Presenting the Drawback in Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy In 1992, Alice Walker printed her novel Possessing the Secret of Joy. It tells the story of an African feminine named Tashi, who’s from Olinka, a spot the place females generally follow genital mutilation. All through the novel, Tashi is torn between her Olinkan tradition and her American tradition. She has married an American; nonetheless, she chooses to honor her heritage and bear the “feminine circumcision” as a youngster.
The novel’s fundamental battle is centered upon how feminine genital mutilation bodily and mentally degrades ladies. Alice Walker presents this traumatic concern by writing the novel in numerous characters’ voices: Tashi, Adam, Olivia, Evelyn, Pierre, Lisette, Benny, Mzee, and M’Lissa. The novel begins by presenting the horrifying dangers and penalties which are related to the follow of feminine genital mutilation. At the starting of the novel, Walker permits her reader to know that Tashi has witnessed the horrific loss of life of her sister which occurred as a result of of feminine slicing.
Olivia informs the reader that Tashi’s feelings have been deeply affected by her favourite sister’s bleeding to loss of life that “the sight of her personal blood terrifies her” (Walker 9). The viewers can be knowledgeable very early in the novel that Tashi is seeing a psychiatrist which permits us to know her crumbling psychological state. One other downside with FGM is that it permits the feminine to expertise terrible ache not solely throughout the surgical procedure, but additionally throughout intercourse together with her husband. In keeping with the Olinkans, this could hinder females in participating in actions of infidelity.
This process would additionally set up a person’s hierarchy inside the relationship giving them the alternative to really feel extra manly by penetrating and forcing a gap of their spouse’s sewn up genital space. Tashi is torn between the American method and the African method of life however finally chooses to have the process performed following her tradition’s perception. The viewers additionally examines how everybody in the novel is affected by Tashi’s resolution. After Tashi has the process and turns into mad, Adam takes half in an affair with Lisette and has a son named Pierre: a scenario that will have by no means occurred earlier than the mutilation.
Dividing the character’s ideas and actions into chapters of the novel was Alice Walker’s elegiac try of enjoying down the horrible and down-right wrongness of feminine genital mutilation. Moreover the altering the characters’ viewpoints, ideas, and actions in the novel, Walker additionally consists of many scenes which are flashbacks from the previous. This stylistic concept of always referring to the previous is parallel to the unchangeable, ageless, set beliefs of circumcising feminine genitals in the African nation.
