Here and there tantalizing remnants of the writing that made The
Color Purple such a critical success, but for the most part
Walker's latest is held hostage to an agenda - the eradication of
female circumcision in Africa and the Middle East - a cause to
which she will be contributing a portion of the royalties. A range
of voices, including husband Adam, son Benny, and the character
Tashi herself, tell the story of the Olinka girl who made a brief
appearance in The Color Purple. Married to Adam, the young
African-American missionary who took her back to the US, Tashi has
suffered intermittent periods of madness since she was brutally
circumcised as an adolescent in a remote guerrilla camp in Africa.
It's a madness that has required hospitalization and treatment by a
range of analysts, including the great Jung, who puts in a cameo
appearance here. Though her older sister had bled to death from the
effects of the operation, Tashi chose to have it done because she
felt it would make her "...completely woman. Completely Africa.
Completely Olinka." The operation also was responsible for a
difficult delivery in which her son Benny was brain-damaged. Helped
by therapy, her grief turns to anger: she returns to Africa and
murders the old woman who performed the operation. Sentenced to
death, Tashi, who feels neither guilt nor fear of death, is finally
at peace because an anthropologist tells her about the mythic
causes of the practice: the early African woman, "the mother of
womankind," was "notoriously free" of both sexual guilt and
circumcision; invading tribes and Arabs were responsible for its
imposition. Dying, Tashi finally possesses the "secret of joy": the
resistance to what is evil. A pastiche of New Age mysticism,
dubious history, and feminist ideology tied to a storyline that
points a moral, heavily underlined, rather than one that grows out
of a tale. Female circumcision is a terrible travesty, but neither
it nor Walker's talent is well served by this overwrought novel.
(Kirkus Reviews)
A novel about a character from Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "The Color Purple". This is Tashi's story, a shattering account of a young African woman whose decision to go through the female initiation ceremony has terrible consequences.
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