Learning to Blame Our Mothers -- Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker

Negro women, said the doctor, are considered the most difficult of all people to be effectively analyzed. Do you know why?...Negro women, the doctor says into my silence, can never be analyzed effectively because they can never bring themselves to blame their mothers...  

I just finished reading Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy, and wish I had read it much sooner.  Although, I'm not sure if I would have been able to appreciate it as much years ago. The passage above appears early in the novel when the protagonist, a young woman named Tashi (AKA Evelyn) who went mad after she decided to have herself "bathed" -- a euphemism for genital cutting/mutilation, met for the first time an American psychiatrist. Initially, I found the doctor's observation a bit peculiar, even offensive. However, it stayed with me through the remainder of the story.  In fact, it seems that Tashi's story surrounds her efforts to do exactly that, learn how to blame her mother.

I don't believe the doctor meant blame our mothers for the mistakes we make, especially the type of mistakes one associates with youth. I believe he means that we carry the grief and burdens of our mothers; we perpetuate and reflect their oppression unquestionably. That we can easily blame a misogynistic society and all the violent acts that come from it (emotionally, spiritually, and physically) on men. However, it never occurs to us to blame our mothers for passing down and advocating the ideas and practices that keep women (all women) oppressed. (Walker, for natural reasons, takes note to use the word "enslaved" where one could easily use "oppressed" to do describe woman's plight.)

 The doctor says our inability to blame our mothers prevents black (and I believe black and brown women everywhere) from being effectively treated for psychosis. It cripples our ability to resolve the things that literally could drive us insane. It cripples our ability to become truly free.

At the end of the story, "the secret of joy," is revealed to be "RESISTANCE." Thus, can our lack of joy, of freedom, be rooted in our inability to blame our mothers for not resisting? For allowing their daughters to become victims of the same cruelty they suffered, to even encourage it? For allowing their sons to become the men who inflict such pain, who feel that they are men only via the oppression of women?

As I reflect on this book and ask myself why this passage has set off an "explosion" in mind, I think about how I have very few close male friends. All of them, those who have been around for years, have come from the wombs of women who have resisted, or at least cultivated the strength of resistance in their sons, even if they could not resist the oppression of their husband and fathers. All of whom I would be happy to have in my daughter's life, and that's saying more than I could express in this post.  This doesn't mean that I have not fallen for or befriended the type of  men I am not so proud to have called my own; men, who at the time, were good enough for my sunken self-esteem, but who would meet a bullet if the type ever sought the company of my daughter. However, the men who sprout from the wombs of resistance are those who I have loved (romantically or within a platonic friendship); I know they will be in my life for as long as I am on Earth. The others, some of whom I cannot even remember their names, have been long forgotten, never deserved a page in my journal, or hurt me in such an emotionally or physically violent way that my pain has sealed them from my conscious mind.

It feels so new, even a bit frightening to think about such things, because at this point in my life I am not particularly righteous, or resistant. I've always, even now when asked, labeled myself a womanist/feminist.  However, I now wonder if I still own the right to that label.

Blame them for what, I asked. Blame them for anything, said he. It is quite a new thought. And, surprisingly, sets off a kind of explosion in the soft, dense cotton wool of my mind.

Tashi, throughout the story, blames her plight and the death of a sister who died while she was being "bathed" on the village tsunga (Walker's fictional word for the woman who perform the ritual). During the climax of the story, Tashi and the tsunga (who has now become a "monument to her country") are discussing the death of Tashi's sister.  The tsunga asks Tashi why she has never blamed her mother for her sister's death, for it is her mother who helped to hold her sister down as she was being mutilated. It was her mother who initiated the ritual even though she new her daughter's blood did not clot as quickly as it should. It was her mother who never explained to Tashi the circumstances under which her daughter had died, under which her daughter had been, well, murdered. Even though these facts are obvious, Tashi struggles to come to terms with them and never seems to blame her mother. Maybe, indeed, it was not the act of mutilation that sent Tashi mad, but her inability to blame her mother for her sister's death? Or at least some combination of the two.

I've yet to find the strength to blame my mother, her mother, my aunts, and other motherly figures in my life. I have never been able to blame my mother for (at least through the eyes of a child) putting the happiness of men before my own; I blame her illness. I never blame her for not treating her illness. Thus, I have always been able to forgive her; I have always allowed her to return to my life only to bear her burdens again. However, I have always been able to blame my father for his absence; I have never blamed his alcoholism. I believe that if it was the other way around, maybe I could begin forgive him?

I have never been able to blame one of my aunts for her coldness, her bitterness, her jadedness; I blame her ex-husband for destroying her life, her happiness, instead of blaming her for her inability to resist the depression that consumes her. Thus, I tolerate her judgment, her perpetual criticism, and the fact that she can just be a downright Bitch sometimes. I have yet to blame my grandmother for her submission to men and the fact that she encourages me to do the same; I blame her generation. Thus, I regard her advice as wisdom. I don't blame my other aunt for her annoyingly passive ways and hoarding; I blame her father who left her when she needed his strength the most. Thus, I am one of her many enablers.

I have yet to blame my mothers; I have yet to possess the secret of joy. I only pray that as I grow, so will my resistance. I only can hope that my own daughter will find the courage to blame me.

2016 © Stephanie M. Henderson