Possessing the Secret of Joy was published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1992. Tashi — a minor character from The Color Purple, an Olinka woman who married Celie’s stepson Adam — is the novel’s protagonist. As a young woman, Tashi chooses to undergo female genital mutilation (specifically, excision and infibulation) as an act of solidarity with her people’s traditions at a moment of anticolonial resistance. The novel follows the lifelong consequences of this decision: chronic pain, sexual dysfunction, psychological trauma, and eventually Tashi’s murder of the woman who performed the operation.
Walker’s decision to make FGM the subject of a novel was deliberately provocative. She argued that cultural relativism — the position that FGM should be understood within its cultural context and not judged by Western standards — was itself a form of violence: a refusal to acknowledge the suffering of individual women in the name of respecting “tradition.” The novel was praised by anti-FGM activists and condemned by critics who felt Walker was imposing Western feminist values on African cultures, simplifying a complex practice for polemical purposes, and sensationalizing African women’s bodies for a Western audience.
The novel’s psychological depth — Tashi’s fragmented consciousness, her nightmares, her inability to experience pleasure, her rage at the cultural machinery that mutilated her while calling it love — transcends the polemic. Walker draws on Jungian psychology (Tashi’s analyst figures significantly in the narrative) and on her own extensive research in Africa to create a portrait of trauma that is specific and universal simultaneously.
Collecting Possessing the Secret of Joy
First edition (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1992): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Very good: $10–$25