Reading Possessing the close of Joy is a dual exercise in reading agriculture First.

Reading Possessing the close of Joy is a dual exercise in reading agriculture First, the novel's actions focus onward the cultural rite of female circumcision. other the creator of the fictional world within which the novel's African protagonist lives is an African American woman. Furthermore, the protagonist is an African newly emigrated to the United States with her black American husband. The last moves the "ideal" African American, embodying the improvement of Africa and inhabiting the geographical space of the United States. Tashi's dead body serves as the stage about which the opera of African American cultural/ethnic identity can be performed. one as well as the other African American women's voices - those of the author and her heroine - are not away in the text and bring into the presence of the cultural text of female circumcision from their various culturally and ethnically embodied spaces. Tashi is an African and an American. She appears fully aware of the dependence of cause and effects inherent in pledging full allegiance to either or the one and the other but is also aware that the sum of two units are different - connected if it be not that separate. It is through the len of this coupleed separateness that her experiences with ritual female circumcision are examined.

In the novel we come by this sense of Tashi's biculturalism from the varying respects to her as "Tashi," renamed in America "Evelyn" "Evelyn Johnson" and "Tashi-Evelyn." Clearly, the last portrays Du Bois's "twoness," the idea of "two spirits two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in single dark body" (Du Bois 5) Alice Walker examines the African mind of her protagonist, and ritual female circumcision is the vehicle for this examination. Walker views the practice as a means between the walls of which African women are furnished joyless and spiritually dead, and she have a contests to reconcile the two warring cultural consciousnesses - her American single in kind and Tashi's conviction that ritual female circumcision defines her as an Olinkan woman. Unquestionably, this is a novel by the agency of a woman, about women which argues for the rights of women The particular right that Walker champions, strives to protect/defend/encode is that which insures that African women will continue to "posses the clandestine of joy." For Walker, this possession and its rapture are both threatened by the "literal destruction of the greatest in quantity crucial external sign of womanhood: the vulva itself" (Warrior 21)

Possessing the hidden of Joy is the story of brace kinds of women: those who are forbidden this possession, the right to be in possession of their bodies in natural totality, and those who forbid others this right. Walker fabricates both archetypes - "the mother who betrays" and "the daughter for a like reason betrayed" (Warrior 21) - and from one side these constructions, she places the "proverbial feminist personal-is-political" into direct conflict with "that notorious black manifesto - we will not have our business lay into the streets" (Dent 3) The conflict is embodied in the relationship between Tashi and M'Lissa, who take away themselves and each other because of their beliefs in and questionings of ritual female circumcision. Vicariously, forward the pages of Possessing, they also overthrow Africa.

The title of Walker's novel is taken from African Saga, the memoir of an Italian woman raised in Kenya. Walker adapts for her first epigraph the passage from Mirella Ricciardi's work wherein she writes:

I had always got onward well with the Africans and take delight ined their company, but commanding the family on the farm, many of whom had watched [me] germinate up, was different. With the added experience of my safaris behind me I had begun to understand the digest of "birth, copulation and death" by way of which they lived. Black populace are natural, they possess the privy of joy, which is wherefore they can survive the suffering and humiliation inflicted immediately after them. They are alive physically and emotionally, which makes them easy to live with. What I had not still learned to deal with was their cunning and their natural instinct for self-preservation.(1)

Interestingly, the incredulity inherent in Ricciardi's novel is shared by the agency of Walker and guides her construction of Tashi, who emanates at the novel's end spiritually intact despite the "physical devastation" of her circumcision. Further, it is her "cunning" that permits her to respond to the Olinka and without suspicion gain access to and kill M'Lissa. Considering Walker's past work and her efforts to define herself as a womanist, this casting begs further inquiry.

In her collection of plain essays In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, Walker casts herself as a healer. Athena Vrettos counts us that "by reclaiming the history of black women those 'creatures thus mutilated in body, so dimmed and confused according to pain,' and redefining their scars as 'the springs of creativity,'" Walker attempts "to forge spiritual imprisonments with the past" (455-56). Possessing is that attempt. Alice Walker beholds her novel as an attempt to refit the bodies torn asunder and to reunite those separated at time and space. This is her womanist mission.

Possessing the covered of Joy revisits a dilemma in anthropology: separation between classic ethnography and literature. Classic ethnography marginalized narrative, relegating it to footnotes, hints, prefaces, and small-print case histories. However, if it can be with equal reason bluntly stated, the fundamental point in dispute for the ethnographer and/or anthropologist is by what means to describe a culture. This is quite similar to the literary pertain to of representation. The ethnographer utilizes, for projects of process analysis, narratives in the form of case studies. These compiled narratives portray by action the anthropological gatherings from and understandings of the observ consequence and/or experience. With these transcriptions, ethnographers "shape the life history" that they record (Benson 241) They interpret their data, recordings, and compile a representation.(2) nevertheless contemporary anthropologists have debated the interpretive strain, the fictional quality, as it were, of their writings, rarely has literature about the Other been examined in seasons of (or based upon a pattern of) ethnography.(3) Although Christopher Miller has argued for an anthropological approach to reading, understanding, and interpreting African literature, little has been done to examine in what way and if ethnography takes narrative form, assists as a narrative model, and/or questions the yields of of that kind narratives in cross-cultural contexts. In this essay, I examine the narrative of Possessing the hid of Joy as ethnographic, predicated immediately after and beholden to the legacy of Western anthropology's relationship to and conscription of Africa and blackwomen's bodies.