LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 11 : 8 August 2011
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.

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Female Circumcision: Myth and Fact in
Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy

Gulab Singh, Ph D.

One of the targets of Alice Walker’s critical exposure has been the taboo territory of female circumcision being practiced in a number of African communities. Alice Walker is a crusader against this inhuman practice and uses all her means as an artist to attack this custom with a view to freeing the society from this scourge. This is evident from the way she lays bare the horrors of this brutal sexist practice in her fiction, prose writings and in a documentary which she prepared in collaboration with London-based Indian film maker, Pratibha Parmar. This film, Warrior Marks, shown in the United States, created a stir in American society, especially in the Afro-American community. Drawing attention to the magnitude of this problem, she estimates in her book, entitled Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women that “one hundred million women in African, Asian and Middle-Eastern countries have been genitally mutilated causing unimaginable physical pain and suffering."(Walker:55)

Possessing the Secret of Joy

Walker has been in the front line of those writers, journalists and women organizations who have led a campaign for the last two decades against this practice. In her novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy she has dealt with this theme in depth and detail providing flashes of insight into the causes of the prevalence of this custom as well as its consequences on the life of its victims like Tashi.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Gulab Singh, Ph.D.
Dean
Faculty of Arts and Languages
BPS Women University
Khanpur Kalan
(Sonipat)
Haryana
India
gulabchillar@gmail.com
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