"In Uncle Rafe's house Suwelo always seemed to himself to be in a rather idle state of mind. His life had stopped, at least the life he thought he was building with Fanny, at he was suspended. He sometimes felt literally as if his feet did not touch upon the ground. It was a relief. And at times too, he simply thought, something that money, enough to keep you going for a while without worrying, permitted you to do. Another of the many advantages of the rich, but only if they were clever enough not to ruin this idle time by thinking about their money.""But this little woman -- she was a white woman, and she had a black woman helping her -- she started to agitate on the mainland about the condition of the Island children, and pretty soon whole big boatloads of white people came to look us over. It was the first time I'd seen so many! They were in many different shapes and sizes and very healthy from having eaten our food all their lives. I didn't know this then, of course; how they had sound teeth because mine were rotted' how they could afford glasses to help them see, while my friend Eddie couldn't see beyond his nose and would never learn to heard; how they...well, you get the picture. They all had a distinct quality of being apart from real life. It was like they were on one side of a glass and were were on the other, and we could have no real impact on what happened on their side, the side of the unknown, but they could have a great deal of impact on us. And i felt that was because we were were life was. For even in our frailty, we laughed. So much was so funny to us! They could not laugh freely. Their faces were life fists. When they almost touched you, they grew confused and looked about to see what the others in the group did. We gathered in clumps, digging our bare toes into the sand, and looked at them as if they were a zoo. Only one man, short, fat, and disheveled, had come to be alive with or without us. He head for the beach out in the front of the school and took off most of his clothes, never looking at us. He took out a jar of liquid soap and started blowing bubbles. Pretty soon we were all out there with him chasing the bubbles and watching them float out into the bay.""There was a period in the sixties when I passed myself off as a griot. I pretended I'd traveled to Africa and learned the stories of the diaspora straight from the old storytellers and record keepers there. I didn't have to go anywhere. I remembered quite enough of the story to tell, thank you. There was a little white woman professor who came to one of my lectures about the crossing of the Atlantic in a slave ship. She was one of those Afrophiles who was so protective of Africa that she claimed Idi Amin was framed. She got up and said "I wish you'd try not to say "I remember thus and so" about your African experiences. It is claiming more than you could possible know, and besides that, it is confusing.' Well, I apologized for that. It just slipped out. I did remember everything I was talking about, though, but I new the professional way to present my experience was as if it had merely been told to me. Some people don't understand that is the nature of the eye to have seen forever, and the nature of the mind to recall anything that was ever known. Or that was the nature, I should say, until man started to put things on paper."On Elvis Presley: "That in him white Americans found a reason to express their longing and appreciation for the repressed Native America and black parts of themselves. Those non-European qualities they have within them and all around them, constantly, but which they've been trained from birth to deny.""On we talked into the night, listening to the crickets and appreciating the warm brilliance of the stars. People are called 'stars' not only because they shine -- with the glow of self-expression and the satisfaction this brings -- but because the qualities they exemplify are, as far as human lives are concerned, eternal.""Ola says he is convinced that human beings want, above all else, to love eachother freely, regardless of tribe, and that when they're finally able to do it openly - although the true essence of the person they've focused on is camouflaged by society's dictation - there is always the telltale quality of psychic recognition -- that is to say, hysteria; the weeping of the womb.""But they were all three of them rare people, Suwelo thought, for they had connected directly with life and not with its reflection; the mysteries they found themselves involved in, simply being alive and knowing each other, carried them much deeper into reality than "society" often permits people to get. They had found themselves born into fabulous, mysterious universe, filled with fabulous, mysterious others; they had never been distracted from the wonder of this gift. They made the most of it.""They believed that all that has ever happened is stored in the memories within the human mind, or in the head granary of those who alone on earth think of what is just. The life of my people is to remember forever; each head granary is full. The life of your people is to forget; your think granaries ('museums') and not yourselves, are full. I can tell you truthfully ('eyes steady, heart calm') that meeting your people was a terrible shock (' small children running away'). Your people are most afraid of what you have been; you have no faith that you were as good as or better than what you are now. This is not our way ('path'). Not only were we as good in the beginning as we are now, but we are the same ('two grains of sand, identical').
Alice Walker is reputedly one of the most well-known, yet most difficult post-modern authors to read, and The Temple of My Familiar makes both of these reputations known. Why is it difficult? In an effort to present life, and I mean life as in the history of man (and other creatures) in this world throughout time, there's no doubt that the result of this feat would be a difficult read. Walker's novel travels in a non-linear way through time, covering South America, North America, Africa, and England, among others. With such an all-encompassing focus on "human" history, Walker can focus neither on one time period or one character. Walker achieves this by use of a different ordering principle than we normally use to recognize time, i.e., past lives. She takes fantastic liberties with the presentation of the past and human origins, telling a matriarchal creation story where the men attempt the emulate the perfect art form of female childbirth and pregnancy. Walker also presents an arboreal past that is possibly an evolutionary history, and the most utopic of all the worlds in the novel.With these stories and multi-faceted characters, Walker communicates that in every other person, there is a piece of ourselves and our histories, that from within one person, our entire past exists. She communicates the Jungian philosophy of the collective unconscious being connected back through time and culture in significant ways. It is with this that one of the characters, Mary Jane, claims that "we all touch each other's lives in ways we can't begin to imagine."Such off-the-wall stories and complicated concepts add to the difficulty of the read while at the same time encouraging the readers to swallow a world that is so unlike their "normal" ones. This world of magic realism, an art form perfected by Walker and fellow writer, Toni Morrison, is one that makes for a refreshing and engrossing read. The characters are unforgettable, the historical and visual backdrops breathtaking. Names like Carlotta, Fanny, Hal, Lulu, Suwelo, and Lissie will forever remain portraits of amazing people that live in my mind beyond Walker's intricate telling.Suwelo himself speaks of the "rare people...[who are:] connected directly with life and not with its reflection." It is this ultimate person that I believe Walker wants to present, create and/or reach with the readers of this story. With this, Walker's confusing journey becomes almost a dramatization of how she feels the universe itself works.
Do You like book The Temple Of My Familiar (2004)?
is there a bookshelf called "to re-read?" this is definitely one of those. and i'm not even done with it.several metaphors come to life in this book, but one scene that I see as representative of the entire novel, is where Lissie is showing Suwelo several different pictures of herself taken in one day. Except the woman in each picture is distinctly different from the next. and from the clothing you can tell that they are also different time periods. but they are all of Lissie. Lissie explains that everyone has an infinite number of different "selves", and she remembers who she is in each picture. and each chapter of "Temple of My Familiar" is like a different picture of the same person, and this is the essence and truth about life- the interconnectedness of everything and everyone. and so many, many stories! Some interlocking, some not, some stories are of people telling a story of someone else telling a story. one crazy story is about a trip to the natural history museum in DC and seeing an exhibit that is replicates an african village that no longer exists becaues it was destroyed by slavery and civil wars. The narrator thinks she sees a mannequin in the display but it turns out the mannequin is an actual human being, a young woman in traditional attire who LIVES in the exhibit! She learns that the museum "lets" this woman, the last of her people, live in her "natural environment". All day she weaves beautiful tapestries in front of an audience. Creeeeepy shit.
—Nicole
Walker's book is a challenging read, in many aspects of 'challenge.' Walker's book follows the intertwinings of a particular family throughout all of known (and unknown) history. Through this device, Walker proposes her own alternate mythology of origin, a state of grace where humans and animals lived in peace until the formation of race and gender caused a fall into arrogance and violence. We see characters of all genders, orientations, and ethnic backgrounds struggling with survival and the difficulty of relationships. This presents the first sort of challenge: it is difficult to read stories of rape, torture, enslavement, and degradation, especially as a white male person of some privilege. But the powerful pull of Walker's writing kept me reading instead of the easy fix of putting down the book and walking away. The plainly ideological bent of the book is what presents the flip side of the challenge: Walker's insistence on her agenda is so forceful at times that it overwhelms her prose and threatens the narrative, which would again make it easy to put the book down and walk away. (Hence the three-star review rather than something higher). I would still recommend this book, difficult as it is in many ways, as a portrayal of the difficulty of human relationships when they are based on hierarchy, greed, and fear - particularly if you're one of the folks on the top side of the heap for now.
—Jeremy Garber
“Long will we remember pain, but the pain itself, as it was at that point of intensity that made us feel as if we must die of it, eventually vanishes. Our memory of it becomes its only trace. Walls remain. They grow moss. They are difficult barriers to cross, to get to others, to get to closed-down parts of ourselves.” - Alice Walker, The Temple of my FamiliarIt’s quite an intimidating feat to review this book. The Temple of my Familiar is such a rich, multi-layered story, the kind that you can ruminate on days after you’ve finished reading it, as I’m doing now. To me, this book is more than a story, it’s an education and it’s also a challenge. Walker educates by giving us facts and opinions on literature, race, gender, feminism among other topics. It challenges our preconceptions while offering alternative worldviews in areas such as race, religion, patriarchy and the like. As it’s Walker, it’s only expected that political statements are made. In this case, one of the most profound ones was the “whitewashing” of history due to the impact of colonialism. African playwright Abajeralasezeola's critique of colonialism is emphatic: "Clean out your ears: THE WHITE MAN IS STILL HERE. Even when he leaves, he is not gone." I found that powerful as a reminder that Africa and other places are still under the scourge of colonialism, albeit modern day colonialism. If this weren't the case, we would know our history. Walker posits that we are barred from knowing our ancient selves, from being who we truly are, from being because of this blockage . We have lost the connection: “You cannot curse a part without damning the whole. That is why Mother Africa, cursed by all her children, black, white, and in between, is dying today, and, after her, death will come to every other part of the globe.” The characters in the book were memorable. Miss Lissie was the most interesting to me, being a woman who had been reincarnated several times and had fascinating past lives. Following closely behind in the intrigue category was Miss Fannie, who was constantly falling in love with spirits.I think this book is for everyone but there are passages that I believe will speak more strongly to women. For example, this line by Miss Lissie said “But what I refused to give up was my essence; nor could I. For it was simply this: I did not share their vision of reality, but have, and cherish my own.” At the very least, everyone should read The Gospel According to Shug: http://www.fantasymaps.com/stuff/shug...
—Rowena
