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

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)