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Postmodern ethnography and the womanist mission: postcolonial sensibilities in 'Possessing the Secret of Joy.'
African American Review, Summer, 1996 by Angeletta K.M. Gourdine
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).
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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.
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