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Summary
Summary
A provocative novel about an African tribal woman's battle with madness after the trauma of a childhood genital mutilation.
Author Notes
Alice Walker won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for her novel The Color Purple. Her other bestselling novels include By the Light of My Father's Smile, Possessing the Secret of Joy, and The Temple of My Familiar. She is also the author of two collections of short stories, three collections of essays, five volumes of poetry, and several children's books. Her books have been translated into more than two dozen languages. Born in Eaton, Georgia, Walker now lives in Northern California.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Pulitzer Prize winner Walker illustrates the truism that violence begets violence in this strong-voiced but often stridentan obvious novel? and polemical novel. The focus of Walker's rage is the practice of female circumcision in African cultures. Her tale concerns Tashi, a character who made fleeting appearances in The Color Purple and The Temple of My Familiar , and who here represents an archetypal figure, not so much a woman as a mouthpiece for feminist distress. Tashi grows up in a small African village but initially escapes the customary clitorodectomy. Eventually she is coerced into having the operation as a means of offering fealty to the sinister politician called Our Leader. When she moves to the U.S. with her husband and assumes a new identity as Evelyn Johnson, her pain and anger, accumulating the suffering of the ages, bubble to the surface in a lingering madness that therapy does not assuage and thatwhy not delete this next phrase (through `finally') as point is made in previous sentence and `accumulate' is repeated, and incorporate the point about ``the ages'' into the previous sentenc finally culminates in murder. Walker tells the story in very brief chapters, each loaded with the sense of the historical importance she wishes to convey, but the fragile narrative cannot support the weight of her overwrought prose. Walker's protest against ok? author's ''message'' in the last review ``what men . . . do to us'' cannot be faulted; its guise as a novel, however, can. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Here and there tantalizing remnants of the writing that made The Color Purple such a critical success, but for the most part Walker's latest is held hostage to an agenda--the eradication of female circumcision in Africa and the Middle East--a cause to which she will be contributing a portion of the royalties. A range of voices, including husband Adam, son Benny, and the character Tashi herself, tell the story of the Olinka girl who made a brief appearance in The Color Purple. Married to Adam, the young African-American missionary who took her back to the US, Tashi has suffered intermittent periods of madness since she was brutally circumcised as an adolescent in a remote guerrilla camp in Africa. It's a madness that has required hospitalization and treatment by a range of analysts, including the great Jung, who puts in a cameo appearance here. Though her older sister had bled to death from the effects of the operation, Tashi chose to have it done because she felt it would make her ``...completely woman. Completely Africa. Completely Olinka.'' The operation also was responsible for a difficult delivery in which her son Benny was brain-damaged. Helped by therapy, her grief turns to anger: she returns to Africa and murders the old woman who performed the operation. Sentenced to death, Tashi, who feels neither guilt nor fear of death, is finally at peace because an anthropologist tells her about the mythic causes of the practice: the early African woman, ``the mother of womankind,'' was ``notoriously free'' of both sexual guilt and circumcision; invading tribes and Arabs were responsible for its imposition. Dying, Tashi finally possesses the ``secret of joy'': the resistance to what is evil. A pastiche of New Age mysticism, dubious history, and feminist ideology tied to a storyline that points a moral, heavily underlined, rather than one that grows out of a tale. Female circumcision is a terrible travesty, but neither it nor Walker's talent is well served by this overwrought novel.
Booklist Review
Less manipulator than instructor--but both are the rightful roles of the artist--Walker makes the reader wince at the subject matter of her new novel while at the same time admire the adroit (which means, in this case, nonsensational) way she treats it. She follows her widely discussed novel, The Color Purple, and its less-talked-about successor, The Temple of My Familiar, with a certain-to-be-read fictional venture into an unenlightened social practice that unfortunately still exists in some parts of the world. Female circumcision is depicted by Walker as mutilation of not only the body but the psyche; specifically, Walker details the life of Tashi, a woman who grew up in the Olinka tribe in Africa but spent most of her adult life in the U.S. As a child, when the custom of circumcision is ordinary carried out among Olinka females, Tashi was spared; later, though, her muddled need to reidentify with her origins causes her to submit to the tribal circumciser's blade. Rather than reknitting her soul to that of her people, the episode and its disastrous consequences alienate her body from sexuality and her mind from reality. How she reconciles herself to her plight--and in the process secures vengeance for the many young women who have undergone mutilation before her--is a staggering, but befitting, climax to a novel poised in its avoidance of polemics, confident in the grit of its language, and beautiful in its dual understanding of inhumanity and humanity. (Reviewed Apr. 15, 1992)0151731527Brad Hooper
Library Journal Review
A peripheral character in The Color Purple ( LJ 6/1/82) and The Temple of My Familiar ( LJ 3/15/88), Tashi becomes the focus of this welcome new work. Tashi, who marries Celie's son Adam, submits to female circumcision partially out of loyalty to the threatened tribal customs of her people, the Olinka. As a result, she endures physical pain and long-lasting emotional trauma. Not a sympathetically drawn victim, the tortured Tashi stretches to bridge two continents and to understand why women must undergo this torture, even at the hands of their mothers, for the pleasure of men. Though she often succumbs to madness, Tashi eventually takes possession of the secret of joy. Her compelling story is every Eve's account of those ``whose chastity belt was made of leather, or of silk and diamonds, or of fear and not of our own `flesh.' '' This is not a sequel to Walker's previous novels, but it easily equals, if not surpasses, their excellence.--Faye A. Chadwell, Univ. of South Carolina Lib., Columbia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
