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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
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.
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