POSSESSING THE SECRET OF JOY

By Alice Walker
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (1992)


Alice Walker refuses to let us be comfortable.

While some other writers replow the old ground she turned over in A Color Purple, Walker herself continues to move us into new challenges...to make us examine older, and rawer, wounds. In Possessing The Secret Of Joy, she takes up the case against female circumcision, a ghastly ritual of genital mutilation traced back to earliest human history, and which Walker estimates to have been suffered by some one hundred million women and girls living today in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

Female circumcision is generally confused with its male counterpart, but after reading this book you will never again view it in the same way...by cutting off the clitoris and binding the mouth of the vagina so tightly that intercourse becomes a nightly rite of pain and blood, we learn that the aim of female circumcision is clearly to control female sexuality by eliminating it altogether. Possessing is a powerful polemic, crying out to the world that "this outrage must stop!"

To be sure, there are a few flaws. The story's short, first person narratives by various speakers allow us to see the characters on their own terms, but some confusion results when Walker does not always give each person a distinctive enough voice. There is also some unevenness to the quality of the writing. While the opening parable of the three panthers is among the best work Walker has ever produced (like her picture on the back of the book jacket it is delicately powerful and quietly intense, grabbing you in its jaws before you realize you are caught), parts of the later sections flatten out and do not always live up to this opening promise.

Possessing might have benefited from a more patient editing process. But one can see Walker compelled to put out this book as soon as possible in the hopes that its publication would trigger an outcry to stop the practice of "little girls...being forced under the shards of unwashed glass, tin-can tops, rusty razors, and dull knives of traditional circumcisers." If such an outcry is the result, then this book can be forgiven all its minor sins.