| Possessing the Secret of Joy |
[05 Mar 2007|07:31pm] |
Read Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker. Could barely believe the racism and the misogyny of this book. How could Walker write a book about such a horrible patriarchal, gynocidal practice as genital mutilation and basically blame the practice on women? But the racism was what really got to me. Because the book failed to show patriarchy as a system which controls women’s and men’s lives globally the book basically places the blame for practices like female genital mutilation on African culture… and women.
Very, very disturbing. I actually would go as far to say that Alice Walker has appropriated African culture in the writing of this novel. She makes up place names and even words to create her idea of African culture then blames female genital mutilation on this made up idea of a culture instead of patriarchy.
One of the reasons I loved The Colour Purple was because Walker created these amazingly beautiful relationships between women which crossed time and space and were truly revolutionary. They helped the women to survive through atrocity after atrocity and they lived.
Relationships between women were completely absent in Possessing the Secret of Joy and Tashi (the main character) is set up (or sets herself up as the context of patriarchy is virtually ignored) for slaughter again and again. Tashi is shown to push every woman who tries to befriend her away, but her hatred of women is not shown to be a necessary part of a woman-hating culture. In fact, we are not meant to think that she does hate women. Her hatred of women (and seemingly Walker’s) is so internalised that she doesn’t even realise she hates them.
One of the earliest scenes in the book is one where Tashi rejects her best friend Olivia for being too Westernised. Olivia is begging Tashi not to go through the intiation ceremony, trying to explain about the dangers and generally acting out of concern for her friend. The two are shown to be very close and Tashi willfully rejects Olivia’s friendship in favour of ‘tradition’ – read patriarchy. After this scene Olivia virtually disappears, appearing very infrequently later in the novel.
Tashi goes through with the ceremony and Olivia’s brother Adam (her childhood lover) finds her later, mutilated and unable to walk, weaving mats for the male revolutionaries in a hidden camp. For some reason (patriarchy) Tashi does not have the same problem with Adam as she does with Olivia. In fact, Adam is one of those mythical ‘nice men’ who wants to rescue Tashi by marrying her and whisking her away to America where she will be ‘safe’. I find the construction of Adam rather problematic as there is an implicit suggestion that he is a ‘nice man’ precisely because he has been Westernised. There are no ‘nice men’ who have been born and raised in Africa.
Tashi however is not ‘safe’ in America. Her ‘nice man’ husband still expects to engage in penetrative sex despite the fact of Tashi’s mutilation. Tashi becomes pregnant by Adam’s ‘aggressive sperm’ and when her son is born his brain is slightly damaged from the horrific birth Tashi must endure because of her mutilation. And after all of this Adam is surprised when Tashi begins to go mad. Tashi rejects Adam’s affection and poor Adam is forced into the arms of another woman. This reaction of Tashi’s is later explained by a black female psychologist as “psychological circumcision”. Adam is not to blame for his infidelity, nor for his wife’s ‘madness’ as it is actually Tashi’s fault for being psychologically circumcised.
Adam begins an ongoing affair with another woman who is white and ‘liberated’ unlike Tashi, who is black and still in psychological and physical chains. Lisette, Adam’s lover, takes pity on Tashi and recommends an expert psychologist, enter ‘nice man’ number two. The Old Man is shown to be an expert racist and misogynist within the first page and yet is concurrently completely benign. His haphazard application of his white, male ‘science’ onto his black ‘patient’ is not shown to have any ill-effects whatsoever. This contradicts any and all research feminists have done on the subject of women and madness. White, male, racist, misogynist psychologists are incredibly detrimental to women’s health.
Under the care of The Old Man and Adam, Tashi supposedly begins to recover herself and explore the nature of her fears. And yet she cannot be free of them. I would suggest that this is because she is surrounded by the cause of every single one of her ‘mental’ problems – men.
Walker, however, does not agree. She introduces a third ‘nice man’, Pierre, Adam and Lisette’s ‘perfect’ son. Pierre’s function is to explain Tashi’s fears and nightmares to her, filtering his interpretation of her psychological and physiological condition through his anthropological research. His words confuse her further but when she listens harder and longer she begins of understand. Again Pierre accuses culture and tradition for the practice of genital mutilation.
Adam and Pierre’s relationship brings to light even more disturbing misogyny. Pierre must leave his mother when he turns seventeen because it is ‘time’. He goes to join his father in America. I would suggest this is a classic case of a son cutting the strings which tie him to his mother in order to become a man. For this he needs his father. Pierre and Adam have only one conversation together which is recorded by the novel. They talk of how they wish women were free and not mutilated as it makes them feel guilty for wanting to have penetrative sex with them. Wow, I really feel sorry for these poor nice men.
Pierre seems to be shown as the model of humanity for the future. He is masculine and feminine, bisexual and biracial. However I would argue that his apparent biracialness is actually very white. He is born and raised by a white mother and has a black father who is thoroughly Westernised. He leaves his mother in order to study at some prestigious American University. He chooses to do anthropology but not in the traditional way, he wants to empower African people, especially women. It never even crosses his mind that African people, African women, would probably have a hell of a lot more to teach him than any white, male professor in an American University.
Anyway, throughout this constant hullabaloo of men talking constantly at her, penetrating her verbally with their understanding and care, Tashi realises that death is her only solution. She murders the woman who mutilated her, symbolically staining the national flag of independence. The staining of the flag is important as Tashi associates herself and freedom with the American flag. Again, it is African culture which is the problem and not patriarchy.
The woman who mutilated her is also a national icon. She was a living symbol of culture and tradition. It was she whom Tashi believed she had to destroy in order to bring about her own liberation and the liberation of other women. But M’Lissa, the mutilator, was a woman. She was a black woman, whose genitals had been mutilated twice over. Once by her mother, and again by a male witchdoctor. She had not been allowed to determine her own fate, but acted under patriarchy without being able to make self-determining choices. And yet Tashi chooses M’Lissa’s death as her pathway to liberation.
Tashi’s murder of M’Lissa also fulfills the role she was given by The Old Man who tells her in the beginning of the novel that black women are difficult to treat because they refuse to hate their mother. Apparently Tashi doesn’t hate her mother. However, she does seem to blame her mother for her sister’s death (who died of blood loss from M’Lissa’s knife). Tashi leaves her mother and doesn’t really seem to think about her much, M’Lissa becomes a kind of surrogate mother while Tashi is in the revolutionaries camp. So Tashi does fulfill The Old Man’s wish for her to hate her mother. In fact, she kills her mother.
The death of a black woman at the hands of a black woman cannot be called, with any stretch of the term, a feminist act. It is not resistance. In fact it is in ultimate compliance with patriarchy. M’Lissa even tells Tashi that it is tradition for a tsunga (female genital mutilator – one of Walker’s made up words) to be killed by a woman she has mutilated. It is exactly the purpose of token torturers, as Mary Daly points out, to draw the attention of women who might resist, away from men, and keep us fighting ourselves. Women like M’Lissa do not have any more power in society than any other woman, bar what men give them, insofar as they obey the orders of men. Period. The slaughter of M’Lissa by Tashi is Tashi killing herself, literally and figuratively as she is put to death for the act. As she knows she will be put to death for the act.
This was an altogether depressing book; not because of the subject matter but because I never imagined that someone as strong and intelligent as Alice Walker could possibly write something so very racist and misogynist. She obviously does not know that her work is racist or misogynist which implies that she still carries much unpacked, internalised woman and race hatred around with her. I fervently hope that one day that she unpacks that bag and finds the real secret of joy, the daughter of true resistance – freedom.
PS. I still respect Alice Walker as a strong, intelligent black woman who has done a lot of really great feminist and anti-racist work to empower her people. The Colour Purple and her collection of short stories You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down have taught me much and are truly good pieces of feminist literature. It saddens me that someone like Walker could write something like Possessing the Secret of Joy.
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