerogative to recast or slightly change events alluded to or described in the earlier books, in order to emphasize and enhance the meanings of the present tale.
Like The Temple of My Familiar, it is a return to the original world of The Color Purple only to pick up those characters and events that refused to leave my mind. Or my spirit. Tashi, who appears briefly in The Color Purple and again in The Temple of My Familiar, stayed with me, uncommonly tenacious, through the writing of both books, and led me finally to conclude she needed, and deserved, a book of her own.
She also appeared to me in the flesh.
During the filming of The Color Purple, a commendable effort was made to hire Africans to act the African roles. The young woman who played Tashi, who has barely a moment on the screen, was an African from Kenya: very beautiful, graceful and poised. Seeing her brought the Tashi of my book vividly to mind, as I was reminded that in Kenya, even as this young woman was being flown to Los Angeles to act in the film, little girls were being forced under the shards of unwashed glass, tin-can tops, rusty razors and dull knives of traditional circumcisers, whom I’ve named tsungas. Indeed, in 1982, the year The Color Purple was published, fourteen children died in Kenya from the effects of genital mutilation. It was only then that the president of the country banned it. It is still clandestinely practiced in Kenya, as it is still practiced, openly, in many other African countries.
Tsunga, like many of my “African” words, is made up. Perhaps it, and the other words I use, are from an African language I used to know, now tossed up by my unconscious. I do not know from what part of Africa my African ancestors came, and so I claim the continent. I suppose I have created Olinka as my village and the Olinkans as one of my ancient, ancestral tribal peoples. Certainly I recognize Tashi as my sister.
A portion of the royalties from this book will be
used to educate women and girls, men and boys, about the hazardous effects of genital mutilation, not simply on the health and happiness of individuals, but on the whole society in which it is practiced, and the world.
Mbele Aché.
Alice Walker
Costa Careyes, Mexico
Mendocino County, California
January-December, 1991
THANKS
DESPITE THE PAIN one feels in honestly encountering the reality of life, I find it a wonderful time to be alive. This is because at no other time known to human beings has it been easier to give and receive energy, support and love from people never met, experiences never had.
I thank all the writers—Esther Ogunmodede, Nawal El Sadawi, Fran Hosken, Lila Said, Robin Morgan, Awa Thiam, Gloria Steinem, Fatima Abdul Mahmoud and many others around the world—for their work on the subject of genital mutilation.
I thank Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor for the inspiration and confirmation I get from their magnificent book, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth. I also thank Monica Sjoo for the beauty and psychic resonance of her visionary paintings.
I thank Carl Jung for becoming so real in my own self-therapy (by reading) that I could imagine him as alive and active in Tashi’s treatment. My gift to him.
I thank my own therapist, Jane R. C., for helping me loosen some of my own knots and therefore become better able to distinguish and tackle Tashi’s.
I thank Huichol culture for the amazing yarn paintings I have admired over the past several years: paintings which flew me over the pit of so much that is static and dead in the prevailing civilization.
I thank psychologist Alice Miller for writing so strongly in defense of the child. I am especially grateful for The Drama of the Gifted Child, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware, and For Your Own Good.
I thank Louis Pascal for his unpublished essay “How AIDS Began,” which introduced me to the possibility that AIDS was started by the dissemination, among Africans, of contaminated polio vaccine.
I thank the makers of the video Born in Africa for introducing me to the beautiful life and courageous death of Philly LuTaaya, a Ugandan musician who used his dying from AIDS to warn, educate, enlighten, inspire and love his people. This video reassured me that human compassion is equal to human cruelty and that it is up to each of us to tip the balance.
I thank Joan Miura and Mary Walsh for representing the Goddess in my household: for doing research, patching leaks, keeping the refrigerator stocked and shutting out the noise. For holding my hand as I reached for Tashi’s.
I thank Robert Allen for his friendship.
I thank Jean Weisinger for her Being.
I thank my daughter Rebecca for giving me the opportunity to be a mother.
A Biography of Alice Walker
Alice Walker (b. 1944), one of the United States’ preeminent writers, is an award-winning author of novels, stories, essays, and poetry. Walker was the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which she won in 1983 for her novel The Color Purple, also a National Book Award winner. Walker has also contributed to American culture as an activist, teacher, and public intellectual. In both her writing and her public life, Walker has worked to address problems of injustice, inequality, and poverty.
Walker was born at home in Putnam County, Georgia, on February 9, 1944, the eighth child of Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker. Willie Lee and Minnie Lou labored as tenant farmers, and Minnie Lou supplemented the family income as a house cleaner. Though poor, Walker’s parents raised her to appreciate art, nature, and beauty. They also taught her to value her education, encouraging her to focus on her studies. When she was a young girl, Alice’s brother accidentally shot her in the eye with a BB, leaving a large scar and causing her to withdraw into the world of art and books. Walker’s dedication to learning led her to graduate from her high school as valedictorian. She was also homecoming queen.
Walker began attending Spelman College in Atlanta in 1961. There she formed bonds with professors such as Staughton Lynd and Howard Zinn, teachers that would inspire her to pursue her talent for writing and her commitment to social justice. In 1964 she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College, where she completed a collection of poems in her senior year. This collection would later become her first published book, Once (1965). After college, Walker became deeply engaged with the civil rights movement, often joining marches and voter registration drives in the South. In 1965 she met Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a civil rights lawyer, whom she would marry in 1967 in New York. The two were happy, before the strain of being an interracial couple in Mississippi caused them to separate in 1976. They had one child, Rebecca Grant Walker Leventhal.
In the late sixties through the seventies, Walker produced several books, including her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), and her first story collection, In Love & Trouble (1973). During this time she also pursued a number of other ambitions, such as working as an editor for Ms. magazine, assisting anti-poverty campaigns, and helping to bring canonical novelist Zora Neale Hurston back into the public eye.
With the 1982 release of her third novel, The Color Purple, Walker earned a reputation as one of America’s premier authors. The book would go on to sell fifteen million copies and be adapted into an Academy Award–nominated film by director Steven Spielberg. After the publication of The Color Purple, Walker had a tremendously prolific decade. She produced a number of acclaimed novels, including You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (1982), The Temple of My Familiar (1989), and Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), as well as the poetry collections Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1985) and Her Blue Body Everything We Know (1991). During this time Walker also began to distinguish herself as an essayist and nonfiction writer with collections on race, feminism, and culture, including In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983) and Living by the Word (1988). Another collection of poetry, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing, was released in 2010, followed by her memoir, The Chicken Chronicles, in the spring of 2011.
Currently, Walker lives in Northern California, and spends much of her time traveling, teaching, and working for human rights and civil liberties in the United States and abroad. She continues to write and publish along with her many other activities.
Alice’s parents, Minnie Tallulah Grant and Willie Lee Walker, in the 1930s. Willie Lee was brave and hardworking, and Minnie Lou was strong, thoughtful, and kind—and just as hardworking as her husband. Alice remembers her mother as a strong-willed woman who never allowed herself or her children to be cowed by anyone. Alice cherished both of her parents “for all they were able to do to bring up eight children, under incredibly harsh conditions, to instill in us a sense of the importance of education, for instance, the love of beauty, the respect for hard work, and the freedom to be whoever you are.”
Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston during her days in New York City. Hurston, who fell into obscurity after her death, had a profound influence on Walker. Indeed, Walker’s 1975 essay, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” played a crucial role in resurrecting Hurston’s reputation as a major figure in American literature. Walker paid further tribute to her “literary aunt” when she purchased a headstone for Hurston’s grave, which had gone unmarked for over a decade. The inscription on the tombstone reads, “A Genius of the South.”
Alice (front) in Kenya in 1965. She traveled there to help build the school pictured in the background as part of the Experiment in International Living Program. It was here that Walker first witnessed the practice of female genital mutilation, a practice that she has since worked to eradicate.
Walker with her former husband, Melvyn Leventhal, a Brooklyn native. The couple met in Mississippi and bonded over their mutual involvement in the struggle for civil rights—he as a budding litigator for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, she as one of the organization’s workers responsible for taking depositions from disenfranchised black voters. Despite d
isapproval from their respective families, Alice and Melvyn wed in New York City in 1967. They then returned to Mississippi, where they were often subjected to threats from the Ku Klux Klan. Eventually the pressures of living in the violent, segregated state, coupled with their divergent career paths, caused the pair to drift apart. They divorced amicably in 1976.
Alice and Melvyn with their daughter, Rebecca, who would also grow up to become a writer, in 1970. Alice had just published her debut novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, which garnered significant praise and prompted these perceptive words from critic Kay Bourne: “Most poignant is the relating of the lives of black women, who were ready and strong and trusted, only to so often be abused by the conditions of their oppressed lives and the misdirected anger of their men.” Alice characterized it as “an incredibly difficult novel to write,” since it forced her to confront the violence African Americans inflicted on each other in the face of white oppression.
Alice and her partner of thirteen years, Robert L. Allen, a noted scholar of American history, pose for a portrait. The picture was taken at a celebration the couple hosted after the publication of I Love Myself When I Am Laughing, an anthology of Zora Neale Hurston’s writings that Alice edited.
Walker being taken into custody at a 1980s demonstration against weapons shipments sent from Concord, California, to Central and South America. Her shirt reads: “Remember Port Chicago.” This is a reference to an explosion that killed hundreds of sailors stationed in Concord during World War II—most of them black—while they were loading munitions onto a cargo vessel. Walker has remained a dedicated political activist since the 1960s, when she returned to the South after graduating from Sarah Lawrence to help register black voters. Recently, she was arrested with fellow California-based author Maxine Hong Kingston in Washington, DC, during a protest against the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “My activism—cultural, political, spiritual—is rooted in my love of nature and my delight in human beings,” Walker explains.