Possessing the Secret of Joy
Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker
|Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker
I’ll be honest. I started reading Possessing the Secret of Joy for a class. I’d avoided reading Alice Walker in high school, and I didn’t really have any desire to read her work in college. I assumed her writing would be dry and monotonous like the other novels my 11th grade English professor assigned us. I couldn’t have been further off.
Walker's novel reveals the mind of Tashi (also referred to as Evelyn, Tashi-Evelyn, and Mrs. Johnson), a woman from the Olinkan tribe in an unnamed African country who underwent female circumcision. The story follows Tashi’s struggle to come to terms with her circumcision and the efforts of her family to support her, as readers are left to piece together the events of Tashi’s life.