TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/050189/05018900.073

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.6 KB | 110 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 69

A Myth to Be Taken on Faith


By Paul Gray


    THE TEMPLE OF MY FAMILIAR
    by Alice Walker
    Harcourt Brace Jovanovich;
    416 pages; $19.95

    Alice Walker ascended from the realm of mere literature
after Steven Spielberg's film adaptation of her novel The Color
Purple. The movie's huge commercial success -- and the
controversy that arose over its portrait of black males --
ensured Walker's public renown as a woman with a cause, an
author who, when she has a message, would rather write a book
than call Western Union. Indeed, her poetry and fiction have
always been, to some extent, polemical. Now that her potential
audience has increased many times over, Walker, 45, has become
more forthright about the burden of her prose: the horrors that
whites have historically imposed on blacks and that men have
inflicted on women. Perhaps these lamentable subjects cannot be
exaggerated. But in her latest novel, Walker tries.

    The Temple of My Familiar is almost all talk -- monologues
and dialogues, chiefly by and among black women. The skeletal
plot is an excuse to get the conversations going. Suwelo, a
black professor of American history, travels from his California
home to attend an uncle's funeral in Baltimore and to dispose
of the house that comes as his inheritance. Suwelo is grateful
for the respite provided by this visit; his wife Fanny (the
granddaughter of Miss Celie, the heroine of The Color Purple)
has discovered feminism and wants a divorce. It is not that she
has stopped loving him, as she tells him, but rather that "I
don't want to be married." Gloomily, Suwelo decides that "his
generation of men had failed women."

    His spirits lift when he meets Mr. Hal and Miss Lissie, two
old and aged friends of his uncle's. These two drop by regularly
to talk and reminisce; they prove themselves remarkable founts
of memory, particularly Miss Lissie, who confides that she has
lived in countless incarnations dating back to the dawn of time.
Relating her experiences as a slave girl being transported to
America, she interrupts herself to warn Suwelo, "You do not
believe I was there? I pity you."

    Suwelo believes. Short of hustling Miss Lissie out the
door, that is probably his only option. For her voluminous
story, to which a growing chorus of other voices gradually
contributes, is an extended myth that must be taken on faith or
not at all. Parts of it are enchantingly beautiful. She
remembers primeval Africa as the Edenic cradle of life, when
women and men lived separately and thus at peace and when lions
killed only to put ailing fellow creatures out of their misery.
But then the men decided to force their way into residence at
the women's encampments, which Miss Lissie sees as the first of
many tragedies: "In consorting with man, as he had become, woman
was bound to lose her dignity, her integrity."

    More evil followed. Ancient Africa was home to white people
as well, but they were driven out because their pitifully pale
skins could not protect them from the blazing heat and light
("The white man," Miss Lissie notes, "worships gold because it
is the sun he has lost"). Thus was conceived whites' envy of
blacks and a determination to crush them, a process that began,
at least symbolically, in Greek mythology when Perseus beheaded
Medusa, who was really the Great Mother, the Black African
Goddess.

    None of this admits argument, of course; legends, old or
new, are not susceptible to logic. But when Walker's characters
venture into more recent history, their opinions, to put it
discreetly, seem open to debate. Is it, for instance, true that
the white colonial powers driven out of Africa have tried to
undermine the liberated countries by flooding them with
pornography? Fanny's father, the Minister of Culture of a newly
emerged nation, claims that "the reason millions of Africans are
exterminating themselves in wars is that the superpowers have
enormous stores of outdated weapons to be got rid of." Is this
really the whole, or even a valid, explanation of the current
slaughters across the continent? Fanny's mother discusses the
viciousness that people, especially white ones, display as the
consequence of cruelties done to them when they were young. "I
shudder to think," she says, "what Hitler's childhood was like.
But anyone can see that the Palestinians and their children are
reliving it under the Israelis today."

    The most hateful aspect of this last comment is not its
content but its smug, self-righteous assurance ("anyone can
see"). Ultimately, all of Walker's principal narrators reveal
themselves as dictators manque, people who believe that the
truth is whatever they happen to say and who will tolerate no
dissenting opinions. Fortunately for them, their author provides
none. She rewards her actors with the good life, California
style, where suitably enlightened men bake bread and Fanny can
gloat over the advantages of elevated consciousness: "She was
soon meditating and masturbating and finding herself dissolved
into the cosmic All. Delicious."

    Walker's relentless adherence to her own sociopolitical
agenda makes for frequently striking propaganda. But affecting
fiction demands something more: characters and events in
conflict, thoughts striking sparks through the friction of
opposing beliefs. The cumbersome ideological weight of The
Temple of My Familiar will lead some, probably many, to praise
it as a novel of ideas. But it is something else entirely, and
disturbingly: a novel of allegations.