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

Comparative Literature, Fall 2001 by George, Olakunle

Kenyatta's apologia for genital cutting displays a limitation that current criticism has identified in the anti-colonial discourses of Third-World nationalism in the heady days of the post-World War II era. To defend the colonized culture against Eurocentric denigration, the nationalist text reifies the culture into an undifferentiated unity, invariably marginalizing woman by casting her in the role of reproducer. Against this background, Tashi's rejection of cultural-nationalism is a rejection of a masculinist ethnography that enlists her body in the service of a cause that is male defined. As feminist work on male-authored African literature and cultural-nationalism has argued, a "positive" representation that marginalizes women or freezes their role in culture must be contested (Cobham, Ogunyemi). In this sense, Walker's critique of masculinist ethnography, even when it serves a cultural-nationalist cause, reinforces current arguments in cultural criticism that seek to combat the marginalization of women and make femininity an active subject of cultural thinking and transformations.

Let us turn, then, to Walker's foregrounding of African womanhood in Possessing. In a recent essay, Hortense Spillers has staged an encounter between psychoanalysis as it is deployed in current cultural criticism and the problematic of race in black diasporic as well as African-colonial contexts. Arguing against the tendency to dismiss psychoanalysis out of hand for being "Eurocentric," Spillers suggests that, as critical tool, it can be purged of the limitations inherent in its founding cultural context and narratives. Properly qualified and appropriated, psychoanalysis can, for Spillers, shed light on the constitution of raced selves in society:

Is it not, then, the task of a psychoanalytic protocol to effect a translation from the muteness of desire/wish-that which shames and baffles the subject, even if its origins are dim, not especially known-into an articulated syntactic particularity? This seems to me a passable psychoanalytic goal, but perhaps there is more to it than simply a nice thing to happen. At the very least, I am suggesting that an aspect of the emancipatory hinges on what would appear to be simple self-attention, except that reaching the articulation requires a process, that of making one's subjectness the object of a disciplined and potentially displaceable attentiveness. (Spillers 107-8)

While I recognize that the psychoanalysis put to work in contemporary literary and cultural studies is not the Jungian version at the heart of Possessing, Spillers's claim does speak to an important dimension of Walker's novel. I want to pull out two ideas from it. The first is the idea of "translating" mute desire into individuated articulation, the second, that of "making one's subjectness the object of a disciplined and potentially displaceable attentiveness" (my emphasis). Clearly, Possessing is about giving voice to what Walker perceives as silence, of translating "desire/wish" into language about what Spillers calls "self-attention" The text is also centrally concerned with the "subjectness" of its main character. Here, subjectness appears as a broader, more self-consciously worldly and materialist concept than subjectivity. Subjectness names subjectivity in action; it names the meanderings of the subject in concrete reality. We have seen the sense in which Possessing dramatizes the textual web that constitutes the ground and engine of subjectivity. We can now add that in the characterization of Tashi and M'Lissa, Walker attempts to narrate the subjectness of the victims of excision, such that both women become metonymnic of woman in culture.