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

Comparative Literature, Fall 2001 by George, Olakunle

These feminist discussions provide a useful conceptual context from which one can draw to explore Walker's novel. In the first place, what they each make visible is that subjectivity-which here designates individual consciousness and self-knowledge-is filtered through prior and ongoing textualizations of reality and experience. We can see this in the way the novel figures consciousness as being based on what we might call a textual web. The novel's form is itself a structure of alternating or composite points of view: the story unfolds by means of the inner thoughts and private letters of the main characters-a narrative choice that corroborates Barbara Christian's observation that the novel's form is in line with the metaphor of quilting made famous by Walker (see Christian 3-17). The novel is obsessed with prior texts and their power to orient, determine, or challenge consciousness. The title is taken from a book entitled African Saga (1982), by Mirella Ricciardi, and towards the end of the novel, Tashi and Mbati reflect on the origins and implications of that title. In Tashi's voice, the novel tells us:

In the evenings she [that is, Mbati, Tashi's friend] reads aloud passages from books for us to puzzle over or enjoy. Tonight she reads from the book of a white colonialist author who has lived all her life off the labor of Africans but failed to perceive them as human beings. "Black people are natural," she writes, "they possess the secret of joy, which is why they can survive the suffering and humiliation inflicted upon them. (p. 269)

Tashi is enraged by this passage. She reads it as an example of a colonialist and racist denigration of Africans. "These settler cannibals," says Tashi, "Why don't they just steal our land, mine our gold, chop down our forests ... devour our flesh and leave us alone. Why must they also write about how much joy we possess" (p. 270). As if to calm her down, Mbati promises to one day present to Tashi the "definitive secret of joy" (p. 270), and at the very end of the novel, just before Tashi is executed by firing squad for the murder of M'Lissa, Mbati fulfills her promise:

Mbati is unfurling a banner, quickly, before the soldiers can stop her... All of them [Tashi's friends and family] Adam, Olivia, Benny, Pierre, Raye, Mbati-hold it firmly and stretch it wide.

RESISTANCE IS THE SECRET OF JOY! it says in huge block letters. (p. 279)

Whereas Ricciardi's book mystifies "the Africans" to a point where complacency and resignation in the face of hardship become their unique gifts, Tashi comes to the realization that resistance, not accommodation, is the definitive condition of joy. We might say, then, that the novel's ending rewrites a disabling colonialist construction, encountered through Ricciardi's text, and replaces that construction with a dynamic and politicized one.

If the novel's rendering of Carl and Pierre sets them up as figures of enlightenment, their enlightenment is at another level shown to be situated and specific. The narrative reveals that the curative knowledge ascribed to both Carl and Pierre can be delimited and historicized. Thus, the novel lays bare the specific conceptual apparatus that undergirds the supposed enlightenment of both Carl and Pierre. Where the characterization of Carl is inspired by the figure of Carl Gustav Jung, we are told that Pierre "discovers" his racial self by reading the AfricanAmerican authors Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin.14 The book that gives Pierre an insight into the cultural misogyny that has victimized Tashi is Marcel Griaule's Conversations with Ogotemmeli.15 By setting Carl and Pierre within recognizable texts and traditions of thought, Walker's novel makes clear a crucial part of the formation of both characters.