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Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker (1992, Hardcover)

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POSSESSING THE SECRET OF JOY By Alice Walker - Hardcover **BRAND NEW**.

About this product

Product Information

A provocative novel about an African tribal woman's battle with madness after the trauma of a childhood genital mutilation.

Product Identifiers

Publisher
HarperCollins
ISBN-10
0151731527
ISBN-13
9780151731527
eBay Product ID (ePID)
58342

Product Key Features

Book Title
Possessing the Secret of Joy
Author
Alice Walker
Format
Hardcover
Language
English
Topic
African American / Contemporary Women, Cultural Heritage, Contemporary Women, African American / General, General, Literary
Publication Year
1992
Genre
Fiction
Number of Pages
304 Pages

Dimensions

Item Length
9.2in
Item Height
1.1in
Item Width
5.2in
Item Weight
17.8 Oz

Additional Product Features

Lc Classification Number
Ps3573.A425p67 1992
Reviews
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. , 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
Copyright Date
1992
Lccn
92-006883
Dewey Decimal
Fic
Intended Audience
Trade