Despite varying, contradictory, and sometimes controversial attitudes of people of African descent in the African Diaspora, there is one truth: Black people in Africa and in the African Diaspora share more common experiences than is usually recognized and have the right to address or speak to these experiences. Marse Conde, the Guadeloupian multi-talented writer whose several novels crisscross the African Diaspora, has cogently argued that "Members of the African Diaspora should not remain isolated within their national shells. It's not a Pan Africanist per se, but rather a way for diaspora members to claim a common heritage." (Pfaff 69-70)

From this perspective, one can make the case that Alice Walker was right to write about African-American missionaries going to Africa to "civilize the un-civilized" and to speak condescendingly about "tribal scarifications" and other Olinka customs in The Color Purple. She was right, too, to condemn and fictionally express her views concerning the inhumanity of clitoridectomy practices in Africa, commonly known as female circumcision, and to theorize about what she or her characters' thought has been leading African men to mutilate young African girls' bodies. Though her endeavor is praiseworthy, her approach to understanding the origins of female circumcision in Africa in Possessing the Secret of Joy is very problematic and troubling: the analysis of the female circumcision and its origins is put forth amid colonialist and neo-colonialist discourses that permeate the novel until one postcolonial reassessment that occurs towards the end of the novel when the damage to Africa, African men and women has already been done. In this paper I argue that in Possessing the Secret of Joy Alice Walker has "colonized" an African female body and endowed her African-American characters with neo-/colonial attitudes toward Africa and Africans. These moments of colonialist and neo-colonial discourses last until Tashi, renamed Tashi-Evelyn-Mrs. Johnson-- the three names are used separately as narrative device, depending on whether or not Tashi is in Africa or America, or is in Africa as an American-attempts to re-read what an Italian colonialist woman has written about Africans being natural and "possessing the secret of joy." Until this exercise in postcolonial or "anti-neocolonialist reading," Possessing the Secret of Joy is as colonialist as Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness. Equally troubling is that even the seemingly postcolonial/anti-neocolonialist questioning of the Italian woman's "colonialist discourse" remains inconclusive at best.

          Thus, contrary to Angeletta KM Gourdine's assertion that reading Possessing the Secret of Joy is "a dual exercise in reading culture"-- an African American woman created "the fictional world within which the novel's African protagonist [Tashi] lives and Tashi emigrates to the United States of America and is married to African American man (237)-- I argue that reading Possessing the Secret of Joy is a multiple exercise in colonialist and anti-neocolonialist discourses. Not only does Possessing the Secret of Joy contain characters endowed with colonial-like attitudes, but it is permeated by several moments of European subjugation of Africa, including the colonial building where Tashi is imprisoned after being accused of murdering M'Lissa, the woman who circumcised her.

Chinua Achebe has argued, in his "Colonialist Criticism," that a colonialist criticism comprises three major parts: "Africa's inglorious past (raffia skirts)," "European brings the blessing of civilization," and "African returns ingratitude" (70). In Possessing the Secret of Joy female circumcision is characterized as part of the "Africa's inglorious past" where men continue to savagely mutilate female genitals for their own sexual desires. Also, the novel contains moments in which European and African-American missionaries bring "the blessing of civilization" by banning the Olinka practice of female circumcision. According to Achebe, pivotal to a "colonialist mind" is "its claim to a deeper knowledge and a more reliable appraisal of Africa" than the Africans have shown themselves "capable of":

To the colonialist mind it was always of the utmost importance to be able to say: "I know my natives," a claim which implied two things at once: (a) that the native was quite simple and (b) that understanding him and controlling him went hand in hand-understanding being a pre-condition for control and control constituting adequate proof of understanding. (71)

Not only does Possessing the Secret of Joy borrow its title from a colonialist text, African Saga, by an Italian woman who was raised in Kenya, but it maintains the same colonialist discourse throughout its narrative until Tashi, Olivia, Benny, Pierre, Raye, and Mbati, re-examine Mirella Ricciardi's understanding of the African and add a postcolonial spin. From this perspective, Gourdine has cogently argued that "the incredulity inherent in Ricciardi's novel is shared by Walker and guides her construction of Tashi, who emerges at the novel's end spiritually intact and despite the 'physical devastation' of her circumcision" (238).

Thus, a reading of Possessing the Secret of Joy must include an analysis of the epigraphs that sets the tone for its narrative. The five-sentence excerpt from Mirella Ricciardi's African Saga is colonialist through and through. For not only does Mirella Ricciardi claim "deeper knowledge and more reliable appraisal" of Africans, but she portrays the latter as "quite simple." First, she says she was always on good terms with "the Africans and enjoyed their company," though commanding them on the farm was something else insofar as they had watched her grow up. Second, Mirella Ricciardi claims that thanks to her extensive safaris, she "had begun to understand the code of 'birth, copulation and death'" whereby the Africans lived. Furthermore, she knows black people so well that she feels comfortable in claiming that they "are natural" and "possess the secret of joy" that helps them endure and "survive the suffering and humiliation inflicted upon them." Additionally, she posits that Africans are "easy to live with" because they are "alive physically and emotionally," but confesses that she had not been able to deal with "their cunning and their natural instincts for self-preservation" (Possessing the Secret of Joy vii).

This "I know my natives" colonialist attitude is later echoed in a conversation between Tashi and M'Lissa. When M'Lissa asks Tashi to describe what an American looks like, Tashi claims that it is easier to define an African than to describe what an American looks like. According to her, it is easier to say what "an Olinkan or a Maasai" looks like because they are "brown or very brown. They are notably short (Olinkans) or tall (Maasai). But no, shortness or tallness, browness or redness, is not what makes an American." Realizing M'Lissa's incredulity, Tashi defines an American as "a wounded person whose wound is hidden from others, and sometimes from herself. An American looks like me" (208). Earlier in a courtroom scene, the prosecutor argues that Evelyn-Tashi-Mrs. Johnson's mental disturbance has been caused by being in America for many years and that "American life is, for the black person, itself a torture" (162).

As hinted at above, the colonialist discourse of Possessing the Secret of Joy originates in part from The Color Purple, as evidenced by the second epigraph, a nine-paragraph passage from The Color Purple. The passage describes a wedding ceremony that takes place in London and therein Olivia is angry with Tashi because, when they left for London, the latter was preparing to "scar her face." Through scarifications, Olivia contends, the Olinka people hope to return to "their own ways," "even though the white men has taken everything else." When Nettie vows to bring civilization to the Olinka people by helping to stop "the scarring or cutting of tribal marks on the faces of young women, Olivia informs her Tashi is going to get circumcised, though he has told her that "nobody in America or Europe cuts off pieces of themselves." (ix) As for the third epigraph, it is supposedly from a bumper sticker, but it reads like a proverb, "When the axe came into the forest, the trees said the handle is one of us." (xi) I agree with Gourdine that the sentence generates a "cultural context" for Possessing the Secret of Joy insofar as the "forest, the wilderness, and the dark continent are at once Africa and blackwomen [sic]'s bodies." (239)

Several moments of pre-colonial, colonial, post-colonial, and neo-colonial Africa permeate the text of Possessing the Secret of Joy; these moments are linked, directly or indirectly, to Tashi and other characters. From the opening pages of the novel, we hear from Olivia reminiscing on the days when he and his parents, African-American Christian missionaries, made their way "through jungle, grassland, across rivers and whole countries of animals" to arrive at the Olinka village. Olivia also describes the young Tashi's hand as "a small dark hand and arm, like that of a monkey" (7)-later in the novel, the monkey becomes a more powerful metaphor to describe the Olinka young people who are stricken with AIDS. In another scene, Adam remembers the children's "nakedness" and the men's "seedlike tribal markings on their cheeks and the greasy amulets they wore around their necks. I noticed the dust and the heat. I noticed the long flat breasts of the women who worked barebreasted, babies on their backs" (13).

Africa is also defined from the perspective of taboos. In one scene Adam brags about having broken and defied "the strongest taboo" in the Olinka society: "making love in the fields." For Adam, it was triumphant to defy a taboo that no Olinka had yet dared to defy for fear of damaging the crops; "lovemaking in the fields jeopardized the crops; indeed, it was declared that if there was any fornication whatsoever in the fields the crops definitely would not grow--no one ever saw us, and the fields produced their harvest as before" (27). Also while sitting in a courtroom where his wife is being accused of murder, Adam lambastes African men for not only refusing to see their children's suffering but for considering suffering to be taboo itself. He wonders, indeed, if by taboo they mean "'sacred,'" in which case nothing could be "publicly examined for fear of disturbing the mystery," or if the suffering is so "profane" that they must not explore it, lest they corrupt young people (161). The point to be made, albeit the colonialist tone, is that Adam sees the Olinka traditions and customs as colonial as the white man's subjugation of the Africans.

Also, Possessing the Secret of Joy contains some specific echoes of Africa's colonial period. In a letter to his niece Lisette, Mzee, also referred to as the Old Man and whose real name is Carl [Jung!], recalls how twenty-five years ago "the natives of Kenya" "spontaneously" called him Mzee-actually a Kiswahili word for "old man" or a term of address as in "Mzee Jomo Kenyatta." He also recalls how "every person of color" cheered and thanked him every time he would say that "'Europe is the mother of all evils,'" and how the names given whites by Africans were suggested by the whites' behavior. Equally interesting is how Carl--a clear pun on Carl Jung; he is the disciple of Freudian and Jungian psychological theories-- identifies himself with the suffering Tashi, an identification that echoes Marlow, Joseph Conrad's character in Heart of Darkness, who travels to the dark interior of Congo searching for his European self in Mr. Kurtz. In effect, Carl sees his Self and himself in Tashi and Adam, a self he has often "felt was only halfway at home on the European continent" in his "European knowledge of the experiences of its ancient kin. For Carl, what has been done to Tashi has also been done to him via a "truly universal self" which he calls "the essence of healing" that he "frequently lost" in his "European, 'professional' life." (83-84)

Through Lisette, who becomes Adam's lover, Walker recalls the French colonization of Algeria and how the latter fought hard to recover its independence. To Lisette and her father, a clergyman, Algeria meant their "house and gardens and servants and friendships (with the servants)" and "hot sun" which, in addition to having been born there, made Lisette feel "native to the land." Lisette recalls the "old colonial story" in Algeria, of "places-restaurants, nightclubs, schools, neighborhood-Algerian natives could not go to," in spite of which the Algerians remained "so beautiful, hospitable as Africans are, especially our servants and playmates. The children taught me Arabic." Of course, it is this "colonial paradise" that led Lisette to hate France and protest their return to a country where she had never been and in which his father would never find " a niche for himself that was rewarding." Lisette points out that the Christian minister, though amid Moslems, possessed "more power in Algeria, and a more conspicuous place in society, than he ever could have had in France." Noteworthy is the fact that Lisette does not condone what the French did to Algeria, as she seems to admire the way the Algerians, tired of being killed, "body and souls," and "of being treated worse than dogs" by the French, fought back.

Any study of colonialist discourse as applied to Africa would be incomplete if it did not include an analysis of the crucial role played by the missionaries in fostering the colonial rule. V. Y. Mudimbe, in The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge, has underscored the momentous role that the missionaries played, along with the explorer and the soldier, in determining "modalities and the pace of mastering, colonizing, and transforming the 'Dark Continent.'" More specifically, Mudimbe posits that the missionary's objective has been "the most consistent: to expand 'the absoluteness of Christianity' and its virtues." Furthermore, the missionary was "the best symbol of the colonial enterprise," because he dedicated himself "sincerely to the ideals of colonialism: the expansion of Civilization, the dissemination of Christianity, and the advance of Progress" (46-47). In Possessing the Secret of Joy, we learn that the Olinka people saw M'Lissa as a "national monument," "a prized midwife and healer," while "Christianized" Olinkans " who also turned to Western medicine" shunned her (61). More revealing is how Tashi's female circumcision and its physical and psychological effects actually results from the conflict between the Olinka traditions and Christianity. Indeed, it is suggested that Tashi's predicament could have been prevented, had Catherine, Tashi's mother, agreed with M'Lissa to do it at the proper age and time. But having "gone Christian," Catherine had "turned a deaf ear to" M'Lissa. As I will argue later, the grown-up Tashi went to M'Lissa to get circumcised/mutilated as an anti-colonial/postcolonial act, "wanting the operation because she recognized it as the only remaining stamp of Olinka tradition" (63).

Equally pivotal to the missionary's colonialist discourse in Possessing the Secret of Joy is the death of Dura, Tashi's sister who bled to death after being circumcised, which is attributed to Christianity and Olinka traditions, through (Catherine) Nafa. M'Lissa informs Tashi-Evelyn that when the missionaries called "the 'bath' barbaric," the Olinka chief, "who was always grinning into the faces of the white missionaries," told the latter that "he was a modern man. Not a barbarian," they told him that as a chief he could stop the barbaric "bath." According to M'Lissa, the Olinka chief stopped the barbaric "bath" not because he sympathized with women but to prove to the white missionaries that he was a chief (252). Citing A. J. Christopher, Mudimbe reminds us that the missionaries "sought, whether consciously or unconsciously, the destruction of pre-colonial societies and their replacement by new Christian societies in the image of Europe'" (47).

But the "new Christian societies in the image of Europe" concept does not seem to have had an immediate impact on Nafa. For though no one was certain the Olinka chief would make women "return to circumcision" (252), Nafa, when she learned that "the new missionaries were black, she felt certain the village would be returned to all its former ways and that uncircumcised girls would be punished. She could not imagine a black person that was not Olinkan, and she thought all Olinkans demanded their daughters be bathed." And though M'Lissa told her to wait, Nafa defiantly refused and helped in holding Dura, her daughter, down while M'Lissa cut her outer female genital parts (253). Of course, as suggested by the attitudes of Adam in Possessing the Secret of Joy and his parents in The Color Purple (whom Nafa mistook for Olinkans), the African-American missionaries were equally opposed to "tribal scarifications" and female circumcision which they characterized as barbaric practices. It is worth noting that both Tashi and Dura echo Muthoni in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's novel The River Between, who dies of female circumcision trying to reconcile two irreconcilable traditions: Kikuyu and Christian. As a matter of fact, Muthoni's and Tashi's desires to get circumcised are driven by a will to defy Christianity by maintaining their tribal custom. Realizing that people are shocked to see her at the circumcision ceremony, because she is the daughter of Joshua who has converted to Christianity and preached against circumcision, Muthoni explains that she has not run way from the new (Christian) faith but that she wants "'to be initiated into the ways of the tribe. How can I possibly remain as I am now? I knew my father would not let me and so I came'" (43). As is to be shown later, this is exactly how Tashi explains her reasons behind going to M'Lissa to get circumcised. Given references to Kiswahili language and to Jomo Kenyatta, the Kenyan leader who led Kenya to its independence from Great Britain to become its first president and wrote about female initiations and other rites of passage in Facing Mount Kenya, one can argue that Alice Walker was aware of Ngugi's character. What is troubling in the presentation of the missionaries' colonialist discourse in Possessing the Secret of Joy is the authorial voice, Walker's, that seems to side with the missionaries' stand against Olinka customs.
 

Africans, Chimpanzees, Monkeys,
and the Origins of AIDS

In its condemnation of African primitivism Possessing the Secret of Joy has tapped into another controversy: AIDS and the African connection. Early in the novel it is mentioned that the second floor of the building where Tashi is incarcerated houses "a mounting number of AIDS victims, sent to the prison" because the hospital is swamped. Also, the novel points out that though for almost a year the government has denied the AIDS's existence in the country, it was now grudgingly acknowledging that AIDS exists in the country, but that there is "no official speculation about what might have caused it printed in the news." (90-91) Later in the novel, this need for speculation serves as a narrative device for Alice Walker because it provides Adam and Olivia, two African Americans, the opportunity to theorize about the African connection to the origins of AIDS.

It is worth noting that Walker is right in criticizing the politics of some of the African governments concerning AIDS and HIV. That is, some African governments would rather deny the existence of AIDS cases in their countries than damage the tourism industry. And she is not the only black writer who has fictionalized this. In Silence That Is Not Golden by Tibbie S. Kposowa, an African writer from Sierra Leone who lives in the United States, Hon. Misalie Lamboi, Minister of Health in an imaginary African country, denies the existence of AIDS in his country until he is diagnosed HIV positive. Though Lamboi later takes responsibility for the lack health policies regarding AIDS, people still condemn him for failing to disseminate "'tons of literature on AIDS sent to his ministry by the World Health Organization for distribution among citizens" (101). Both Kposowa and Walker demonstrate how AIDS is crippling Africa and rendering its future utterly bleak. In Possessing the Secret of Joy, Olivia saddened by the AIDS-stricken students, laments, "It is bitter to watch them die: their country's future doctors, dentists, carpenters and engineers. Their country's fathers and mothers. Teachers. Dancers, singers, revels, hell-raisers, poets" (246).

Then the novel veers into a speculative mode about the origins of AIDS. Adam tells "the intellectuals" that AIDS may have originated from a neighboring country where scientists injected people with a contaminated polio-vaccine made "from cultures taken from the kidneys of the green monkeys" and that this vaccine against polio, because it lacked purification, was an HIV carrier. Contrapuntally, a "dying student" posits that according to the story he heard "Africans caught AIDS not from monkeys but from his teeth!" More revealing, but equally speculative in nature, is the theory of the Olinka "intellectuals" theory according to which AIDS is a white man's conspiracy against the Africans, something similar to the syphilis experiment conducted on black men in Alabama, the "kind of experiment that would not have been hazarded on European or white American subjects." Olivia finds it unbearable that these "intellectuals" died believing that "an African life is made for experiments and is expandable" (247).

As for young girls who die of AIDS, the cause is attributed to the unhealthy and unclean tools used during female circumcision. That is, women get infections from "the unwashed, unsterilized sharp stones, tin tops, bits of glass, rusty razors and grungy knives used by the tsunga." Notice how many of these rugged tools are embedded in a colonialist discourse insofar as they point directly to "Africa's inglorious past." Also noteworthy is how the women's case differs sharply from the men's case, as it is compounded by painful intercourse characterized by "tearing and bleeding, especially in a woman's early years," because the opening to the vagina has been so tightly sewn that it cannot "enlarge on its own, but must always be forced," which produces "infections and open sores" (247-248).

By now it should be clear that Alice Walker blames the African man for infecting his woman with AIDS. Olivia reports that Adam thinks that the "anal intercourse kills women too," as testified by one the AIDS patients. After his wife's death, the AIDS-stricken man explains that not only had they been married for three years without children but they had been unable to make love as husband and wife "normally" do. So he had resorted to anal intercourse without understanding that this way of making love was costing "her, and him, her life" (248). Also, M'Lissa tells Tashi that she should not be ashamed of anal intercourse because that is "how boys do each other while waiting for the girl's dowry," which takes a long time to raise (240). Though I am not an expert on the African man's sexuality and how African men make love, I am tempted to argue that anal intercourse in Africa, at least the Africa presented in the novel, is both Walker's invention and European gift to an ex-colonized country. Besides, Adam contradicts his own argument in the early pages of Possessing the Secret of Joy when he points out that when he was not with Tashi, described as "a fleshy, succulent fruit," he dreamed of lying on his stomach "between her legs," his "cheeks caressed by the gentle rhythms of her thighs. My tongues bringing no babies, and to both of us delight. This way of loving, among her people, the greatest taboo of all" (28). One can deduce that the Olinka people see anal intercourse as taboo as they do cunnilingus.

A more powerful evidence that the discussion about AIDS intertwines with a colonialist discourse occurs toward the end of Possessing the Secret of Joy where a young Olinka man dying of AIDS mistakes Adam for a missionary father and implores him to hear his confession. Despite Adam's denial of being a "father," Hartfort insists on telling his version of how AIDS originated, a version that reads like a postcolonial story that laments the disappearance of " harmony in the world between man and nature" in "the old days." According to the lament, men suddenly became creatures and beasts, "In the not so old days we people were hunted down and killed or stolen from our land and families to work for other people far across the sea. Hunted we were, like we hunt the monkey and the chimpanzee" (257-258).

Echoes of neo-colonialism and neo-colonial practices by foreign governments and scientists permeate Harfort's tragic tale. First, a pharmaceutical company hired local boys to hunt monkeys for them in exchange for money. The men in the factory, mostly Americans, Australians, New Zealanders, Germans, and Dutch, are described as "strange" people who resembled the doctors that the local boys had seen in films or on TV. More important, however, is how the white-clothed white scientists did not see the local boys as human beings, but instead insisted on reminding them how they "had always hunted monkeys and chimpanzees." Implicit in the white scientists' attitude is the identification of the local boys to the monkeys and chimpanzees as seen in the Tarzan films. Hartfort relates how he "grew to identify, and sometimes mimic, chimp and monkey behavior. Monkey gestures." Furthermore, the monkey and the chimpanzees' behavior is compared to the behavior of human beings insofar as the "mother always placed the baby behind her body, the little one's arm reaching around to her breast" while the father was fighting and screeching to warn others (259). Of course, it is common knowledge that the chimpanzee is the closest animal to a human being, by 98%.

The comparison between the chimpanzees and the Olinka young men reaches its climax when Harfort describes the screaming of the monkeys as "very human," which their faces make "even more human." That is, everything "they think, everything they fear, everything they feel, is as clear as if you'd known them all your life. As if they'd slept in the same bed as you!" (260). Yet, it is not clear why Hartfort feels compelled to confess for his decapitation of monkeys and chimpanzees or why Walker's Adam spends so much time re-telling Hartfort's story, a story that Adam calls "the evil of civilization" (261). At any rate, as suggested by the way Harfort concludes his confession, Adam has accepted to play the role of a priest, "Father, thank you for hearing my confession," to which Adam meditatively responds that though he is not a priest, he is "a man of God." (263) Equally interesting is how the agony of the monkeys and chimpanzees at the hands of Hartfort parallels Tashi's female genital mutilation at the hands of M'Lissa.

"We Are all Sisters: Female Circumcision and Neo-Colonialist Discourse

In Possessing the Secret of Joy, no other character exemplifies a case of colonialist discourse than Tashi-Evelyn-Mrs. Johnson whom Alice Walker claims as her sister. In an epistolary note to the reader Walker argues that because she does not know what part of Africa her ancestors came from, she claims the continent. She adds, "I suppose I have created Olinka as my village and the Olinkans as one of my ancient, ancestral tribal peoples. Certainly I recognize Tashi as my sister" (283). As mentioned above, it is praiseworthy for black writers of the African Diaspora to claim a common heritage. But it becomes problematic when the main objective underlying this claim is to criticize and scorn Africa and Africans for their primitivism. Though in the past Walker has described herself as a Womanist , I would argue that Possessing the Secret of Joy articulates its critique of and opposition against female circumcision in Africa from a "Western-feminist" perspective.

Kadiatu Kanneh has warned us against this sort of reading in her essay, "Feminism and the Colonial Body," a practice of "Western feminism which involves the representation, the discussion and manipulation of Third World women." What happens is that the discussion changes to "a different kind of acculturation of the body, where what is literally inscribed in the flesh, and, by implication, in the sexual freedom and expression of African women," is perceived as "a difficult agenda for Black women and White women." Kanneh further deplores how in Western feminism female circumcision "has become almost a dangerous trope" for "the muting and mutilation of women-physically, sexually and psychologically-and for these women's need for Western feminism. Circumcision, clitoridectomy, and infibulation, become one visible marker of outrageous primitivism, and the Third World woman" (347).

As hinted at above from the analysis of how the African-American and European missionaries view Olinka customs and as is to be argued later, throughout Possessing the Secret of Joy Tashi's female circumcision and the varying consequences derived from it function as markers of "outrageous primitivism," sexism, African men's sexual selfishness and brutality; it is also assumed that the African woman can heal from the scars inflicted upon her in Africa and discover her sexuality only in the West, in this case America. During a therapy session Evelyn tells Raye, her African-American therapist who replaced Mzee, that she discovered "what was supposed to be down there" only after she came to America. Evelyn claims that "beyond the function of the breasts," her "own body" as "the female body" was "a mystery" to her:

From the prison Our Leader said we must keep ourselves clean and pure as we had been since time immemorial-- by cutting out unclean parts of our bodies. Everyone knew that if a woman was not circumcised her unclean parts would grow so long they'd soon touch her thighs; she'd become masculine and arouse herself. No man could enter her because her own erection would be in his way (119).

Toward the end of the conversation, however, Evelyn seems to contradict herself by revealing that she "used to stroke herself," though it was taboo, and that she and Adam used to make love in the fields. She also reveals that though they made love via "cunnilingus," oral stimulation of the clitoris or the vulva, she always experienced orgasm. Also later in the novel M'Lissa reveals that she too used to follow her mother to the forest where she, after her mother had left, would play with "a small smiling figure with one hand on her genitals, every part of which appeared intact." She would then lie down to compare her vulva to "the little statuette's." She adds, "Hidden behind a boulder, I very cautiously touched myself. The blissful, open look of the little figure had aroused me, and I felt an immediate response to my own touch." (213) These sexual revelations suggest that M'Lissa and Tashi, though young then and before circumcision, knew and still know what is "down there" and that they were aware of their female bodies. Otherwise, Walker is suggesting that female circumcision has so erased these sexual experiences and the awareness of their bodies that only a therapy session can bring their memories back.

At any rate, Evelyn's therapy session with Raye suggests that not only are African women ignorant of their own female bodies and sexuality, but they lack control over them. To borrow from Chandra Talpade Mohanty's postcolonial theoretical concept, Evelyn is presented as "an 'average third world woman'" who "leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and her being 'third world' (read: ignorant, poor, un-educated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized)." As implied through the characters of Raye, Lisette, and Olivia, Tashi-Evelyn sharply contrasts to "the (implicit) self-representation of Western women as educated, as modern, as having control over their own bodies and sexualities, and the freedom to make their own decisions" (Mohanty 176). In Possessing the Secret of Joy, Raye, in stark contrast to the uneducated Tashi, is characterized as a woman who, though a descendant of slaves, has "studied at the best of the white man's school." In her ignorance, on the other hand, Tashi recalls what Raye does as "an ageless magic, the foundation of which was the ritualization, or the acting out, of empathy." Furthermore, she calls her psychiatrist "a witch," a "spiritual descendant of the ancient healers who taught" Olinka "witch doctors" (131-132).

Probably aware of the negative image of the African woman as ignorant of her sexuality, Walker has mitigated Tashi-Evelyn-Mrs. Johnson's image by universalizing her suffering across continents, class, and ethnicity. When Evelyn is introduced to Amy Maxwell by Raye, she learns that even a white girl from a rich white American family from New Orleans can be mutilated. Like Tashi, Amy Maxwell used to touch herself when she was young until her mother discovered and put an end to it by putting "hot pepper sauce" on her finger first and then by asking a doctor to excise her clitoris (185). Also through Amy Maxwell, Tashi learns that she is not the first African woman to come to America; many African women who came to America as slaves were sold into captivity "because they refused to be circumcised, but many of them sold into bondage circumcised and infibulated." Equally painful is what these African women had to endure from the American doctors who invaded the slave auction blocks to examine "these sewed-up," "naked and defenseless" women in order to learn "to do the 'procedure' on other enslaved women" in the name of "Science." Also, the American doctors "wrote in their medical journals that they'd found a cure for the white woman's hysteria" (186).

Noteworthy is how Evelyn reacts to the "distressing" conversation. Not only does she angrily leave Raye's office by slamming the door, but she rationalizes that because Louisiana was once ruled by France Amy Maxwell's mother may have had "trouble communicating with her doctor, who was perhaps like me a stranger from another tribe." But this rationalization, which should be understood as Evelyn's reluctance to believe that a white girl could be circumcised, does not last very long as Amy Maxwell's mother gradually becomes another M'Lissa. That is, perhaps "Amy's mother had meant her daughter's tonsils after all" (188). It is worth noting that Alice Walker consciously universalized the female genital mutilation and meant for Tashi-Evelyn-Mrs. Johnson to be a microcosm for all the circumcised and infibulated women the world over. In the first paragraph of her epistolary note to the reader, Alice Walker informs us that "one hundred million women and girls living today in African, Far Eastern and Middle Eastern countries have been genitally mutilated" and that this practice is growing among the immigrant population of the United States and Europe (281).

Clearly, this sort of universalism makes Tashi and other women in the novel become what Mohanty has called "'Women as category of analysis, or: we are all sisters in struggle." By "category of analysis" Mohanty refers to "the crucial assumption" that all women "across classes and cultures, are somehow socially constituted as a homogeneous group identified prior to the process of analysis." In other words, the "homogeneity of women as a group is produced not on the basis of biological essentials but rather on the basis of secondary sociological and anthropological universals." From this perspective, Tashi, Dura, M'Lissa, Amy Maxwell, and millions of other women victims of female genital mutilation are perceived as "a single group on the basis of a shared oppression" because they are bound together by "a sociological notion of the 'same-ness' of their oppression." Thus, "the discursively consensual homogeneity" of Tashi and other women" as a group has been "mistaken for the historically specific material reality of groups of women" (Mohanty 176). According to Mohanty, the assumption is that women are perceived as "an akready constituted group, one which has been labeled 'powerless,' 'exploited,' 'sexually harassed'" (176-177). This is exactly how Tashi, Dura, M'Lissa, and Amy Maxwell, are characterized in Possessing the Secret of Joy. As the next section will argue, Tashi and these other women are presented as women who have been victimized by men.

Colonialist Anthropology: Female Circumcision and African Male Violence

The failure of Alice Walker and Possessing the Secret of Joy is to have not taken the time to investigate the real reasons behind female circumcision instead of using an always-already colonialist discourse from an anthropological book written by a French anthropologist. Indeed, it is through the reading of Marcel Griaule's Conversation with Ogotemmàli that Tashi learns about how female circumcision came about. Noteworthy is that it is Pierre, Tashi's step son from the relations between Adam and Lisette, who introduces the book to Tashi. The explanation reads like a story of creation from the Dogon people, according to which the "God Amma" created earth and a feminine body:

"This body, lying flat, face upwards, in a line from north to south, is feminine. Its sexual organ is anthill, and its clitoris a termite hill. Amma, being lonely and desirous of intercourse with this creature, approached it. That was the occasion of the first breach of the order of the universe." Because the "termite hill rose up, barring the passage and displaying its masculinity," God "cut down the termite hill and had intercourse with the excised earth. But the original incident was destined to affect the course of things forever" (169).

           

Also attached to this myth of creation is how the spirit later endowed each human being with "two souls of different sex, or rather with two principles corresponding to two distinct persons. In the man the female soul was located in the prepuce; in the woman the male soul was in the clitoris" Therefore, men are circumcised to rid of their "femininity" while women are excised to rid them of their "masculinity (170). Pierre concludes that it is men's fault that people have been permanently locked "in the category of their obvious sex." Also we learn that female circumcision is not only pharaonic-Cleopatra and Nefertiti were circumcised-but it is also a very old civilization that "spread northward, from central Africa up toward ancient Egypt and the Mediterranean" and that it "predates all the major religions." (172) Later, Tashi, fascinated by what the book says about the origins of female genital mutilation, reads how the "'dual soul'" is dangerous and how "' a man should be male, and a woman female. Circumcision and excision are the remedy.'"

Here again, Alice Walker both fails to question and seems to agree with the colonialist discourse of Marcel Griaule's anthropological book, with its "I know my natives" assumptions. Instead of questioning what Pierre is reading or what she is reading herself, Tashi identifies with the First Dogon woman for whom during birth "'the pain of parturition was concentrated in the woman's clitoris, which was excised by an invisible hand, detached itself and left her, and was changed into the form of a scorpion'" whose "'pouch'" and "'sting symbolized the organ: the venom was the water and the blood of the pain.'" What is more, Tashi tells us that she read over and over the passage about "'an invisible hand'" and that pain was what she felt "at the moment of parturition," because pain was not only what she felt giving birth, but she lacked "a clitoris to be concentrated in" (173).

By now it must be clear that Possessing the Secret of Joy blames man and God for the female genital mutilation and infibulation. Early in the novel Tashi calls their Olinka Leader "our Jesus Christ" who implores his people, especially uncircumcised women, to resist European ways and stay clean (120), while later in a courtroom scene Adam posits that every man in the courtroom had had his penis cut off, then he would understand that his "condition is similar to that of all the women" who have been circumcised (162). To Pierre, a man wants a woman to be circumcised because he is "jealous of woman's pleasure" insofar as the woman "does not require him to achieve it. Thus, when "the outer sex is cut off, and she's left only the smallest, inelastic opening through which to receive pleasure, he can believe it is only his penis that can reach her inner parts and give her what she craves. But it is only his lust for her conquest that makes the effort worthwhile. And then it is literally a battle, with blood flowing on both sides" (178). To M'Lissa a man excises the woman to make "her into a woman," because it "only because a woman is made into a woman that a man becomes a man" (241).

Kanneh has argued that when Western feminism characterizes the "Black Third World" woman as a victim of men's violence, "The battle over the Black Third World woman's body is staged as a battle between First World feminists and Black Third World men" (348). In other words, the battle over Tashi's body becomes the battle between Alice Walker, Raye, Pierre, Adam, Marcel Griaule, on the one hand, and the Olinka man, on the other. According to Mohanty this polarizing discourse in which women are defined as "archetypal victims" "freezes them into 'objects-who-defend-themselves,' men into 'subjects-who-perpetrate-violence,' and (every) society into powerless (read: women) and powerful (read: men) groups of people." From this perspective, Alice Walker and Possessing the Secret of Joy have failed to do what Mohanty has argued is the best way to interpret male violence: "Male violence must be theorized and interpreted within specific societies, in order both to understand it better and to effectively organize to change it. Sisterhood cannot be assumed on the basis of gender; it must be forged in concrete historical and political practice and analysis." (178) For, indeed, the explanation and analysis of female genital mutilation of Tashi are not only woven into a colonialist discourse from two colonialist books written by two Europeans, but they are also predicated upon what Mohanty calls "the privileged and explanatory potential of gender difference as the origin" of female body mutilation (179).

Thus, "the privileged and explanatory potential of gender difference as the origin" of female circumcision prevented Alice Walker from discussing the fact that in Africa "the actual cutting is only part of a rite that young people undergo as an initiation rite into adulthood. According to Diana C. Menya, during these rites of passage ceremonies young children learn about "the secrets of their society" as well as "acceptable social and sexual behaviors," thus "protecting society from pre and extra marital sex, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, and sexually transmitted diseases." Menya theorizes that Alice Walker was probably afraid of "lending a degree of respectability to the abhorrent practice of female genital mutilation." Walker's silence on these issues as well as discussing female circumcision "out of its cultural context" resulted in an "ethnocentric view of an outsider" (423).

One way to rescue Alice Walker may be to argue that she wrote Possessing the Secret of Joy out of a trickster tradition insofar as while the entire narrative borrows both its colonialist discourse and explanation of female circumcision from two colonialist texts, in the last section of the novel Tashi is allowed to question the truth about the African in Mirella Ricciardi's African Saga. When Mbati fails to explain to her what the Italian woman meant by African women "possessing the secret of joy," Tashi becomes anti-colonial: "Oh, I say. These settler cannibals. Why don't they just steal our land, mine our gold, chop down our forests, pollute our rivers, enslave us to work on their farms, fuck us, devour our flesh and leave us alone? Why must they also write about how much joy we possess?" (270). In an ultimate anti-colonial and anti-neocolonialist move and re-reading of the excerpt from Mirella Ricciardi' African Saga, Adam, Olivia, Pierre, Benny, Raye, and Mbati carry a banner in "huge block letters" reading, "RESISTANCE IS THE SECRET OF JOY!" (279). Thus, Possessing the Secret of Joy, like a piece Bebop song that starts in one key to end in a completely different key, starts with a colonialist discourse borrowed from a European colonialist text and ends with anti-neocolonialist revision of that text, even if this anti-neo-colonialist sentiment that closes the novel is also directed against neo-colonial Africa, as exemplified by the presence of illiterate soldiers who fail to prevent Adam and others from displaying the bannner.

This essay was originally presented at the National Conference of National Association of African American Studies on February 11, 1999 in Houston, Texas.

This is a sort of new theory I am developing in opposition to the Post-Colonial theory as proposed in Bill Aschroft's The Empire Writes Back or in Padmini Mongia's Contemporary Postcolonial Theory. My contention is that the current postcolonial theory is inadequate as a theory to be applied to African contemporary realities because colonialism is there under different forms, including IMF and the World Bank.

For a definition of Womanist see Alice Walker's In Search of our Mother's Garden: Womanist Prose. New York: Harcourt, 1983.

Achebe, Chinua. "Colonialist Criticism." in Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays. New York: Doubleday, 1988: 68-90.

----------------Things Fall Apart. 1959. Reprint, New York: Doubleday, 1994.

Gourdine, Angeletta KM. "Postmodern Ethnography and the Womanist Mission: Postcolonial Sensibilities in Possessing the Secret of Joy." African American Review 30.2 (Summer 1996): 237-243.

Kanneh, Kadiatu. "Feminism and the Colonial Body." In The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, edited by Bill Aschroft et al.. New York: Routledge, 1995: 346-348.

Menya, Diana C., review of Possessing the Secret of Joy, by Alice Walker, Lancet 341.882 (Feb. 13, 1993): 343.

Mudimbe, V. Y. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses." In Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Padmini Mongia. New York: Arnold, 1996: 172-197.

Ngugi, wa Thiong'O. The River Between. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1965.

Pfaff, Franáoise. Conversation with Maryse CondÇ. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.

Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. 1982. Reprint, New York: Harcourt Brace Javanovich,1992.

----------------Possessing the Secret of Joy. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.