The Temple of My Familiar
By Alice Walker
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 416 pages, $19.95
On its surface, Alice Walker`s new narrative, ”The Temple of My Familiar,” can be read as a colorful quilt of many patches, one that includes remnants from, and reminiscences of, Walker`s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
”The Color Purple.” The book doesn`t have a conventionally linear, closed plot and a three-dimensional development of characters. Instead, frequent and abrupt shifts in time, place and people-from the prehistoric world in which animals and humans live in natural harmony to the contemporary world of man-made conflicts among all species-mark the many microsections of this multivocal, anecdotal novel.
On a deeper level, though, ”The Temple of My Familiar” can be read as an ambitious postmodern romance, a book whose stylized lovers, remembrances of things past, bold flights of fantasy and vision of a brave new world of cultural diversity and cosmic harmony challenge the reader`s willingness to suspend disbelief. As a sequel to ”The Color Purple,” it is a major achievement.
In her fiction and essays, Walker affirms a profound respect for the mystery and spirituality of life, which she considers the ”one thing African- Americans have retained of their African heritage.” This celebration of the spiritual kinship of all things, which she calls animism, is, for her,
”deeper than any politics, race or geographical locations.”
Guided by the spirit and achievement of Zora Neale Hurston, Walker also affirms a contemporary black American feminist`s vision of the lives of Southern African-Americans. In ”The Third Life of Grange Copeland” (1970),
”Meridian” (1977) and ”The Color Purple” (1982), she exposed the oppression of Southern black women and celebrated their struggles for communal wholeness-as they turned for support more to each other than to working-class black men and middle-class whites.
”The Temple of My Familiar” is dominated by Suwelo, whose ”generation of men had failed women-and themselves.” Suwelo is a self-indicting degenerate whose exploitation of his wife, Fanny Nzingha; of prostitutes; and of Carlotta, a college literature teacher, is associated with his addiction to pornography. Suwelo`s inheritance of his great-uncle Rafe`s Baltimore house is the focal point for the central characters` memories, dreams and stories-especially his own, his wife`s and those of Hal and Lissie, his uncle`s friend and wife, who were raised on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina.
According to Suwelo, Fanny-a psychic, feminist teacher and masseuse who was raised by her grandmothers, Celie and Shug (of ”The Color Purple”)-is
”a body with many spirits shooting off to different realms almost every day.” Periodically falling in love with spirits, she ”found the spirit that possessed her first in herself. Then she found the historical personage who exemplified it. It gave her the strange aspect of a trinity-she, the spirit, the historical personage, all sitting across the table from you at once.”
Fanny`s letters to Suwelo from Africa, complemented by the memories of her mother, Olivia, reconstruct the historical and spiritual ties between Celie and Shug. They also reveal the ties between Fanny and her father, Ola, an anti-imperialist playwright who, like all of the men in the book, has failed women.
The book`s most bizarre flights into other realms of experience, both historical and fantastical, are related by the characters Zede and Lissie. Continuing the tradition of the mother whose name she bears, Zede sews resplendent head-dresses and capes of bird feathers for gays and rock stars. In the course of a love affair with her son-in-law, Arveyda, she travels through Mexico and Central and South America. Revisiting the magical scenes where her female ancestors were goddesses and priests, she relives their South American experiences and introduces the book`s multicultural motifs.
Even more magical are the memories, dreams and stories shared with Suwelo by Lissie, whose name signifies ”the one who remembers everything”-although she confesses not remembering earlier lives in Egypt, the African birthplace of Isis.
Isis, we learn from Fanny, was the ”mother of Horus, sister and lover of Osiris, Goddess of Egypt. The Goddess, who, long before she became Isis, was known all over Africa as simply the Great Mother, Creator of All, Protector of All, the Keeper of the Earth. The Goddess.”
Herself the mother of five children, Lissie has lived many lives-as a witch doctor, sorceress, preacher, white man and lion, among others. Yet, after listening to Suwelo`s anecodotes about his exploitation of women, she concludes dispassionately: ”Men are dogs.”
In its celebration of the Goddess within us all and of the color blue,
”The Temple of My Familiar” is clearly a sequel to ”The Color Purple.”
The thematic significance of the title is suggested when Lissie recalls her dream of the temple as ”a simple square one-room structure, very adobe or Southwestern-looking . . . painted a rich dust coral . . . (with) lots of designs-many turquoise and deep blue . . . painted around the top.”
Turquoise, is ”a color of cleansing of body and spirit, of the clarification of memories, and of powerful healing.” Earlier, Olivia recalls Celie`s facination with the color blue. ”This is a blue that . . . gave off energy . . . power. A person wearing this blue was suddenly more confident, stronger, more present and intense than ever before.” And the familiar (or animal spirit) of Lissie`s dream was like a pet, ”a small, incredibly beautiful creature that was part bird . . . part fish . . . part reptile . . . . Its predominant color was blue.”
Lissie`s dream of this strange, chameleonic creature, whose freedom she unsuccessfully tries to confine, suggests the central theme of the book: Vital relationships are betrayed and destroyed when one disrespects the spiritual energy of other beings.
A magical, trans-historical, cross-cultural, multivocal blend of fact and fiction that employs realistic details in the service of fantasy, ”The Temple of My Familiar” will delight some and disappoint others. As Lissie says in one of her reincarnations: ”It is hard for people to comprehend the things that I remember . . . . I swallowed past experiences all my life, as I divulged those that I thought had a chance, not of being believed . . . but of simply being imagined, fantasied.”
