possessing the secret of joy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224035274 ISBN 13: 9780224035279

Publisher: Jonathan Cape (1992)., 1992

Prompted by misguided loyalty to the customs of her people, Tashi Johnson, a tribal African woman living in North America, endures a severely traumatizing tribal initiation rite of passage, an experience that affects her sense of identity. Reprint.

About the Author:

Alice Walker is the author of the novels The Color Purple, which won the Pulitzer Prize, The Temple of My Familiar, Meridian, The Third Life of Grange Copeland; two collections of short stories, In Love & Trouble, You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down; and five volumes of poetry, Once, Revolutionary Petunias, Good Night Willie Lee, I'll See You In The Morning, Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, and Her Blue Body Everything We Know. She lives and teaches in San Francisco.

From AudioFile:

Tashi-Evelyn Johnson, the African heroine of Possessing the Secret of Joy, submits to the ritual female circumcision and spends the rest of her life trying to understand its meaning and live with its consequences. This story, which is told from the different perspectives of Tashi and her family, flows from one character's recollection to another, not always chronologically. Having two exceptional readers, Alice Walker and Joe Morton, helps the listener differentiate between the characters. Both speak in pleasant, well-modulated voices, and Morton is particularly adept in conveying different accents. Enchanting music from an embaire, an African log xylophone, signals the end of each cassette. A.A.B. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine