Editors Reads Verdict
Possessing the Secret of Joy is Walker's most deliberately confrontational novel — a book designed to make the reader uncomfortable and unwilling to leave female genital cutting as a subject of other people's cultures. Whether you read it as a political act or a literary work depends on what you ask fiction to do.
What We Loved
- The decision to give Tashi a full novel is itself an act of political imagination — she was a minor figure in The Color Purple
- The psychological portrait of trauma is detailed and serious
- The novel does not permit cultural relativism as a position — it forces a confrontation
- The multiple narrators create a complex account of the same events from different angles
Minor Drawbacks
- The didactic intent is always visible — the novel sometimes feels like an argument in fictional form
- The political agenda can override the characters' independent existence
- The novel's confrontational strategy may alienate the readers it most needs to reach
- The ending's rhetorical directness breaks with the novel's fictional frame
Key Takeaways
- → Cultural tradition is not a defense against harm — the source of a practice does not determine its ethics
- → Trauma does not resolve itself; it accumulates until it demands action
- → Female solidarity can require confronting practices that some women defend as part of their identity
- → Giving voice to minor characters from earlier works is an act of fictional justice
| Author | Alice Walker |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Harvest Books |
| Pages | 320 |
| Published | June 1, 1992 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction, African American Literature, Feminist Fiction |
Possessing the Secret of Joy Review
Possessing the Secret of Joy was published in 1992 and is the most directly political novel Alice Walker wrote — a book whose purpose is not primarily aesthetic but interventionist, designed to put before readers a practice (female genital cutting) that Walker argues cannot be accommodated within any framework that takes women’s bodies and lives seriously. The novel’s title is its accusation: the “secret of joy” that is supposedly being preserved by the practice is being destroyed by it.
Tashi is Celie’s daughter-in-law in The Color Purple, a barely sketched figure from a Christianised African community. In this novel, Walker gives her a full life: her childhood in an African village, her decision as a young woman to undergo the ritual cutting as an act of cultural solidarity against colonialism, and the decades of psychological and physical damage that follow. The novel is narrated by multiple voices — Tashi herself, her husband Adam, her son, a Swiss Jungian analyst, and others — and the multiplicity creates a complex record of how the same events look from different positions of knowledge and investment.
Walker’s formal strategy — the multi-narrator structure, the fragmented chronology, the documentary intrusions — serves the novel’s essentially prosecutorial purpose. She is making a case, and the fictional apparatus is deployed in the service of the argument rather than as an end in itself. This transparency of purpose is both the novel’s strength and its limitation: the argument is made with great clarity and considerable force, but the reader is rarely able to forget that fiction is being used as advocacy.
The novel generated significant controversy for its treatment of cultural tradition and its implicit argument that solidarity with African women requires confronting practices that those women may themselves defend. Walker does not soften this argument or seek to resolve its tensions. The novel ends not with resolution but with a statement — the title’s accusation made explicit — that forecloses the possibility of remaining comfortable on the subject. It is the most uncomfortable of Walker’s major works, and perhaps the most necessary.
Our rating: 4.1/5 — Walker’s most confrontational novel — a direct political act in fictional form that demands more from readers than it offers them as aesthetic pleasure, and is right to do so.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "Possessing the Secret of Joy" about?
Tashi, the African woman who appeared briefly in The Color Purple, undergoes female genital mutilation as an act of cultural solidarity and spends the rest of her life dealing with the trauma, eventually killing the woman who performed the procedure. Walker's most confrontational novel — a direct political act about female genital cutting as a cultural and feminist issue.
What are the key takeaways from "Possessing the Secret of Joy"?
Cultural tradition is not a defense against harm — the source of a practice does not determine its ethics Trauma does not resolve itself; it accumulates until it demands action Female solidarity can require confronting practices that some women defend as part of their identity Giving voice to minor characters from earlier works is an act of fictional justice
Is "Possessing the Secret of Joy" worth reading?
Possessing the Secret of Joy is Walker's most deliberately confrontational novel — a book designed to make the reader uncomfortable and unwilling to leave female genital cutting as a subject of other people's cultures. Whether you read it as a political act or a literary work depends on what you ask fiction to do.
Ready to Read Possessing the Secret of Joy?
Check the current price on Amazon.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)Prices and availability are subject to change. See Amazon for current price.
Review last updated: