*“‘There’s One Humanity or There isn’t: A Conversation” between Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka. Originally published in The New York Review of Books, March 21, 2019. https://www.nybooks.com/contributors/henry-louis-gates/ Accessed 20 January 2020
On 20 January 2020, the federal holiday honoring the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I drew from my German mailbox a mystery package whose Japanese stamps appealed to me. What could it contain? I asked. From within its fold I drew a hefty tome with glossy cover, a gift inscribed with my former mentee’s name in Kanji script: Sachiko Mitsumori. The gouache painting – an explosion of coalescing pigments like hair adorning a woman’s profile –created a resonating, polyvalent symbol of unity in diversity, one whose endorsement can easily be found in the work of MLK, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alice Walker and others. And the inspiration could as well be called “ethics into action.”
For instance, interviewed by Satsuko Kamiya in The Japan Times on her first visit to that nation, Walker was asked why, if at age 20 she had first encountered ‘female circumcision’ in Kenya, it took so long before she wrote about it, Possessing the Secret of Joy being her 15th book. Walker’s answer is instructive:
“I was … gathering my courage, because it is such a taboo subject and I knew that many people didn’t want it discussed. I myself didn’t want to embarrass anybody. So I had to question what was the best thing to do, or what should I do. Was my duty to write about this so that people can see and feel it and think about it in a different way and change it? [Italics mine] Or, like all the other people before me, should I just camouflage it in my fiction and make it look like something else? You know? I had to struggle with all those issues. So I took all the time I needed to be able to make a decision that I can live with.
“… And actually what came after Possessing was a lot of criticism and a lot of controversy. But I could sustain it because I’d had 20 years to think about it and commit myself to it.” [1]
My book, Waging Empathy. Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy and the Global Movement to Ban FGM (2014) explores (and deflects) Walker’s negative reception, often couched in terms of misguided tolerance and a static understanding of tradition. When asked how Alice responded to criticism faulting her for interfering in ‘other peoples’ culture’, Setsuko is assured, “Genital mutilation is torture, and torture is not actually a culture. It may be a custom,” Walker adds, “but it is not a culture.”
Endorsing Blood Stains. A Child of Africa Reclaims Her Human Rights, Khady Koita’s intimate account of her experience under the blade, Henry Louis Gates Jr. has written, “What we think of as the unspeakable pain and suffering of FGM must be given voice” (on the front cover). In Sachiko Mitsumori’s view, Walker does more than mount the megaphone for redress of genital abuse; instead of freezing a separate moment of horror, the excision drama melts into the context of an oeuvre that conciliates and seeks allies.
We applaud those African American voices Sachiko ferries across the Pacific that stand for tolerance and unity for all.
Footnote
- Setsuko Kamiya. “Alice Walker: Love Makes Her World Go Round.” The Japan Times. May 4, 2003. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2003/05/04/general/alice-walker-love-makes-her-world-go-round/#.XibCAyMxk2w Accessed 20 January 2020.
What follows are Sachiko’s synopsis of her book and the chapter she has contributed to mine.
Compliant to Rebellious: New Interpretations of Alice Walker’s Seven Novels
By Sachiko Mitsumori. Hiroshima: 株式会社渓水社 [Keisuisha Co.], 2020.
By highlighting the intertextual relationship between The Third Life of Grange Copeland and Meridian I open my interpretation of Walker’s oeuvre. Depicting the struggles of black people under the crop-lien system, — de facto slavery by another name–, and the civil rights movement, Walker hails not only the survival of discrete persons but also their broader quest for “One-Life” that exceeds the individual. As Grange’s achievement is crowned by success in passing full, no longer monstrous, humanity on to his granddaughter Ruth, Meridian’s activism also hands the torch to future generations under the banner of social change and improved mental health.
Chapter two looks at the complementary relationship between The Color Purple and By the Light of My Father’s Smile. Uniting the male protagonists in these novels is the violence to which they subject their wives and daughters while destroying themselves in the system of white supremacy and patriarchal dominance. The suffering of both women and men is attributed by Walker to the same cause, and she aims to emancipate both sexes from a dichotomous worldview.
The third chapter turns to Possessing the Secret of Joy to show how Walker pursues the goal of abolishing FGM. The protagonist Tashi agonizes both physically and mentally from the lingering effects of her ordeal. Therefore, it might seem that her victimhood lies at the heart of the script. In fact, Walker features a number of perspectives other than Tashi’s, such as Adam’s, Olivia’s, M’Lissa’s, and last but not least Mzee’s, and delineates each person’s struggle to achieve their own “universal self.” The strength derived from this figuration of wholeness is very much needed to enable solidarity with Tashi in protest against genital abuse whose abolition presupposes community consensus.
The final chapter compares The Temple of My Familiar and Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart. Regardless of age, sex or nationality, all characters in both novels, set in the eighties in the USA, suffer separation from their history and feel strong anxiety about their future. Close scrutiny of each one’s challenge reveals deep roots in colonialism and imperialism endured by parents or ancestors going even further into the past. Therefore, restoring a healthy bond to mothers and fathers brings understanding of black resistance and engenders fortified, wholesome identities that enable peace to embrace them all.
SACHIKO’S chapter, “Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy. Towards the Universal Self,” from Waging Empathy follows an excerpt from my Introduction to Waging Empathy (UnCUT/VOICES, 2014).
“‘I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own’.” Audre Lorde
Lorde’s mantra finds expression in the final section [of Waging Empathy] “Treasure and Text.” Both nouns and, given smart-phones, also verbs, the global reach of Walker’s effort is celebrated here. I treasure these texts on Walker’s fiction by scholars with influence in indisputably important places, in Japan, China, India, Uganda, and Kenya, and I was, frankly, gratified to find a common thread among contributors no matter where they live: the claim that women’s rights are human rights and that stopping FGM presents a universal moral challenge.
The first stop on this journey is Japan.
The lush campus of Jogakuin University, set on steep, graceful hills, was steaming on July 9, 2013, as Sachiko and I, seeking shelter from the heat, came upon a powerful reminder of tragedy, hope, and the ability of humans everywhere to see how one child’s destiny speaks to their own lives. Inscribed “Blessed are the peacemakers” (Matthew 5:9), the plaque next to the library’s entrance announced a new rose created in Belgium at Otto Frank’s request to honor Anne with a symbol of his daughter’s dream of peace. In 2005, the 60th anniversary of the atomic bomb and the young author’s death witnessed the planting of saplings. Now fat with fragrance, their blossoms provided an iconic preface for information I would soon impart to youthful students on FGM, an act also known as „cutting the rose.” The symbol of loveliness and harmony, the flora represents female genitalia whose desecration I would soon ask my listeners to confront. How could this best be done?
When Alice Walker came to Tokyo to promote the Japanese translation of Possessing the Secret of Joy, she was concerned about this, too. How do you do it? Walker chose to place genital mutilation on a continuum with other sexist tortures labeled „culture.”
Similarly in Chapter 9, “Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy. Towards the Universal Self,” Sachiko Mitsumori asks how “a horrible truth” can be brokered into insight that “what is done to Tashi is done to all.” The heroine’s trauma presents a dilemma, for readers don’t automatically act when confronted by dramas of injustice. They may be indifferent, even hostile. „How can [the author] replace … distaste for objectionable facts with empathy?”
In the plot itself, Walker embeds critics’ challenge to her understanding of (neo) colonialism and pre-empts their refusal to voice FGM by having her heroine, at first, bear its standard. She makes defiance of the colonizer Tashi’s motive to have herself cut; and then again, as a result of immense anguish, her motive to end genital assaults on others, even if defiance costs her life. Thus, anticipating being faulted for her “superior Western attitude toward Africa,” Walker deflects the barb by promoting the “idea of a universal self, one enabled to embrace the pain of others” (Mitsumori).
What allows this universal self to surface? It arises from the tension between resistance and complicity. After all, the story ends with a call to arms but the preface is serial assassination. Mitsumori writes:
Women murder women in this book. M’Lissa kills Dura; Tashi suffocates M’Lissa; the State – in superficial solidarity with its token female ‘national monument’ – executes Tashi. There are metaphoric deaths, as well, of parts of personality: M’Lissa never to emerge from the scene of torture but her girl self left to weep all of the world’s tears; Nafa, in mourning for her daughter Dura, leaving footprints for Tashi to follow who envisions them stained with blood. The blood of women – a force in birth but also in death – fuses the African female characters into a single image. Nafa, M’Lissa, Mbati and Tashi gradually merge.
Empathy among these women allows them to cohere. But what of the men? If initially Adam rejects his wife’s genital distress as the fit subject of a sermon, his mind opens at the trial: in the crowded courtroom he considers the ordeal that each female has gone through, “the women suffering from the unnatural constrictions of flesh their bodies have been whittled and refashioned into,” (Possessing 166) and he sees that Evelyn [Tashi] is not alone; there are so many others.
This man had once been in complicity with patriarchy for refusing to nest the trials of women under the wings of a tormented Jesus, but the pastor has a change of heart. He joins the psychiatrist Mzee who, “horrified at what was done to [his patient], … recognizes it as something that is also done to [him]. A truly universal self” (Possessing 84).
Chapter 9
Sachiko Mitsumori
Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy: Reflections on the Universal Self
In Possessing the Secret of Joy, Alice Walker’s protagonist Tashi, a.k.a. Evelyn or Mrs. Johnson, has been ill-treated by a widespread custom that few fictional works make their central theme: female genital mutilation. Not an obscure act or ‘isolated brutality’ taking place far away from us, it wounds large numbers of people around the world. Yet, as Tashi gradually reveals her trauma, Walker faces a dilemma: how can she replace the inevitable audience distaste for objectionable facts with empathy? How can she present a horrible truth from which readers will not turn away but, on the contrary, accept in order to become their sisters’ keepers? How can the point be made, that what is done to Tashi is done to all? Criticized for her neglect of cultural diversity and application of superior Western attitudes toward Africa, Walker deals directly with the tension in these concepts and, although colonialism surges at key moments in the plot, the author promotes the idea of a universal self, one enabled to embrace the pain of others. How does this work?
In Warrior Marks (with Pratibha Parmar, 1993), a companion video that pursues the theme, Walker brings more than an outsider’s anger to the widespread amputation of girls’ genitalia; she leads us inside the process of becoming a voice for change. In “Feminist (and ‘Womanist’) as Public Intellectuals,” Tobe Levin argues that Warrior Marks has been misread as a “straight-forward documentary” about FGM. Actually, it is as much about Walker herself and “the coming-to-awareness of an activist, writer and public [figure] willing to take on and encourage others to oppose a dangerous but entrenched custom” (Levin 266). Part of a broader social movement, Walker grows emotionally and realizes herself, not unlike her characters, by acting to stop what causes harm; and featuring thickly in this development is empathy, taking on the burden of the other, sharing in a “universal self.” In the novel, Adam enlarges his awareness; so, too, does Olivia, if incompletely. But Tashi’s murder of M’Lissa is the prime universal gesture, ending symbolically the chain of pain toward which the fiction and the facts all tend. Out of the characters’ mutual empathy, based on common suffering and hope, comes the impulse to act — as Walker does in her everyday life, and her characters do in the book.
Beyond the Western lens to the “universal self”
First, Adam …
Walker depicts a poignant scene: surrounded by nurses, students and staff, Tashi is giving birth in the USA. Like a “sideshow” (Possessing 61), her body is exposed to Westerners’ curious gaze, and her infibulated genitalia, called “the hole” by a doctor of questionable courtesy, become a source of deep humiliation. Not only is Tashi’s physical body at stake but also her human dignity. The experience ‘others’ her, a danger of which Walker is keenly aware, as revealed in supplementary narrative vignettes.
When Tashi enters psychoanalysis, for instance, the treating physician remarks that “Negro women … are considered the most difficult of all people to be effectively analyzed” (Possessing 18). Tashi, who denies that she is “a Negro woman,” feels “negated [to realize] that even [her] psychiatrist could not see [she] was African. That to him all black people were Negroes” (18). Walker’s sensitivity to critics’ concerns about the West’s disdain is revealed by this ‘othering’ even in the consulting room where a special form of empathy – transference — is prescribed. Notwithstanding the stone and clay figures of African divinities, office decorations are impotent to obviate Tashi’s initial feeling about her clinician, that he is a “stranger” and “white” (18).
Similarly, Walker confronts the deep emotional rift between Africans and the West in Warrior Marks introduced by a script Walker sends to Pratibha Parmar that depicts the cradle of Walker’s empathy in her own experience. “I’ve done this in a deliberate effort to stand with the mutilated women, not beyond them,” she wrote (Warrior Marks 13). Lovalerie King considers the effort successful, noting how “deeply personal” the project is for Walker, and how “she situates herself in the middle, rendering her narrative from that subjective vantage point. She frames her telling of their collaborative journey around her own blinding in one eye at the age of eight” (King 542). With a Christmas present – an air rifle — from their parents, one of Walker’s brothers had shot her, the injury later identified once she became “a consciously feminist adult” as a “patriarchal wound.” These two concepts – male dominance and violence – tie an everyday experience in the American South to the routine maiming of African girls.
The blending of both continents occurs again when Adam, otherwise supportive, refuses to preach a sermon whose text reveals what Tashi and so many others have gone through. A progressive minister in San Francisco, Adam discourses on the suffering of Jesus to his increasingly confused and impatient wife who wants to know why women’s anguish resulting from torture in the name of tradition has never been revealed in the church. Tashi argues that “[n]ot in some age no one remembers, but right now, daily, in many lands on earth” (276) women are being crucified. “One sermon, [she] begged him. One discussion with your followers about what was done to me.” His reply? “… the congregation would be embarrassed to discuss something so private and that, in any case, he would be ashamed to do so” (Possessing 276).
The last of the novel’s epigraphs reads: “When the ax came into the forest, the trees proclaimed, ‘The handle is one of us’.” This theme of complicity in oppression – the flipside of empathy — is reinforced when Adam refuses Tashi’s request. In critic Alyson R. Beckman’s words, like a colonizer, he maintains “a disempowering silence” (91). In fact, as Walker writes, the real task is “[to] understand what it means to all of us in the world, that you can have this kind of silencing of the pain of millions of women, over maybe six thousand years” (Warrior Marks 269). It is strongly implied that revelation will save lives – as the unfurled banner that closes the tale proclaims. “Resistance is the secret…” of success.
Does Adam resist? Indeed, his thoughts at Tashi’s trial show him moving beyond complicity to solidarity by means of empathy in an approach to the universal self. If as a preacher he had maintained a distance from her concerns, he later starts to think of Tashi’s pain as his own. In the hot and crowded courtroom he considers the ordeal that each female has gone through, “the women suffering from the unnatural constrictions of flesh their bodies have been whittled and refashioned into” and he sees that Evelyn is not alone; that there are so many others (166). He confronts the prosecutor, mentioning the taboo word and infuriating from the crowd. Tashi acknowledges his transformation: “He is saying I am a tortured woman. Someone whose whole life was destroyed by the enactment of a ritual upon my body which I had not been equipped to understand” (162). “Weary” and “about to weep,” Adam touches Tashi’s heart and identifies with her affliction. A man once in complicity with patriarchy in refusing to universalize the suffering of Jesus to include the trials of women, he now appears ready for a change of heart.
After Adam comes Olivia …
If Adam represents the stranglehold of masculine privilege even on the kindest of men, his sister Olivia provides the occasion to look at another structural oppression, not gender now but colonization, a stronger impediment that in fact prevents Olivia’s attainment of a universal self. Thematically linked to continuation of FGM and thus Tashi’s torment, colonization stubbornly draws boundaries, marks exclusion and sets up rigid hierarchies. Tashi may think of Olivia as the “sister of [her] heart” (Possessing 24) and “best friend” (275) and yet, twice, the African confronts the African American concerning superior Western attitudes and even explains her self-destructive choice in terms of resistance to them. As Tashi states on departure for the Mbele camp:
All I care about is the struggle for our people, I said. You are a foreigner. Any day you like, you and your family can ship yourselves back home.
Jesus, she said, exasperated.
Also a foreigner, I sneered. I finally looked her in the eye. I hated the way her hair was done. (Possessing 22-23)
Tashi captures the crux of it in a few pithy questions: “Who are you and your people never to accept us as we are? Never to imitate any of our ways? It is always we who have to change” (Possessing 23).
This tension between Tashi and Olivia reflects the volatile situation concerning FGM in formerly colonized – and now neo-colonialized — African nations. The Olinka, modeled after inhabitants of such states, had been evicted from their land, deprived of property and impoverished. Social status had been undermined and compulsory measures enforced. Under such circumstances, rebellion is a logical choice that entails reversals. Whereas the girls’ arms had previously looked beautiful in contrast, now Tashi disdains Olivia’s “mahogany,” (23) a sign of impurity. She also mocks the American’s braids and Mother Hubbard, her prudish and inconvenient high collar announcing not only foreignness but a specific kind within a specific context, middle-class American. Moreover, Tashi has cultural knowledge that Olivia lacks. Can the missionary recognize “the sister’s elbow” (19) in the basket? The “crazy road” on the cotton cloth? (74) As M’Lissa will later remark, red fingernails connote ancient blood power, but those who consider her ignorant are ignorant of that.
In light of colonial mandates, history confirms many versions of Tashi’s decision to have herself sewn up, thinking she would thereby benefit, not burden, the tribe. For instance, “in 1946, during the era of British colonial rule in [the] Sudan, [when] the news that a law banning infibulation was about to be proclaimed” (Islam and Uddin 75), a rush to mutilate ensued, parents wanting infibulated daughters NOW in case vaginal sealing could not be done later. And
When some midwives were arrested … anticolonial protests broke out. The British colonial government, fearing a massive national revolt such as those that had occurred in Egypt and Kenya, eventually let the law go unenforced. More recently, calls to action by Western feminists and human rights activists provoked similar negative reactions. (Islam and Uddin 75)
These responses are like Tashi’s, and even if they disable her, Tashi at first conforms to customs that identify the group. Olivia argues from medical and ethical standpoints only, not acknowledging these emotionally-anchored patriotic roots of Tashi’s self-destructive act. Outwardly, Tashi is loyal to a fatherland; inwardly, though, she enacts her own rebellious will. To “disobey the outsider” – “even if it is wrong” — is to stand up for herself, “all [she] now [has] left” (Possessing 254), she explains. Olivia doesn’t understand. Her dress and hair faithful to a different standard, Olivia cannot see Tashi’s deep connection to tradition and community. Her empathy falls short. “You’ve paid for not listening to me all your life,” (254) Olivia reminds the prisoner. “And I intend to keep on paying, I say” (254).
The rift between Tashi and Olivia mirrors that between Walker and her critics. Here empathy fails. But it wasn’t always so. From the moment she enters the story, Olivia contrasts with Adam in her sensitivity to child abuse, remembering the little girl whose sister, Dura, a hemophiliac, had just bled to death after genital mutilation (though the missionaries do not know this), and who wept in mourning the very day that the dusty village welcomed the weary strangers. “One crying child is the rotten apple in the barrel of the tribe!” (7) Samuel had taught Olivia to empathize. But the weeping girl soon disappears and with her Olivia’s access to what remains hidden under the surface.
Surfaces and depths continue to challenge both young women. Take the classic Olinka woman’s walk, for instance: Olivia loses Tashi to the effects of FGM, the once “cheerful” and “impish” pal replaced by an overly studied if graceful figure whose feet no longer rise above the ground but “appear to slide forward,” the visible gait occasioned by the invisible disfigurement between Tashi’s thighs. Assisting with hygiene, Olivia takes care of Tashi in America, their friendship re-established on a pragmatic basis: a medical syringe “like a small turkey baster,” used to clean behind the scar (Possessing 67), frees Tashi from the odor of accumulated blood that had kept her “virtually buried” in her home.
Olivia’s friendship, however useful, is also inelastic, seemingly limited to surface action; the depths of Tashi’s mind continue to elude her friend, in particular the condemned woman’s need to fantasize. Geneva Cobb Moore has remarked that “[u]nable to reconcile the impoverishment of her culture with … cultural arrogance, Tashi develops a ‘passion for storytelling’ and slips into madness” (Moore 114). Tashi’s alternate realities, however, introduced from the start when a swooping bird steals the shiny penny from a water glass, define not only madness but also sanity, enabling her to go with lucidity where others, and especially Olivia, cannot.
At her trial, Tashi sees this fissure, hurling at the prosecutors but even more so at her family the rhetorical question, “Can you bear to know what I have lost?” (35). What is lost – undercover, not there, unrealized – is the specific creativity of a woman, i.e. the essence of her wholeness.
It must therefore be imagined, and the faculty that births it is empathy, also a component of the universal self. Spying Olivia in a gallery seat at the trial, Tashi notes her deficit. The smirk on her face, friendly but also disapproving, reveals her thoughts, and Tashi names them. “Oh, Tashi, her look seemed to say, even here, on trial for your life, you are still making things up!” (35-36). As a child, Tashi had been mocked for this and suffered; now she knows, however, the existential healthful function it serves. “Without [my fantasy life],” she thinks, “I’m afraid to exist. Who am I, Tashi, renamed in America ‘Evelyn,’ Johnson?” (36).
Who is Tashi? A post-colonial subject, she strikes a blow for women’s freedom that Olivia, African-American, cannot understand because it means Tashi’s death. But doesn’t it really mean her universal life?
Solidarity for resistance
The novel ends with a demonstration of women’s solidarity, surprising given the dominant emphasis on treachery. Women murder women in this book: M’Lissa kills Dura; Tashi suffocates M’Lissa; the State – in superficial solidarity with its token female ‘national monument’ – executes Tashi. There are metaphoric deaths, as well, of parts of the self: M’Lissa never to emerge from the scene of torture but her girl self left to weep all of the world’s tears; Nafa, in mourning for her daughter Dura, leaving footprints for Tashi to follow who envisions them stained with blood. The blood of women – a force in birth but also in death – fuses the African female characters into a single image. Nafa, M’Lissa, Mbati and Tashi gradually merge.
An energetic worker in the wars of independence and champion of the ancient ways, M’Lissa appears in a Newsweek photo. She is honored as “a link with the past for us,” Mbati tells Tashi, “especially for us women,” adding “she is an icon” (154). But she is the only one, because only one is needed. Angels or devils, either women conform, or they are demonized. Either their genitals are sewn, or they are loose and monstrous, as Tashi confides: “[her] uncircumcised vagina was [considered] a monstrosity” (121). Note how geography doesn’t matter here: in Africa or in the West, women’s genital organs define them, corseting their options to act.
Both Tashi and M’Lissa share this insight. Both have the eyes of the sere, Melissa’s “beady,” (151), Tashi’s suggesting madness, flat and unreflective, serving no longer to see out but rather to look in where each finds the other’s doppelgänger, the young child that each had once been abandoned to weep unheard—until now when, at last, liberation is imminent even if the effort to save a girl had been tried in the past and failed. It was M’Lissa’s mother who had wanted to leave her daughter’s clitoris intact. But the vain attempt led to even graver injury when the “witchdoctor … corrected the fault,” (221) leaving on M’Lissa’s body “the mark … of her … mother’s disobedience” (217), a keloid scar “hard as a leather shoe sole” (217), a wound that becomes a sign of the child’s betrayal (225) and at the same time a signal to open blocked pathways to the heart.
The device that frees the way is tears – “Why is the child crying?” –, Tashi enabled to shed them, M’Lissa, not yet. Realizing her enemy’s pain and hence its reflection of her own, Tashi weeps: “For [herself]. For Adam. For [their] son. For the daughter [she] was forced to abort” (Possessing 224). M’Lissa, however, cannot shed tears thoughshe evokes her own childhood’s howling and understands for the first time her fragmented self, finding release.As Olakunle George observes, M’Lissa’s and Tashi’s voices fuse with those of “every little girl that has passed under her … knife” and who have not ceased to cry “’since [she] left’” (366). Thus, M’Lissa, who calls Tashi “daughter,” and Tashi for whom the older woman is “Mother Lissa,” (153) finally connect, united by their shared weeping,but instead of commemorating their mothers’ and many children’spain,M’Lissa had already stopped feeling, and she persuades Tashi to accept that “there is no God known to man who cares about children or … women.” Rather, “the God of woman is autonomy” (223).
Autonomy, however, a function of power, remains unavailable to women coerced into performing or commissioning their own dismemberment. When Tashi, her inarticulate mind resembling “a crow … cawing mutely at an empty sky, … wore black, and black and black,” the mournful image of both insanity and protest evokes the patriarchal politics that led her in the first place to accept the cut. Allegedly ‘for her own good’, as proponents insist, it failed to liberate but instead imprisoned her – as it did M’Lissa and all victims – in their inflexible flesh. Millennia old, rigid in the mutilated skin, the labial stitch perpetuates the status quo in which mothers like Nafa and M’Lissa, by “prepar[ing] the lambs for slaughter” (258), ready them for lives prematurely closed, emotionally numb and, above all, inarticulate. As Elaine Scarry writes, pain has no language; Walker, at least, has taught it to speak through fiction.
M’Lissa’s last story is told by Tashi. Tashi wants to learn more about her sister Dura’s death, her mother’s role in it, and M’Lissa’s thoughts. If Nafa knew that Dura was a bleeder, why wasn’t she spared? The discussion implies that her death could have been prevented, but not by Nafa, “the kind of woman who jumps even before the man says boo” (253), nor by M’Lissa who, by the time it’s Tashi’s turn, “did not care” (54).
Not caring, indifferent, resigned to the status quo destructive to women, M’Lissa dies not only for what she has repeatedly done in the absence of conscience but as much for what she has ceased to feel — the pain of women and her own. Tashi must kill indifference in M’Lissa and also in herself, and in doing so rejuvenates herself, admitting to a sense that, “at the end of [her] life,” she can “reinhabit … the body [she] long ago left” (110).
What kind of body is it? The frame Tashi enters is American.
“What does an American look like?” (210) M’Lissa asks Tashi in a seemingly unrelated, Scheherazade-like change of theme that prolongs the exciser’s life. “An American looks like me,” the younger woman comes to realize. The specific question that postpones the murder is for Olakunle George the missing key to closure. America, a “sub-textual protagonist” (365), encourages intervention to right wrongs. If Americans harbor hidden wounds (213), then Tashi belongs among them and can drink at the fountain of a new allegiance. Tribal pride encouraged mutilation; another nation’s alternative ethos enables her to fight it. An ideal America is inclusive, as Mzee writes about his “self”: it is “horrified at what was done to Evelyn, but recognizes it as something that is also done to me. A truly universal self” (84).
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—–. “Feminist (and “Womanist”) as Public Intellectuals: Elfriede Jelinek and Alice Walker.” In The New York Public Intellectuals and Beyond. Exploring Liberal Humanism, Jewish Identity, and the American Protest Tradition. Eds. E. Goffman and D. Morris. W. Lafayette, IN: Purdue U.P., 2009. 243-274. Print.
—–. Rev. of Warrior Marks a film by Pratibha Parmar, executive producer Alice Walker, 1993; and Warrior Marks. Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women by Alice Walker and Pratibha Parmar. NWSA Journal 6/3. Fall 1994. 511-514. Print.
Menya, Diana C. Rev. of Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker. The Lancet. 13 Feb. 1993: 423. Print.
Moore, Geneva Cobb. “Archetypal Symbolism in Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy.” Southern Literary Journal 33.1 (2000): 111-21. Print.
Olenick, I. “Female Circumcision is Nearly Universal in Egypt, Eritrea, Mali and Sudan.” International Family Planning Perspectives 24.1 (March 1998): 47-49. Print.
Pifer, Lynn, and Tricia Slusser. “’Looking at the Back of Your Head’: Mirroring Scenes in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Possessing the Secret of Joy.” Melus 23.4 (1998): 47-57. Print.
Sample, Maxine. “Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy.” Explicator 58.3 (2000): 169-72. Print.
Osaki, Lillian Temu. “Madness in Black Women’s Writing. Reflections from Four Texts: A Question of Power, The Joys of Motherhood, Anowa, and Possessing the Secret of Joy.” Ahfad Journal 19.1 (2002): 4-20. Print.
Vega, Susanna. “Surviving the Weight of Tradition: Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy.” Journal of American Studies of Turkey 5 (1997): 19-26. Print.
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“Girls die every day. We are here wearing masks, aren’t we? So we don’t die of Covid. But girls die every day of FGM. Every day. Every day FGM kills girls. And who tells their story? Nobody.”
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