by Alice Walker
I was just twenty when I first overheard something about female genital mutilation (FGM) while helping to build a school (out of sisal stalks, all that these very poor, dispossessed-by-British-colonialists people had) for children near Thikka, Kenya. I was then too young and ignorant of patriarchal control of women even to grasp what I had heard. Besides, what was there to be cut off? And why? It would be another twenty-odd years before I felt empowered, by study, travel, conversations with mutilated women, and years of being an editor at Ms. Magazine—the feminist magazine that dared to encourage public discussion about FGM by occasionally publishing pieces that protested it—to begin the work that, in all honesty, felt like it was mine to do from the start. Even in that moment of overhearing “something” about the practice of cutting young girls. Why me? Because such information caught my ear, snagged my imagination, and never left me, not once, in all those years? I believe in such gifts.
And so, with the blessings of my Africans-in-America ancestors in the form of the massive bestseller The Color Purple, and after writing The Temple of My Familiar—a long, loving, thank-you novel to said ancestors—I wrote the book that began the journey toward my seat on the floor of the Ghanaian plane, Possessing the Secret of Joy. I would have written this novel in any case, but what a delight to have enough money, space, and time to give it my complete attention. I did not have to teach or do speaking engagements, as I had done while writing The Color Purple. I did not have to worry about heating bills or car notes. Or school fees. Whether to buy winter boots this year or wait. Could I afford new glasses? It was heaven to feel the support of the women and men in this novel as they gathered themselves into flesh that walked around on the page after living for so long as shadows and tortured spirits in my consciousness.
The world is teaching us more every day of earth’s hard realities; it seems that part of my mission is to encourage a closer look. Many who read this novel will not be prepared for the world that it exposes. I understand. I recall my own innocence at the age of twenty, with nowhere to put information about previously unheard-of violence against women that so shocked me. However, for those who wish to feel with the people who are immersed in the suffering through and occasional triumph over female genital cutting, this book is a good place to start, if only to criticize my approach (which has been done by some readers, and which—understanding an instinctive need many feel to protect the people of Africa, battered for so long by misrepresentation and disdain—I accept without resentment. I have done the best that I could with a challenging subject; perhaps my writer’s shortcomings might be viewed against the magnitude of the calamity).
After writing Possessing the Secret of Joy, I asked Pratibha to make a film with me about the practice. Warrior Marks became a vigorous and fruitful adventure, as did our touring of it over several countries in Africa and Europe, and also in England, Japan, Cuba, and the United States. We talked ourselves hoarse on the subject in city after city for a couple of years. Going into my tenth year of giving the campaign against female genital cutting virtually all of my activist energy, I realized I needed to retreat. During the trial in Paris of a Gambian woman whose infant daughter bled to death after being cut by a “circumciser” she met in the park, the ongoing, increasingly global nature of the struggle impressed itself upon me. It wasn’t as simple as burnout; it was a deep recognition that, as with many of the planet’s urgent crises, it will take all of us working together to turn things around. It was also extremely draining to find that I, rather than the eradication of FGM, was becoming the subject of many people’s discourse. Years after I wrote and published Possessing the Secret of Joy there were those who claimed I made the whole FGM thing up, and protests met me at more than one college campus where I was accused of maligning Africa and men (and women of African descent). There were those who assumed I sought control of the subject and jealously guarded their “turf” as the discussion became debate in some places. Two doctors whom I was later told had performed female genital cutting procedures in the United States were some of my most persistent critics. One of them sent me a photograph of a child whose incision had healed to show me how smoothly and “cleanly” it was done.
Although I have removed myself from the FGM arena in recent years, the reader will sense that all of my love remains with the characters in this novel, just as all of it moved forward to embrace characters to come. The everlasting elasticity of love is what makes creativity possible. Pratibha and I have tried, unsuccessfully so far, to interest a major American filmmaker in making a film based on the novel. We are convinced it could halt the practice of genital cutting in many places—in cities in the West and in Africa, for example—overnight. Such is the power of cinema in people’s lives, especially in the lives of people who do not read. We will continue to hold the belief that this collaborative venture is possible, and when it arises we will be ready for it.
What does it mean to possess the secret of joy? Where is the secret to be found? Where must we search for it? Looking back on my life I see moments when the secret of joy became plain to me and I began to dance its dance. In Possessing the Secret of Joy I pass this on. Human beings do terrible things to each other, yet we are healers, too. In the midst of my darkest ruminations about a practice that affects over a hundred million women and girls, with more becoming its victim every day, I leaned on the wisdom and grace of many a psychiatrist and psychologist. One of them, Dr. Carl Jung, entered the novel as Mzee, “the old man,” who tenderly begins to guide Tashi,*[1] the character who was mutilated, back to mental health. My favorite thought most days about the suffering of our planet is that some of us, many of us, recognize the perilous journey we are on and its unexpectedly thrilling allies and joys—and we are preparing ourselves, of necessity, to withstand many a shock, as we continue on our way.
Alice Walker
Temple Jook House
Mendocino, California
Fall 2007
_________________________
[1]*The lover and later wife of Adam, in The Color Purple.
There are those who believe Black people possess the secret of joy and that it is this that will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation.
The children stood up with us in a simple church ceremony in London. And it was that night, after the wedding dinner, when we were all getting ready for bed, that Olivia told me what has been troubling her brother. He is missing Tashi.
But he’s also very angry with her, she said, because when we left, she was planning to scar her face.
I didn’t know about this. One of the things we thought we’d helped stop was the scarring or cutting of tribal marks on the faces of young women.
It is a way the Olinka can show they still have their own ways, said Olivia, even though the white man has taken everything else. Tashi didn’t want to do it, but to make her people feel better, she’s resigned. She’s going to have the female initiation ceremony too, she said.
Oh, no, I said. That’s so dangerous. Suppose she becomes infected?
I know, said Olivia. I told her nobody in America or Europe cuts off pieces of themselves. And anyway, she should have had it when she was eleven, if she was going to have it. She’s too old for it now.
Well, some men are circumcised, but that’s just the removal of a bit of skin.
Tashi was happy that the initiation ceremony isn’t done in Europe or America, said Olivia. That makes it even more valuable to her.
I see, I said.
The Color Purple, 1982
When the axe came into the forest, the trees said the handle is one of us.
Bumper sticker
PART ONE
TASHI
I DID NOT REALIZE for a long time that I was dead.
And that reminds me of a story: There was once a beautiful young panther who had a co-wife and a husband. Her name was Lara and she was unhappy because her husband and her co-wife were really in love; being nice to her was merely a duty pan
ther society imposed on them. They had not even wanted to take her into their marriage as co-wife, since they were already perfectly happy. But she was an “extra” female in the group and that would not do. Her husband sometimes sniffed her breath and other emanations. He even, sometimes, made love to her. But whenever this happened, the co-wife, whose name was Lala, became upset. She and the husband, Baba, would argue, then fight, snarling and biting and whipping at each other’s eyes with their tails. Pretty soon they’d become sick of this and would lie clutched in each other’s paws, weeping.
I am supposed to make love to her, Baba would say to Lala, his heartchosen mate. She is my wife just as you are. I did not plan things this way. This is the arrangement that came down to me.
I know it, dearest, said Lala, through her tears. And this pain that I feel is what has come down to me. Surely it can’t be right?
These two sat on a rock in the forest and were miserable enough. But Lara, the unwanted, pregnant by now and ill, was devastated. Everyone knew she was unloved, and no other female panther wanted to share her own husband with her. Days went by when the only voice she heard was her inner one.
Soon, she began to listen to it.
Lara, it said, sit here, where the sun may kiss you. And she did.
Lara, it said, lie here, where the moon can make love to you all night long. And she did.
Lara, it said, one bright morning when she knew herself to have been well kissed and well loved: sit here on this stone and look at your beautiful self in the still waters of this stream.
Calmed by the guidance offered by her inner voice, Lara sat down on the stone and leaned over the water. She took in her smooth, aubergine little snout, her delicate, pointed ears, her sleek, gleaming black fur. She was beautiful! And she was well kissed by the sun and well made love to by the moon.
For one whole day, Lara was content. When her co-wife asked her fearfully why she was smiling, Lara only opened her mouth wider, in a grin. The poor co-wife ran trembling off and found their husband, Baba, and dragged him back to look at Lara.
When Baba saw the smiling, well kissed, well made love to Lara, of course he could hardly wait to get his paws on her! He could tell she was in love with someone else, and this aroused all his passion.
While Lala wept, Baba possessed Lara, who was looking over his shoulder at the moon.
Each day it seemed to Lara that the Lara in the stream was the only Lara worth having—so beautiful, so well kissed, and so well made love to. And her inner voice assured her this was true.
So, one hot day when she could not tolerate the shrieks and groans of Baba and Lala as they tried to tear each other’s ears off because of her, Lara, who by now was quite indifferent to them both, leaned over and kissed her own serene reflection in the water, and held the kiss all the way to the bottom of the stream.
OLIVIA
THIS IS THE WAY Tashi expressed herself.
The way she talked and evaded the issue, even as a child. Her mother, Catherine, whose tribal name was Nafa, used to send her to the village shop for matches, which were a penny each. Tashi would be given three pennies. She would lose at least one of them. The story she would tell about the lost penny might go like this: That a giant bird, noticing the shimmer of the coin in the glass of water in which she’d temporarily stored the pennies for safekeeping and for aesthetic enjoyment, had swooped down from the sky, flapped its wings so boldly that the glass of water fell from her hand, and when next she looked, having hidden her face from the creature for fear of its large beak and outspread wings, why—dash! No more penny!
Her mother would scold, or she’d put her hands on her hips, shake her head sadly and make a self-pitying cry to the neighbors about this incorrigible little liar, her daughter.
We were about the same age, Tashi and I, six or seven. I remember, as if it were yesterday, my first glimpse of her. She was weeping, and the tears made a track through the dust on her face. For the villagers, in gathering to meet us, the new missionaries, had raised a cloud of it, reddish and sticky in the humidity. Tashi was standing behind Catherine, her mother, a small, swaybacked woman with an obdurate expression on her dark, lined face, and at first there was only Tashi’s hand—a small dark hand and arm, like that of a monkey, reaching around her mother’s lower body and clutching at her long, hibiscus-colored skirts. Then, as we drew nearer, my father and mother and Adam and myself, more of her became visible as she peeked around her mother’s body to stare at us.
We must have been quite a sight. We had been weeks on the march that brought us to Tashi’s village and were ourselves covered with the dust and bruises of the journey. I remember looking up at my father and thinking what a miracle it was that we’d somehow—through jungle, grassland, across rivers and whole countries of animals—arrived in the village of the Olinka that he’d spoken so much about.
I saw that he too took note of Tashi. He was sensitive to children, and often stated as fact that there could be no happy community in which there was one unhappy child. Not one! he used to say, slapping his knee for emphasis. One crying child is the rotten apple in the barrel of the tribe! It would have been difficult to ignore Tashi. Because though many of the faces that greeted us seemed sad, she was the only person weeping. Yet she uttered not a sound. The whole of her little cropped head and reddened brown face bulged with the effort to control her emotions, and except for the tears, which were so plentiful they cascaded down her cheeks, she was successful. It was a remarkable performance.
In the course of our daylong welcome Tashi and her mother disappeared. Even so, my father inquired after them. Why was the little girl crying? he asked, in his stiff, newly learned Olinka. The elders seemed not to understand him. They shifted their robes, looked genially at him and at us and at each other and replied, looking about now over the heads of those assembled, What little girl, Pastor? There is no little crying girl here.
And Tashi and her mother did seem gone forever. We didn’t see them for a long time, after they’d spent several weeks on Catherine’s farm, a day’s walk from the village. They turned up at vespers one evening, both Tashi and her mother dressed in new pink gingham Mother Hubbards with high collars and large flowered pockets, their faces similarly set in the look of perplexed, instinctive wariness that characterized Catherine’s face whenever she encountered “the Pastor,” as they all called my father, or “Mama Pastor,” as they called my mother.
We did not know that on the morning we arrived in the village one of Tashi’s sisters had died. Her name was Dura, and she had bled to death. That was all Tashi had been told; all she knew. So that if, while we were playing, she pricked her finger on a thorn or scraped her knee and glimpsed the sight of her own blood, she fell into a panic, until, gradually, she played in such a way as to take no risks and even learned to sew in an exaggeratedly careful way, using two thimbles.
But she forgot why the sight of her own blood terrified her. And this became one of the things the other children teased her about. And about which she would cry.
Years later, in the United States, she would begin to remember some of the things she’d told me over the years of our growing up. That Dura had been her favorite sister. That she had been headstrong and boisterous and liked honey in her porridge so much she’d sometimes stolen a portion of Tashi’s share. That she had been very excited during the period leading up to her death. Suddenly she had become the center of everyone’s attention; every day there were gifts. Decorative items mainly: beads, bracelets, a bundle of dried henna for reddening hair and palms, but the odd pencil and tablet as well. Bright remnants of cloth for a headscarf and dress. The promise of shoes!
TASHI
THERE WAS A SCAR at the corner of her mouth. Oh, very small and faint, like a shadow. Shaped like a miniature plantain, or like the moon when it is new. A sickle shape with the points toward her ear; when she smiled, the little shadow seemed to slide back into her cheek, above her teeth, which were very white. While she was crawling, she�
�d picked up a burning twig that protruded from the fire and attempted to put it into her mouth.
This was long before I was born, but I knew about it from the story that was often told: how bewildered Dura had looked, as the twig stuck to her lip, and how she, instead of knocking it away, cried piteously, her arms outstretched, looking about for help. No, they laughed, telling this story, not simply for help, for deliverance.
Did anyone help her?
This white witch doctor scribbles, only a little, behind his desk, on which there are small stone and clay figures of African gods and goddesses from Ancient Egypt. I noticed them before lying down on his couch, which is covered by a tribal rug.
I think and think, but I can not think of the rest of the story. The sound of the laughter stops me before I can come to the part about the rescue of my sister Dura. I know that the twig, ashen, finally dropped away, having burned through the skin. But did my mother or a co-wife leap to gather the crying child in her arms? Was my father anywhere near? I am frustrated because I can not answer the doctor’s questions. And I feel him, there behind my head, pen poised to at last capture on paper an African woman’s psychosis for the greater glory of his profession. Olivia has brought me here. Not to the father of psychoanalysis, for he has died, a tired, persecuted man. But to one of his sons, whose imitation of him—including dark hair and beard, Egyptian statuettes on his desk, the tribal-rug-covered couch and the cigar, which smells of bitterness—will perhaps cure me.