Alice Walker's Africa: Globalization and the province of fiction

Comparative Literature, Fall 2001 by George, Olakunle

Walker's novel raises questions such as the following: is it possible to represent in fiction an "alien" cultural practice or belief system without violating the inner logic-the self-understanding-of the culture itself? And to what extent is it defensible to represent a cultural practice as simply cruel and misogynistic over and beyond the way the culture itself understands and rationalizes it? Set against such questions, Possessing the Secret of Joy may elicit two opposing reactions. On the one hand, one may see the novel as a replication of a discredited missionary arrogance-that is, as a case of the enlightened Westerner saving poor black women from their husbands and fathers.9 On the other hand, it is equally possible to defend the novel as a laudable effort driven by a vision of female emancipation and community. Here, the liberal-humanist-indeed, missionary -candor is its positive contribution. What is so wrong, one may then ask, with liberals saving black women from their husbands and fathers, or exposing the plight of such women, if indeed their husbands and fathers mutilate them in the name of tradition?

I have set up the issues in these rather simplified terms in order to pose the problematic of Possessing the Secret of Joy as starkly as possible. If the controversy that surrounded The Color Purple or the recent removal of some of her writing from high school reading lists indicate that this prolific author is not new to the sorts of hostile reception that amount to censorship, Possessing raises her status as taboo-breaker (or insensitive scribbler) even higher.10 What I wish to do is to engage the novel she has written in order to abstract lessons from it that both admit and transcend her overt authorial claims. In his essay on the novel, Ikenna Dieke has remarked that the controversies that have surrounded Walker's writing may distract us from reading Possessing as closely as the text demands ("Fractured"). I agree with Dieke, and one of my aims in this article is to read Possessing with due respect to the specificity of the novel as a genre with compositional pressures. These generic pressures account for certain aspects of the novel that complicate the terms of the novelist's straightforward demonization of the perpetrators of genital mutilation. The overt moral conviction of the novel is neither questioned nor diminished by the reading I pursue in this essay. Rather, it is more complexly nuanced, that is to say, enriched.

I want to read this novel the way I teach it.11 Those who read the novel are either of First-World origin or people who have for historical reasons partaken of the Eurocentric apple, so to speak. Confronted with college students, most of whom are white or black Americans, trying to come to terms with a novel that purports to speak about and in the service of brutalized African women, how might one read Possessing in a way that recovers from the text the irreducible humanity and agency of the Africans thus textualized? If authorial intention in the novel is one-dimensional and unambiguous, the details of the narrative are not at all one-dimensional. What the novel offers is an enactment of one inescapable factor of representation as such, namely, that the work itself can yield meanings and perspectives that transcend the original intentions of the narrating subject. I want to examine Possessing the Secret of Joy as a text that acts out and meditates upon the making of texts and people, or what Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, quoting Mark Seltzer, has called "embodied subjects and personification" (19).