Postmodern ethnography and the womanist mission: postcolonial sensibilities in 'Possessing the Secret of Joy.'

Reading Possessing the Secret of Joy is a dual exercise in reading culture. First, the novel's actions focus on the cultural rite of female circumcision. Second, the creator of the fictional world within which the novel's African protagonist lives is an African American woman. Furthermore, the protagonist is an African recently emigrated to the United States with her black American husband. The last offers the "ideal" African American, embodying the culture of Africa and inhabiting the geographical space of the United States. Tashi's body serves as the stage upon which the opera of African American cultural/ethnic identity can be performed. Both African American women's voices - those of the author and her heroine - are present in the text and confront the 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 the consequences inherent in pledging full allegiance to either or both, but is also aware that the two are different - connected but separate. It is through the lens of this connected separateness that her experiences with ritual female circumcision are examined.

In the novel we get this sense of Tashi's biculturalism from the varying references to her as "Tashi," renamed in America "Evelyn," "Evelyn Johnson," and "Tashi-Evelyn." Clearly, the last represents Du Bois's "twoness," the idea of "two souls, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body" (Du Bois 5). Alice Walker examines the African soul of her protagonist, and ritual female circumcision is the vehicle for this examination. Walker views the practice as a means through which African women are rendered joyless and spiritually dead, and she struggles to reconcile the two warring cultural consciousnesses - her American one and Tashi's conviction that ritual female circumcision defines her as an Olinkan woman. Unquestionably, this is a novel by a woman, about women which argues for the rights of women. The particular right that Walker champions, struggles to protect/defend/encode is that which insures that African women will continue to "possess the secret of joy." For Walker, this possession and its joy are both threatened by the "literal destruction of the most crucial external sign of womanhood: the vulva itself" (Warrior 21).

Possessing the Secret of Joy is the story of two kinds of women: those who are forbidden this possession, the 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 the "proverbial feminist personal-is-political" into direct conflict with "that notorious black manifesto - we will not have our business put into the streets" (Dent 3). The conflict is embodied in the 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 the pages of Possessing, they also destroy Africa.

The title of Walker's novel is taken from African Saga, the memoir of an Italian woman raised in Kenya. Walker adapts for her first epigraph the passage from Mirella Ricciardi's work wherein she writes:

I had always got on well with the Africans and enjoyed their company, but commanding the people on the farm, many of whom had watched [me] grow up, was different. With the added experience of my safaris behind me, I had begun to understand the code of "birth, copulation and death" by which they lived. Black people are natural, they possess the secret of joy, which is why they can survive the 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, the incredulity inherent in Ricciardi's novel is shared by Walker and guides her construction of Tashi, who emerges at the novel's end spiritually intact despite the "physical devastation" of her circumcision. Further, it is her "cunning" that permits her to return to the Olinka and without suspicion gain access to and kill M'Lissa. Considering Walker's past work and her efforts to define herself as a womanist, this casting begs further inquiry.

In her collection of prose essays In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, Walker casts herself as a healer. Athena Vrettos tells us that "by reclaiming the history of black women, those 'creatures so mutilated in body, so dimmed and confused by pain,' and redefining their scars as 'the springs of creativity,'" Walker attempts "to forge spiritual bonds with the past" (455-56). Possessing is that attempt. Alice Walker sees her novel as an attempt to mend the bodies torn asunder and to reunite those separated by time and space. This is her womanist mission.

Possessing the Secret of Joy revisits a dilemma in anthropology: separation between classic ethnography and literature. Classic ethnography marginalized narrative, relegating it to footnotes, hints, prefaces, and small-print case histories. However, if it can be so bluntly stated, the fundamental problem for the ethnographer and/or anthropologist is how to describe a culture. This is quite similar to the literary concern of representation. The ethnographer utilizes, for purposes of process analysis, narratives in the form of case studies. These compiled narratives represent the anthropological gatherings from and understandings of the observed event and/or experience. With these transcriptions, ethnographers "shape the life history" that they record (Benson 241). They interpret their data, recordings, and compile a representation.(2) Though contemporary anthropologists have debated the interpretive strain, the fictional quality, as it were, of their writings, rarely has literature about the Other been examined in terms of (or based upon a model of) ethnography.(3) Although Christopher Miller has argued for an anthropological approach to reading, understanding, and interpreting African literature, little has been done to examine how and if ethnography takes narrative form, serves as a narrative model, and/or questions the yields of such narratives in cross-cultural contexts. In this essay, I examine the narrative of Possessing the Secret of Joy as ethnographic, predicated upon and beholden to the legacy of Western anthropology's relationship to and conscription of Africa and blackwomen's bodies.

Indeed, Possessing the Secret of Joy is an ethnography of blackwomen's bodies. Ethnography, Clifford tells us, can be fiction "in the sense of something made up or fashioned" and existing within the boundaries of "the partiality of cultural and historical truths" (6). There are at least four characteristics that constitute ethnographic fiction, and Alice Walker frames her novel within all of these. The inscription of ethnographic fiction is manifested, Clifford suggests, "(1) contextually (it draws from and creates meaningful social milieux); (2) rhetorically (it uses and is used by expressive convention); (3) institutionally (one writes within and against specific traditions, disciplines, audiences); [and] (4) politically (the authority to represent cultural realities is unequally shared and at times contested)" (6). These four present themselves in the frame for Possessing, the "Bumper sticker" cited in the novel's second epigraph: "When the axe came into the forest, the trees said the handle is one of us." This sentence provides the cultural context within which Walker positions her story. The forest, the wilderness, and the dark continent are at once Africa and blackwomen's bodies.(4) This political statement also serves, however, as a rhetorical device, speaking to collectives being torn asunder from within. The idea is that the easiest way to deplete the forest is through the manipulation of the trees. The handle (em)bodies the trees just as it wields the force that will disembody them. The blade represents the institution of patriarchy, and though it actually cuts - severs - the trees' bodies, much like those blades which remove women's clitorises, the hands that hold it, that maintain it are themselves trees, women who are gears in the political machinery of patriarchy. The novel is about trees and bodies, blades and patriarchy, women and women, embodiment and dismemberment, a body's remembering and [re]membrance.

"(Re)membrance," according to Karla Holloway, acknowledges that "memory is culturally inscribed" within the "genre of myth" (25). "(Re)membrance" also "emphasizes the body and the restorative aspect of (re)" (13).

Hence, Walker's selection of an epigraph foreshadows her grounding of culture in the body - Tashi cannot be remembered, but Walker tells us what that body remembers. Walker introduces herself as part of the narrative, and hence becomes vital to Tashi's story as she draws Tashi into her own. In fact, she has to journey into Africa to reorient her consciousness, to remember her memory.

Walker's disorientation, or dismembrance, is documented for us in the final essay of her prose collection In Search of our Mother's Gardens, "Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self." Here, Walker recounts her first experience with male aggression:

I am eight years old and a tomboy. I have a cowboy hat, cowboy boots, checkered shirt and pants, all red. My playmates are my brothers, two and four years older than I. Their colors are black and green .... On Saturday nights we all go to the picture show, even my mother; Westerns are her favorite .... Back home ... we pretend that we are ... [cowboys]; we chase each other for hours rustling cattle.... Then my parents decide to buy my brothers guns. These are not "real" guns. They shoot "BBs," copper pellets.... Instantly I am relegated to the position of Indian. Now there appears a great distance between us.... One day while standing on top of our makeshift "garage" - pieces of tin nailed across some poles - holding my bow and arrow and looking out toward the fields, I feel and incredible blow in my right eye. I look down just in time to see my brother lower his gun. (386)

Her brothers rush to her side and forbid her to tell the truth, and she reluctantly agrees not only to protect them but to protect herself from them. She seemed fully aware that, if she does not affirm their reasoning about what happened, say that it was an accident of her own making, her "brothers would find ways to make [her] wish [she] had" (387). In extreme pain, she agrees so that order can be maintained in their home - so they won't all get whippings. She remembers, however, that even then she was not sure that it was an accident, that her brother had unintentionally blinded her. In her documentary text, Warrior Marks, Walker revisits this instance of her physical blinding, and tells us that this past experience led to a social awakening and encouraged her to uncover the secrets of women's blinding worldwide. To begin this uncovery, she ventured into Africa and exposed women's sexual blinding, or what she prefers to term female genital mutilation. Walker's fiction, then, is undergirded by a greater fiction: Tashi is Walker's memory.

As we conclude Possessing the Secret of Joy, we are greeted by an epistle "To the Reader." Here, Walker tells us that Tashi is flesh, represented by the African woman who plays her in the film version of The Color Purple. This Tashi also embodies the "little girls [who] were being forced under the shards of unwashed glass, tin-can tops, rusty razors and dull knives of traditional circumcisers" (282). This whisper into the reader's ear suggests Walker's postmodern ethnographic tendency. The novel becomes a dialogue "emphasizing the cooperative and collective nature of the ethnographic situation" and rejects the "ideology of observer-observed, [for] there is nothing being observed and no one who is observing" (Tyler 126). The reader is called into the text's story and participates in its telling, for the "real" story does not end when the cover of the book is closed - there are the other girls who may still face the knife. Walker tells us that Tashi, embodied and fleshed, warrants a "book of her own" (282). However, I question: Is this book Tashi's own?

These tin-wielding circumcisers revisit the copper-wielding brothers, men, who blinded Walker, signify the men who blind all women. Further, Tashi represents those blinded in Africa and abroad. In fact, Walker tells us that Tashi speaks for nearly 100 million African, Far Eastern, and Middle Eastern women (Possessing 281), while, through Tashi, she (re)members her "great-great-great-great-grandmother who came [to the U.S.] with all that pain in her body" ("Alice" 102). As Gay Wilentz tells us, Walker's political approach to Tashi and her story "tends to efface difference and is problematic for readers acquainted with African culture and history" (4). Institutionally, then, Walker "writes against [this] specific audience" with whom Wilentz is concerned (see Clifford above).

While Wilentz's reading is certainly valid with respect to the novel's discussion of ritual female circumcision and the accompanying casting of Africa(ns), I suspect that this effacement might be mediated if we consider that the novel is Alice Walker's story, that Walker is the heroine and protagonist of this text. Reading Possessing then becomes a journey into the political, social, and gendered consciousness of Alice Walker. Possessing the Secret of Joy is about Alice Walker and her politics more than, or at least equally as much as, it is about Tashi and her trauma.(5) Possessing reveals Walker's postcolonial sensibilities.

Much like an anthropologist's transcribed, tape-recorded interviews, Tashi's (hi)story is detailed in several voices, and the reminiscences of Tashi, as well as the people who share and shape her life, take us down the road to Tashi's recovery of her soul. Generically, Walker disguises the fictional, novelistic quality of her text. Significant to my suggestion that Alice Walker acts as ethnographer is the narrative presence of Raye, "a middle-aged African-American woman" psychologist who treats Tashi after her male psychologist dies (113). In a session with Raye, Tashi discusses their "Leader, like Nelson Mandela and Jomo Kenyatta," who "was Jesus Christ to [them]" (113-14). This Leader instructed the Olinkans that they "must not neglect [their] ancient customs" (115), one being "the female initiation ... into womanhood" (117). Raye takes the opportunity to ask questions that would elicit what Geertz calls experience-near concepts, concepts which subjects "might naturally and effortlessly use" to name their reality (227). Tashi names her reality using the word initiation, and in response Raye requests specifics: "What exactly is this procedure? ... I am ignorant about this practice ... and would like to learn about it from you... is ... the exact same thing done to every woman. Or is there a variation?" (117-18). Tashi responds by informing the therapist of the "three forms of circumcision" (118). Tashi explains only two of them as she tells Raye that, while "some cultures demanded excision of only the clitoris, others insisted on a thorough scraping away of the entire genital area" (118-19).

At this point the anthropological taint of Walker's text is uncovered: An experience-distant concept, the type of concept "which various specialists employ to forward their scientific, philosophical or practical aims" (Geertz 227), is presented as experience-near. Tashi's description begins quite "effortlessly" as "initiation" and progresses to the medicotechnical - "circumcision." This progression is from that which is local to that which is distant. In this instance, Tashi describes her thoughts about her body, thus revealing Walker's role/presence in the text:

It was only after I came to America, I said, that I ever knew what was supposed to be down there.

Down there?

Yes. My own body was a mystery to me, as was the female body, beyond the function of the breasts, to almost everyone I knew. From prison Our Leader said we must keep ourselves clean and pure as we had been since time immemorial - by cutting out unclean parts of our bodies. Everyone knew that if a woman was not circumcised her unclean parts would grow so long they'd soon touch her thighs; she'd become masculine and arouse herself. No man could enter her because her own erection would be in his way.

You believed this?

Everyone believed it, even though no one had ever seen it. No one living in our village anyway. And yet the elders, particularly, acted as if everyone had witnessed this evil, and not nearly a long enough time ago. (119)

Here we see Walker's attempt to reveal, explore, and erase a myth of repression. Raye questions Tashi's belief in this myth which she has embraced even though she has not witnessed its manifestations. Tashi responds that her parts may have grown as the myth suggests because her friends "jeered at [her] for having a tail. I think they meant my labia majora" (120). This reveals not only the power of myth, but an individual's potential to rewrite the myths that control and define a culture. Though African women have described other versions of this myth,(6) I define Tashi's description as an "experience-distant" one because it embodies the "Hottentot" stereotype of the late nineteenth century.

Later in the novel, this stereotype is reinforced by Pierre, the child of Tashi's husband and his French lover Lizette. Tashi lauds Pierre as the one who "continues to untangle the threads of mystery that kept [her] enmeshed." One such untangling comes when Pierre tells her that "European anthropologists" described "early uncircumcised women," "bushwomen," "small, gentle" people "completely at one with their environment" who "liked ... elongated genitals.... By the time they reached puberty, well, they had acquired what was to become known ... as 'the Hottentot apron'" (275-76). Clearly, this is the way Tashi should have remained, at one with her environment, the environment that is her sexuality. This very characteristic that Alice Walker cites and reinforces was once used by anthropologists as evidence serving to "distinguish these parts [the female genitals] at once from those of any of the ordinary vanities of the human species" (Gilman 235; emphasis added).(7) Wilentz suggests that Walker's use of this stereotype to promote a "positive aspect of female sexuality" (15) may be more harmful than helpful. That this description comes from Tashi during a session with her psychoanalyst strengthens Sander Gilman's claim that "the line from the secrets possessed by the 'Hottentot Venus' to twentieth-century psychoanalysis runs reasonably straight" (257).

Walker's manipulation of the Western anthropological tradition is highly relevant in light of a recent segment on ABC's news magazine Day One entitled "Scarred for Life." In this discussion, Forrest Sawyer and Sheila MacVicar attempted to shed some light on female circumcision. Sawyer describes circumcision as "a brutal ritual so tied to culture and tradition that for thousands of years women have been powerless to stop it." In fact, Sawyer continues, "taboos are so strong that women subjected to it will rarely talk about it at all. But now a handful of them are breaking the silence" (1). The language used by Sawyer is highly significant as we read Walker's text. Walker's American citizenship provides her the distance to use such language, but her assumption of an African culture problematizes her articulatory ease. Much as Walker was instructed, required by her brothers not to speak of her blinding, to keep the secret of the truth behind her blinding, so to are these women sworn to secrecy.

It is Adam, Tashi's American husband, who addresses this issue for Walker: "When they say the word 'taboo' ... are they saying something is 'sacred' and therefore not to be publicly examined for fear of disturbing the mystery; or are they saying that it is so profane it must not be exposed, for fear of corrupting the young?" (161). This is Alice Walker's dilemma. Why is it that all African women - African women writers in particular - are not speaking out against a tradition that so maims them and their sisters? In addressing this question, Walker contests African women's authority to represent their own cultural realities (Clifford 6).

Though I respect Alice Walker's right to cast her creative eye upon whatever she chooses, her intrusion into the fictional text of Possessing the Secret of Joy suggests that the novel is more than fiction. I contend that this text exists somewhere on the boundaries of cultural criticism (a Reading) and fiction (a reading). In Claiming the Heritage, Missy Dehn Kubitschek provides a discussion relevant to my reading of Alice Walker and her novel. Kubitschek suggests that the black woman writer explores the "necessity of knowing and coming to terms with tribal history to construct tenable black female identities." This interest appears in two forms: "First, the characters' relationships to the history of Blacks in the New World" are examined, and then "the author's relationships to the literary tradition" (7). The understanding of "tribal history" is central to the writer, and to the female character's becoming and remaining a functioning black woman presence. Walker excavates Tashi's history and in the process discovers her own connection to Tashi, blackwoman to blackwoman. In so doing, Walker categorically castigates African women's histories and possesses their bodies in a bizarre struggle to free her own.

Notes

1. Walker paraphrases this excerpt for the paperback edition of Possessing. "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."

2. For a more elaborated discussion of ethnography and writing, the relationship between author and ethnographer, and the problematic therein, see Geertz 1-25, 129-52.

3. It is worth noting that African literature has for some time been read through anthropology. Most recently, Christopher Miller has tried to revive this approach to reading African texts in Theories of Africans (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990).

4. Marianna Torgovnick (3-42, 141-50) suggests that tropes for primitives and primitivism become tropes for women in literature about and centered around Africa (17). Particularly, she addresses how African women's bodies are cast in images of exotic and primal being with respect to their sexuality.

5. In fact, Kenneth Wylie and Dennis Hickey give a reading of Possessing wherein they suggest that Walker's Africa is "the heart of the narrative" and is not "consciously based on the historical" regarding her connections to Africans. Further, they seem impressed by Walker's gendered universalist approach to reading Tashi: "Walker's thematic focus in [the novel] is sharp and unyielding .... Whatever one may think of the novel as literature or social commentary, it stands out [as one] which took considerable moral courage to write" (207-10).

6. Ama Ata Aidoo, for example, informs us that she was made aware of the dirtiness associated with women's genitalia; to have an intact clitoris indicated a woman's uncleanliness. Similarly, Elizabeth Williams-Moen, in "Genital Mutilation: Everywoman's Problem," discusses the use of circumcision as a means to establish sexuality and that an intact clitoris represents "maleness" in the female (5). Awa Thiam concurs, and Sue Armstrong provides us with a discussion of the strongest form of this myth: "Unless [female genitalia are] cut, the clitoris and the labia will grow until they hang down between a woman's knees" (Thiam 44). Interestingly, the removal of the genitals symbolizes a disconnection of the woman's appendage.

7. For a more detailed discussion of the "icon of the Hottentot" as related to Black female sexuality, see Gilman.

Works Cited

Aidoo, Ama Ata. "Ghana: To Be a Woman." Sisterhood is Global. Ed. Robin Morgan. New York: Doubleday, 1984. 258-65.

"Alice Walker's Appeal." Essence July 1992: 102.

Benson, Paul, ed. Anthropology and Literature. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1993.

Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus, eds. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.

Dent, Gina. "Black Pleasure, Black Joy: An Introduction." Black Popular Culture. Ed. Dent. Seattle: Bay, 1992. 1-19.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: Viking, 1989.

Geertz, Clifford. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988.

Gilman, Sander. "Black Bodies, White Bodies." "Race," Writing, and Difference. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. 223-61.

Holloway, Karla. Moorings and Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Woman's Literature. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1992.

Kubitschek, Missy Dehn. Claiming the Heritage: Afro-American Women Novelists and History. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1991.

"Scarred for Life." Day One. ABC. WLAJ, Lansing. 20 Sept. 1993. Journal Graphics Transcript 129: 1-4.

Thiam, Awa. Speak Out, Black Sisters: Feminism and Oppression in Black Africa. London: Pluto, 1978.

Torgovnick, Marianna. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.

Vrettos, Athena. "Curative Domains: Women, Healing and History in Black Women's Narratives." Women's Studies 16.4 (1989): 455-73.

Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose. New York: Harcourt, 1983.

-----. Possessing the Secret of Joy. New York: Pocket, 1992.

-----. Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women. New York: Harcourt, 1993.

Wilentz, Gay. "Mutilations of the Self." Women's Review of Books 10.5 (1993): 15-16.

Williams-Moen, Elizabeth. "Genital Mutilation: Everywoman's Problem." Working Paper 22. U of Colorado, Apr. 1993.

Wylie, Kenneth, and Dennis Hickey. An Enchanting Darkness: The American Vision of Africa in the Twentieth Century. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1994.

Angeletta KM Gourdine is Assistant Professor of English, specializing in African Diaspora Cultural Studies, at Oregon State University, where she teaches courses in African and African American literatures and cultures. She recently received a College of Liberal Arts Research Grant to support work on her book-length project Bridging the Middle Passage: The Face of Diasporic Politics in Blackwomen's Fictions.