Possessing the Secret of Joy (19 page)

One sermon, I begged him. One discussion with your followers about what was done to me.

He said the congregation would be embarrassed to discuss something so private and that, in any case, he would be ashamed to do so.

I’d learned to appreciate the sanctuary of the Waverly by then. A place where there was a bench on the lawn, partly in the shade but mainly in the sun, just for me. I liked my Sunday mornings there. Sedated. Calm. The grass was so green all around me, the sun so warm. The lake glittered in the distance. Out of a bag of crumbs from the kitchen, I fed the ducks.

They circumcised women, little girls, in Jesus’s time. Did he know? Did the subject anger or embarrass him? Did the early church erase the record? Jesus himself was circumcised; perhaps he thought only the cutting done to him was done to women, and therefore, since he survived, it was all right.

Then there is Olivia. She has always thought so well of me. I find it impossible to disappoint her. I told her I did not kill the
tsunga
M’Lissa. I killed her all right. I placed a pillow over her face and lay across it for an hour. Her sad stories about her life caused me to lose my taste for slashing her. She had told me it was traditional for a well-appreciated
tsunga
to be murdered by someone she circumcised, then burned. I carried out what was expected of me. It is curious, is it not, that the traditional tribal society dealt so cleverly with its appreciation of the
tsunga
and its hatred of her. But of course the
tsunga
was to the traditional elders merely a witch they could control, an extension of their own dominating power.

Pierre has been such a gift to me. You would be proud of him. He has promised to continue to look after Benny when I am gone. Already he has taught him more than any of his teachers ever thought he could learn. I wish you could see Pierre—and perhaps you can, through one of the windows of heaven that looks exactly like a blade of grass, or a rose, or a grain of wheat—as he continues to untangle the threads of mystery that kept me enmeshed.
Chère
Madame, he says, do you realize that the greatest curse in some African countries is not “son of a bitch” but “son of an uncircumcised mother”?

No, I do not realize it, I say.

Well, he says, it is a clue to something important! Who, for instance, were these early uncircumcised women? There is evidence that they were slaves. Slaves of other indigenous Africans and slaves of invading Arabs who swept down from the east and north. Originally bushwomen or women from the African rainforest. We know that these people, small, gentle, completely at one with their environment, liked, if you will forgive my frankness, elongated genitals. Or, put another way, they liked their genitals. So much so that they were observed from birth stroking and “pulling” on them. By the time they reached puberty, well, they had acquired what was to become known, at least among European anthropologists, as “the Hottentot apron.”

Enslaved among people who never touched their genitals if they could help it, having been taught such touching was a sin, these women with their generous labia and fat clitorises were considered monstrous. But what is less noted about these people, these women, is that in their own ancient societies they owned their bodies, including their vulvas, and touched them as much as they liked. In short,
Chère
Madame Johnson, early African woman, the mother of womankind, was notoriously free!

This, Lisette, is your son. I still find him absurdly small for a man, but he is big in mind. On the day of my execution, he says, he will rededicate himself to his life’s work: destroying for other women—and their men—the terrors of the dark tower. A tower you told him about.

You and I will meet in heaven. I know this. Because through your son, to whom my suffering became a mystery into which he submerged himself, we have already met on earth.

Now it occurs to me to wonder how you died. If I had been able truly to understand that you would die, and cease to write to me and to exist, I would have paid better attention to you before you died. However, I was not able to comprehend death except as something that had already happened to me. Dying now does not frighten me. The execution is to take place where this government has executed so many others, the soccer field. I will refuse the blindfold so that I can see far in all directions. I will concentrate on the beauty of one blue hill in the distance, and for me, that moment will be eternity.

Blessed be.

Tashi Evelyn Johnson

Reborn, soon to be Deceased

T
HE WOMEN ALONG THE WAY
have been warned they must not sing. Rockjawed men with machine guns stand facing them. But women will be women. Each woman standing beside the path holds a red-beribboned, closely swaddled baby in her arms, and as I pass, the bottom wrappings fall. The women then place the babies on their shoulders or on their heads, where they kick their naked legs, smile with pleasure, screech with terror, or occasionally wave. It is a protest and celebration the men threatening them do not even recognize.

At the moment of crisis I realize that, because my hands are bound, I can not adjust my glasses, and therefore must tilt my head awkwardly in order to locate and focus on a blue hill. It is while I am distracted by this maneuver that I notice there is a blue hill rising above and just behind the women and their naked-bottomed little girls, who now stand in rows fifty feet in front of me. In front of them kneels my little band of intent faces. Mbati is unfurling a banner, quickly, before the soldiers can stop her (most of them illiterate, and so their response is slow). All of them—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.

There is a roar as if the world cracked open and I flew inside. I am no more. And satisfied.

I
T IS ESTIMATED
that from ninety to one hundred million women and girls living today in African, Far Eastern and Middle Eastern countries have been genitally mutilated. Recent articles in the media have reported on the growing practice of “female circumcision” in the United States and Europe, among immigrants from countries where it is part of the culture.

Two excellent books on the subject of genital mutilation are:
Woman Why Do You Weep?,
by Asma el Dareer (London: Zed Press, 1982), and
Prisoners of Ritual: An Odyssey into Female Genital Circumcision in Africa,
by Hanny Lightfoot-Klein (Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park Press, 1989). For a look at how genital mutilation was practiced in the nineteenth-century United States, there is G. J. Barker-Benfield’s book
The Horrors of the Half Known Life: Male Attitudes Toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth Century America
(New York: Harper & Row, 1976).

Though obviously connected,
Possessing the Secret of Joy
is not a sequel to either
The Color Purple
or
The Temple of My Familiar.
Because it is not, I have claimed the storyteller’s prerogative to recast or slightly change events alluded to or described in the earlier books, in order to emphasize and enhance the meanings of the present tale.

Like
The Temple of My Familiar,
it is a return to the original world of
The Color Purple
only to pick up those characters and events that refused to leave my mind. Or my spirit. Tashi, who appears briefly in
The Color Purple
and again in
The Temple of My Familiar,
stayed with me, uncommonly tenacious, through the writing of both books, and led me finally to conclude she needed, and deserved, a book of her own.

She also appeared to me in the flesh.

During the filming of
The Color Purple,
a commendable effort was made to hire Africans to act the African roles. The young woman who played Tashi, who has barely a moment on the screen, was an African from Kenya: very beautiful, graceful and poised. Seeing her brought the Tashi of my book vividly to mind, as I was reminded that in Kenya, even as this young woman was being flown to Los Angeles to act in the film, little girls were being forced under the shards of unwashed glass, tin-can tops, rusty razors and dull knives of traditional circumcisers, whom I’ve named
tsungas.
Indeed, in 1982, the year
The Color Purple
was published, fourteen children died in Kenya from the effects of genital mutilation. It was only then that the president of the country banned it. It is still clandestinely practiced in Kenya, as it is still practiced, openly, in many other African countries.

Tsunga,
like many of my “African” words, is made up. Perhaps it, and the other words I use, are from an African language I used to know, now tossed up by my unconscious. I do not know from what part of Africa my African ancestors came, and so I claim the continent. 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.

A portion of the royalties from this book will be used to educate women and girls, men and boys, about the hazardous effects of genital mutilation, not simply on the health and happiness of individuals, but on the whole society in which it is practiced, and the world.

Mbele Aché.

Alice Walker

Costa Careyes, Mexico

Mendocino County, California

January-December, 1991

D
ESPITE THE PAIN
one feels in honestly encountering the reality of life, I find it a wonderful time to be alive. This is because at no other time known to human beings has it been easier to give and receive energy, support and love from people never met, experiences never had.

I thank all the writers—Esther Ogunmodede, Nawal El Sadawi, Fran Hosken, Lila Said, Robin Morgan, Awa Thiam, Gloria Steinem, Fatima Abdul Mahmoud and many others around the world—for their work on the subject of genital mutilation.

I thank Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor for the inspiration and confirmation I get from their magnificent book,
The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth.
I also thank Monica Sjoo for the beauty and psychic resonance of her visionary paintings.

I thank Carl Jung for becoming so real in my own self-therapy (by reading) that I could imagine him as alive and active in Tashi’s treatment. My gift to him.

I thank my own therapist, Jane R. C., for helping me loosen some of my own knots and therefore become better able to distinguish and tackle Tashi’s.

I thank Huichol culture for the amazing yarn paintings I have admired over the past several years: paintings which flew me over the pit of so much that is static and dead in the prevailing civilization.

I thank psychologist Alice Miller for writing so strongly in defense of the child. I am especially grateful for
The Drama of the Gifted Child, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware,
and
For Your Own Good.

I thank Louis Pascal for his unpublished essay “How AIDS Began,” which introduced me to the possibility that AIDS was started by the dissemination, among Africans, of contaminated polio vaccine.

I thank the makers of the video
Born in Africa
for introducing me to the beautiful life and courageous death of Philly LuTaaya, a Ugandan musician who used his dying from AIDS to warn, educate, enlighten, inspire and love his people. This video reassured me that human compassion is equal to human cruelty and that it is up to each of us to tip the balance.

I thank Joan Miura and Mary Walsh for representing the Goddess in my household: for doing research, patching leaks, keeping the refrigerator stocked and shutting out the noise. For holding my hand as I reached for Tashi’s.

I thank Robert Allen for his friendship.

I thank Jean Weisinger for her Being.

I thank my daughter Rebecca for giving me the opportunity to be a mother.

Alice Walker (b. 1944), one of the United States’ preeminent writers, is an award-winning author of novels, stories, essays, and poetry. Walker was the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which she won in 1983 for her novel
The Color Purple
, also a National Book Award winner. Walker has also contributed to American culture as an activist, teacher, and public intellectual. In both her writing and her public life, Walker has worked to address problems of injustice, inequality, and poverty.

Walker was born at home in Putnam County, Georgia, on February 9, 1944, the eighth child of Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker. Willie Lee and Minnie Lou labored as tenant farmers, and Minnie Lou supplemented the family income as a house cleaner. Though poor, Walker’s parents raised her to appreciate art, nature, and beauty. They also taught her to value her education, encouraging her to focus on her studies. When she was a young girl, Alice’s brother accidentally shot her in the eye with a BB, leaving a large scar and causing her to withdraw into the world of art and books. Walker’s dedication to learning led her to graduate from her high school as valedictorian. She was also homecoming queen.