Getting Close to Animals with Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar

Robert McKay
University of Sheffield

Alice Walker’s novel suggests that the ability to use language, regarded in this article as equivalent to one sense of the word, "representation," separates or marks the fundamental difference between humans and animals. Although this indicates that representation creates a distance between humans and animals, the novel offers a way to bridge this gap in order that representation, in a second sense of speaking or advocating for animals can effectively occur. Importantly, the explicit context for this is Walker’s anti-oppressive politics of race, gender, sexuality, and class. I analyze the novel’s portrayal of characters that understand their lives, the past, and their relationships with animals by creating myths and stories, rather than via conventional written history. Through this, I show that, for Walker, this imaginative and creative understanding of worldviews other than the norm of western culture allows the distance that language insinuates between humans and animals to be removed. Creative, imaginative understanding, for Walker, allows humans to get close to animals.

It is generally taken for granted that in the real world-that is, outside of imaginative or literary creations-nonhuman animals do not speak. Even in classic fictional examples of talking animals such as Aesop’s Fables or The Jungle Book, it is easily understood that animals are simply voicing human ideas and concerns and are certainly, in no sense, speaking for themselves. Despite research on chimpanzees’ use of sign language, and even if we allow that animals can communicate to us some elemental needs or wishes, it is usually agreed that real communication between humans and animals, such as on the level that occurs when one human speaks to another, is impossible. That is to say, humans’ use of language separates them from other animals. Or, more precisely, with their lack of language, animals must always be thought of as at a distance from humans in a way that humans are not separated from one another.

Lippit (2000) has demonstrated very clearly recently the strength with which this latter conviction has been held in the history of ideas. In a comprehensive survey of notions of “the animal” in the history of western philosophy, Lippit describes the latter’s overwhelming conclusion that although human beings “can project anthropomorphic characteristics onto the animal or experience emotions (such as pathos or sympathy) in response to its being, an impenetrable screen¾language¾divides the loci of human and animal being” (p. 179). This seemingly uncontentious theory, familiar outside philosophy as the taboo on anthropomorphism in scientific reports on animal behavior, is iterated clearly by a character in Walker’s novel, first published in 1989, The Temple of My Familiar: “our language [animals] will never speak; not from lack of intelligence, but from the different construction of their speaking apparatus. In the world of man, someone must speak for them” (Walker, 1990, p. 226). In the ensuing analysis, I will examine the basis and many implications of this assertion through the ways in which animals are “spoken for” in and by Walker’s novel.

In order to effect a speaking for animals, the novel repeatedly strains, and indeed conclusively breaks, the limits of what we might think of as a realistic description of the world. Specifically, Walker (1990) often engages in a sort of creative myth-making, in which the story of Genesis is re-written through the story of one of the book’s main protagonists, Lissie, who is quoted above. In Lissie, Walker creates a character who remembers past lives in which her encounters with animals contradict this culturally powerful description of the origin of humanity as marking a development away from the animal. Disregarding the search for one empirically viable truth, Walker’s myth-writing is profoundly anti-realistic and shifts her novel from the genre of realism into what would be better described as the genre of fantasy or fantastic literature.

Describing the political motivation that often lies behind a writer’s choice to step outside of conventional reality, Rosemary Jackson has written of this genre that “the fantastic traces the unseen and unsaid of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made ‘absent’” (Braendlin, 1996, p. 54). Thus, the genre of fantasy is particularly appealing to the writer who sees the influential human-created narratives by which our world is understood as suppressing other, more politically desirable ways to understand it. For Walker, the story of Genesis is just such a narrative, and so this ability to speak the unspoken is perhaps the clearest reason why the fantastic mode is employed to “speak for animals.” In my analysis of the novel, though, I will explain in more detail the logic behind Walker’s use of the fantastic genre and rewriting of Genesis, which fundamentally lies in her desire to reverse the direction of human development as Genesis describes it, the direction away from animals. Rather than insisting on their separation, then, Walker takes her characters and readers close to animals.

Rewriting Genesis: Representing Animals

Since this article includes much discussion about “the representation of animals,” it will serve well at the outset to begin by analyzing a section of The Temple of My Familiar that stages¾in the context of animals¾the two-sided concept of representation as I will be using it here. I will use “representation” in the senses of (a) the presentation of phenomena by means of words or images that act as symbols for the things they represent-the word “dog”, or an image of a dog, represents a particular species of furry mammal, or individual of that species- and (b) someone’s acting as a proxy, or advocate for another, in the sense that politicians represent their constituents. These two senses of representation might be helpfully understood as (a) “speaking about” and (b)”speaking for.”

The scene that stages the concept of representation involves two of the novel’s central characters: Suwelo, a middle-aged African-American professor of history, is listening to the voice of Lissie, a remarkable old woman of the same ethnicity who was the lover of his great-uncle and whom Suwelo, in the course of the novel, comes to view as a wise mentor and guide. Toward the end of the book, speaking to Suwelo on a tape that has been sent to him after her death, Lissie relates a story in which she describes from memory one of her many past lives. In these previous incarnations that have taken place from prehistory to recent centuries, her race, gender, and even species are not fixed, so that she has been variously white, male, and- in one instance- a lion. These past lives, as they are narrated by Lissie, resemble the stories and creation-myths, particularly the book of Genesis, through which Judeo-Christian culture came to understand its own origins, and can be seen as Walker’s re-writings of them. On the tape, Lissie describes a particularly distant past life as a white boy, approaching adulthood and living with his mother and the other women in a sexually segregated black tribe. Importantly, Lissie notes that in this lifetime humans and animals form part of the same community:

In the days of which I am speaking, people met other animals in much the same way people today meet each other. You were sharing the same neighbourhood after all. You used the same water, you ate the same foods, you sometimes found yourself peering out of the same cave waiting for a downpour to stop. (Walker, 1990, p. 393)
Furthermore, the women of the tribe are accompanied by “familiars,” to whom the book’s title refers. These are companion animals of a special kind-contrasted specifically with contemporary “pets” (Walker, 1990, p. 138)-who live entirely independently from, yet enjoy a relationship of reciprocal physical and emotional care with, their human companions. Lissie’s mother in this past life has as her familiar an adult lion named Husa, yet animals in this life display no aggression or danger to humans, as Lissie explains: “[t]his perhaps sounds strange to you, Suwelo. About the lions, I mean. But it is true. This was long ago, before the animals had any reason to fear us and none whatever to try to eat us” (Walker, 1990, p. 393).

Clearly, then, there is a sense of togetherness of humans and animals in this life, a togetherness that seems impossible today when most people think, Lissie claims, that "a lion is some curiosity in a zoo, or some thing that cares about tasting their foul flesh if they get out of the car in Africa" (Walker, 1990, p. 394). Eventually, however, this togetherness comes to an end when Lissie-a boy in this past life-is expected to find a mate. The girl he meets has her own familiar, with whom she is especially close, a serpent named Ba. Immediately after their sexual coupling, the boy comes to recognize his racial difference, the whiteness (apparently the result of what we would now term a genetic mutation) that his mother had always hidden from him by the application of pigmented ointment. Taken to a reflective pool by the girl, he sees his whiteness and looked, Lissie tells Suwelo “as though I had no skin” (Walker, p. 398). Recognizing her partner’s thorough trauma by this recognition, the boy’s mate seeks to comfort him, displaying once again the human-animal relatedness that obtained in this past life:

She was crying as much as I was, and beating her breasts. For we had learned mourning from the giant apes, who taught us to feel grief anywhere around us, and to reflect it back to the sufferer, and to act it out. But now this behaviour made me sick. I picked up a stick and chased her away. (Walker, 1998, p. 398)
As his mate’s familiar defends her, the boy kills Ba in a final act of violence caused by the repression of his grief. “In my rage I struck it, a brutal blow, with my club, so hard a blow that I broke its neck, and it fell without a sound to the ground.” Finally, the boy’s mate retrieves Ba’s broken body and abandons him. (Walker, 1998, p. 399)
This memory, as recounted by Lissie, can be seen as a feminist anti-racist re-enacting of the story of the fall in the book of Genesis. Eve’s temptation of Adam under the evil influence of the serpent-in a feminist reading, the story of humanity’s (primarily Man’s) loss of sexual innocence, of the moment that the difference between the sexes is first perceived and patriarchy instituted-becomes, in Lissie’s story, the boy’s unwarranted aggression toward the girl, born out of the repressed pain of his racial difference or imperfection. Oppression by gender and race, Walker suggests, are at the heart of this most powerful biblical myth of human origins. It is in the boy’s murder of the serpent, however, that Walker’s rewriting of Genesis through the understanding of gender and race is developed to make a point about animals. The murder of the serpent Ba- no longer a diabolical tempter but the closest companion of Lissie’s mate- in Lissie’s mythological past life makes visible the way that animals are totally shut out, separated from the human community as Genesis defines it. The serpent in Genesis, acting from the beginning as an agent of evil intent on the human couple, is as separate from them as they are connected to one another. The power of the Genesis story of temptation, Walker suggests, lies in its ability to separate humans and animals.

Yet, the recollection of Lissie’s past life does not end with the boy’s racially based aggression toward his mate and her familiar and the exile from his community that it causes. Indeed, as it concludes, Walker’s most pertinent questions about the representation of animals are asked. Alone, the boy enjoys an all too brief period of care by his mother’s familiar, Husa, during which the lion gives him the skin of one of the already lame animals he has killed. As Lissie relates, she uses it as clothing:

With a stone I battered it into a shape that I could drape around myself. I found a staff to support me in my walks and represent “my people [italics added].”
Husa left.
And now I gradually made a discouraging discovery. The skin that Husa gave me … frightened all the animals with whom I came into contact.… They ran from me as if from the plague. And I was totally alone for many years. (Walker, 1990, p. 400 )
Thus, the post-lapsarian boy of Lissie’s past, exiled from his human community by the murder of the serpent Ba, ends up-just as did Adam and Eve-exiled from the animals also. Importantly, Walker explicitly indicates the context of this exile: the boy’s desire as a result of his loneliness to assume power over a fictional tribe by “representing”-that is, symbolizing by means of a staff-“his” people. It is precisely this ability to represent, to make one thing stand for another, that is the very essence of human language in which a written mark (the word we use) stands for the thing it represents. From this vantage, we can see Walker’s suggestion that the very notion of representation-language-marks the moment at which human community with animals is lost. As my analysis of her re-writing of the Genesis story shows, however, lying behind this separation of humans and animals is its cause: the power of white male patriarchy over women and animals, enacted in the boy’s murder of his mate’s familiar.

So, while in this sense the human representation of animals, as of anything else, appears to move us further apart from animals, the political context to which Walker draws our attention (racism/sexism/animal abuse) offers the way in which the representation of animals-in my second sense, of advocacy or “speaking for”-might bring humans and animals closer together. If, as Walker’s re-writing of Genesis suggests, the use of language in Judeo-Christian culture is intimately related to its history of oppressing people of color, women, and animals, then the separation of humans and animals that language or representation inflicts would be avoided by finding a way to speak at the outset from this culture. Put simply, Lissie’s story of her past life suggests that the culture of the Judeo-Christian tradition, western culture, has driven humans and animals apart: To bring them closer, another story by which to understand our relationships with animals is needed. Through this, a political representation of animals that is faithful to them, a true speaking for animals, might be secured. I will now examine how Walker’s novel suggests that this might be done.

Alternative Histories, Unheard Voices: Speaking for Animals

Shortly before her death, Lissie writes a letter to Suwelo, in which, in contradistinction to the re-writing of Genesis entailed by the past life just analyzed, she describes an alternative, non-Judeo-Christian history of the relationship between women of color and animals. It is a story of people whose lives have gone unrecorded in conventional western history. Of central importance to this alternative history is the figure of the witch, which Lissie has also been in a previous incarnation. Lissie writes that the witches of medieval Europe were in fact women (often women of color) who had a specially close relationship with animals. Following from the argument of the previous section, being human and language-using women may have resulted in being separated from animals. Yet, in the history Lissie outlines, although they cannot communicate fully, women in the Middle Ages were not as divorced from the community of animals as men:

woman … kept alive some feeling for the other animals, though she was reduced to caring and feeding one small house cat. … We never forgot it should be possible to communicate with anything that had big enough eyes! So there we were, the dark women, muttering familiarly to every mouse or cow or goat about the place. (Walker, 1990, pp. 225-226)
Lissie suggests that one reason why the notion of the “witch” as we currently understand it appeared in the medieval period under the influence of the Spanish Inquisition was to meet men’s need to subdue this relationship with animals. Lissie, remembering her past life as a witch, tells Suwelo that “[t]he inquisitors, set in place to control us, declared consorting with animals a crime, punishable by being burned at the stake!” (Walker, 1990, p. 226). Here, the inquisitors’ law that criminalizes “consorting with animals” and calls its perpetrators “witches” in effect invents a legal category called “witch” that can be used to describe such women. By being too close to animals, this suggests, some women called into question the inquisitors’ belief that to be human is to be different from animals. And in order to maintain this belief, the inquisitors used the law to define such women as inhuman “witches."

Moreover, as Lissie continues, this legal foreclosure of human-animal communication is reinforced by other cultural methods:

The inquisitors claimed we were fucked and suckled by bulls and goats and all manner of malformed animal creatures. For good measure, they gave their devil- the black thing that represented the people they most despised and wished to be separate from- sharp cloven hoofs and pointed horns, a tail. They made it seem not only natural, but also righteous to kill … any animal or dark creature that one saw. (Walker, 1990, p. 226)
Lissie suggests that through these derogatory images or representations of women and animals- and ultimately through the force of written law- the cultural constructions of the white male inquisitors leave no space for alternative realities, such as that of the “witches,” women who maintained a close relationship to animals. Furthermore, although conventional written history consistently fails to recognize this, theirs is literally a silent story. An epigraph to the letter in which Lissie is writing makes clear these initial and subsequent erasures: “They burned us so thoroughly we did not even leave smoke.” (Walker, 1990, p. 221)

It is with this erasure of history, however, that we reach an important point in Walker’s understanding of the representation of animals. First, in order to make these points about witches and animals, she relies on an understanding that both the law and history are powerful ways for the people who write them to silence others. She has recognized a point made by Fudge (in press) that if “our only access to animals in the past is through documents written by humans, then we are never looking at animals, only ever at the representation of the animals by humans.” She develops this into the recognition of the power that such representations (in my first sense) have to hide from view the animals (or witches) they represent. As Fudge notes in her discussion of the possibility of writing a history of animals in this light, the fact that “[r]epresentation is always-already inevitable” means that “the real animal can disappear” from our understanding (Fudge). In this sense, human representations fail animals and the “witches” who have a close relationship with them. So, language, now understood as language controlled by the interests of the inquisitors (or representation as “speaking about”), separates humans and animals. With the figure of the witch in the story of Lissie’s past lives, however, Walker offers some recuperation from this state of affairs.

Concluding her letter on the subject of language and the distance it creates between humans and animals, Lissie returns to the witch:

[O]ur language [animals] will never speak; not from lack of intelligence, but from the different construction of their speaking apparatus. In the world of man, someone must speak for them. And that is why, in a nutshell … goddesses and witches exist. (Walker, 1990, p. 226)
Having traced the creation of the witch in the suppression of women’s relationships with companion animals by the legal discourse of the Middle Ages, Lissie now claims for the witch a special ability: the representation (in my second sense of “speaking for”) of animals. Just as I have suggested that fantastic literature has the political power to speak the unspoken, so Walker’s imaginative creation, Lissie, reclaims the figure of the witch from its designation of evilness or inhumanity and sees it as a place in which animals can be spoken for. Indeed, although Lissie never claims to be a witch, she does regard herself in speaking for animals as a goddess (Walker, 1990, p. 409). For Walker, the power of both the goddess and the witch is that being supernatural they are not quite human and not quite animal. Thus at the borders of humanity, both goddess and witch provide imaginative ways to reappraise our cultural ideas of what being human is. Since, as Lissie’s description of the Inquisition makes clear, such ideas have been formed by criminalizing close communication with animals and silencing black women as witches, the witch provides an ideal figure to effect the particularly feminist, anti-racist context for the political representation of animals toward which I mentioned earlier. The figure of the witch offers the way for humans to speak for animals.

Here it might serve well to examine this notion in terms of animal advocacy, the most obvious contemporary context in which to understand the political representation of animals. The possibilities offered by Lissie in her figure of the witch, as I have described it, make it the imaginative counterpart of contemporary animal advocacy, as argued by Adams (1994). Looking to animal defense as a “progressive, anti-racist possibility” and often explicitly referring to Walker’s journalism, Adams insists on the need to recognize, in speaking for animals, the interconnected, yet different, abuses in our culture of (among other groups) women, animals, and the environment, people of color or who are gay or lesbian (Adams, pp. 71-84).

Yet, although the use of the image of the witch as a figurehead for the (political) representation of animals is remarkably powerful in its ability to indicate such a context for animal advocacy, that it appears to offer the only way to “speak for animals” is somewhat restrictive. Lissie might be seen as a paragon of virtue, the descriptions in her mythological past-lives of an elemental connection between women- often black women- and animals regarded as offering visions of a perfect past in which, were it possible to return to that past humanity might regain the community of animals described therein. Indeed, celebrating what she perceives as the novel’s recognition of an essential connection between women and animals, Scholtmeijer (1996) has written in an otherwise incisive article that “the inner animal, in Miss Lissie, and in all women, surfaces, to explain and render powerful that correspondence between women and animals” (p. 251). In what follows, however, I shall argue that the representation of animals in Walker’s novel is considerably more complex and illuminating than the apparently restrictive “speaking for animals” indicated by my analysis thus far.

Imaginative Understanding: Getting Close to Animals

I have argued that Walker addresses the problems inherent in the notion of humans representing animals. I have explained that, for Walker, human language as defined in western culture (representation as speaking about) separates humans and animals in the context of racism and misogyny. That animals and humans cannot communicate is the manifest result of this. I have developed this point to indicate that Lissie, by rewriting the history of the witch and imagining herself as a goddess, steps outside of western culture’s politically oppressive context. Hence, reducing the separation caused by human representation of (in the sense of “speaking about”) animals, she is able to get close enough to animals to speak for them.

In a broader context, my analysis shows that in her character of Lissie, Walker uses the creative power of the human imagination, especially as it occurs in the creation of stories, to traverse the distance that the fact of language insinuates between humans and animals, an aspect of the novel on which I will now concentrate. In her focus on the imagination, Walker foreshadows a point made by Coetzee (1999). A character, novelist Elizabeth Costello, is addressing an academic audience on the subject of the distance between humans and animals. She suggests that the imagination can bring the two close:

There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination. If you want proof, consider the following. Some years ago I wrote a book called The House on Eccles Street. To write that book I had to think my way into the existence of Marion Bloom … The point is Marion Bloom never existed. Marion Bloom was a figment of James Joyce’s imagination. If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life. (p. 35)
Walker, herself, has taken this point further, arguing that the very purpose of fictional writing is to use the imagination in this way and that the absence of life is not even a barrier to it:

[The] writer’s pen is a microphone held up to the mouths of ancestors and even stones of long ago. [Once] given permission by the writer … horses, dogs, rivers, and, yes, chickens can step forward and expound on their lives. The magic of this is not so much in the power of the microphone as in the ability of the nonhuman object or animal to be and the human animal to perceive its being. (Walker, 1988, p. 170)
In this sense, Walker (1998) and Coetzee (1999) equate the imaginative writer to the witch or goddess as exemplified by Lissie: He or she can get close to animals. I would argue, however, that the important aspect here is imagination and the ability to be creative in understanding others, rather than writing per se. Indeed, perhaps surprisingly in a written work, Walker’s novel explicitly denigrates writing, as we saw when the force of written law was used to criminalize witches and silence those women’s correspondence with animals. As I shall go on to argue, since, for Walker, the written word can be seen as holding the power of representation (in my first sense) to be oppressive, her celebration of the imaginative understanding of others emerges in proportion to its denigration.

This occurs first through Lissie’s past lives, which are always imaginative, though not “imaginary,” as she claims that they did happen (Walker, 1990, p. 80). Despite this claim, however, these past lives never attempt to achieve the status of objective, verifiable fact. It is important to remember that Lissie’s past lives are explicitly contrasted to official history, always appearing in the form of the narratives that she tells to Suwelo, himself (significantly) a professor of American history. The power of Lissie’s oral history forces him to recognize, for instance, that the written facts on which his knowledge is based are slanted toward the interests of white historians. In this, they ignore the stories of women, Native Americans, other people of color, animals- groups of individuals who do not fit their description of the past. Further abjuring the authoritative status of written history, Lissie describes the past lives in which she encounters community with animals as “dream memories”: “the memory, like the mind, has the capacity to dream, and just as the memory exists at a deeper level of consciousness than thinking, so the dream world of memory is at a deeper level still” (Walker, p. 99). Whether or not we agree with this description of consciousness, Walker’s point is clear that these memories aim at a realm of truth beyond written historical fact.

This distrust of the written word is dramatized explicitly in the text. Written documents of the past, when they do rarely appear in the novel, have a tenuous status. For example, one character reads the diary of her nineteenth century ancestor, Eleandra Burnham, and in it learns about the history of British Imperialism. Even before the diary has been completely read, it crumbles in its reader’s hands, having been eaten by moths (Walker, 1990, pp. 258-259). In it, Eleandra tells of a trip to the British Museum in which a captured indigenous African is housed as an exhibit. This colonial context reminds Eleandra of animals: “[a]nimals in zoos were afraid of me simply as another human being come to stare at them, but this was different somehow” (Walker, p. 250).

Elsewhere in the novel, Walker extends this understanding of the important place of animals and zoos in nineteenth century British colonialism, extensively documented by Ritvo (1987), to the perspective of contemporary global capitalism. As the novel opens, Zedé, a Guatemalan woman, crafts headdresses from peacock feathers. Hers, the most beautiful, are made from found feathers retrieved by Zedé’s daughter, not those plucked from the live peacocks whose “mournful cry” is distressing to her (Walker, 1990, p. 11). When, years later and living in 1970s San Francisco, the daughter, herself, makes headdresses for rich American rock stars, her own child is also able to “find” feathers by stealing them from the sweatshop where she works as a cleaner. By paralleling the two generations, Walker implies that the plight of peacocks and of sweatshop workers, of animals and oppressed peoples, must be understood in the context of one another, as I suggested earlier. The point is also reflected by the story of the captured native in the moth-eaten diary.

The diary’s disintegration is mirrored elsewhere. Fittingly enough, the letter in which Lissie narrates her alternative history of witches is written in special invisible ink, which disappears after being read only once (Walker, 1990, p. 225). Clearly, in both of these instances the powerful status of written history is being questioned. Furthermore, Lissie recalls a confrontation with a white woman professor after a lecture at which Lissie had been describing a past life as a slave of the middle passage. Although Lissie knew that “the professional way to present [her] experience was as if it had been merely told to [her],” she accidentally presents it in terms of actual memories. Recalling the professor’s correcting of her, Lissie tells Suwelo that:

[some] people don’t understand that it is … the nature of the mind to recall everything that was ever known. Or that was the nature, I should say, until man started to put things down on paper. The professor went on to say that she couldn’t even imagine what it must have been like on the slave ship. (Walker, p. 80)
For Lissie, written history itself, the period when “man started to put things down on paper,” blocks the imaginative understanding of others. In this instance, Lissie is discussing diasporic Africans, yet the point equally applies to the animals of her “dream memories.” Indeed, the white professor’s inability to imagine the conditions of the middle passage can be equated to a failure of imagination that separates humans and animals.

Just as each of these issues indicates Walker’s concern with the written word and the representations it offers, so too are photographic images problematized. Living in the house of his recently deceased uncle before his first meeting with Lissie, Suwelo notices that there are many faded patches on the wall where once there were photographs. Eventually, he discovers that these correspond to photographs of Lissie that she had hidden. However, when she gives him them, what he sees is “thirteen pictures of thirteen entirely different women” (Walker, 1990, p. 107), as it transpires that this photography has magically been able visually to capture Lissie’s various past lives.

This part of the novel is vital with respect to Walker’s understanding of representation, in my first sense of using words or images to stand for the phenomena they represent. First, the fact that Lissie’s past lives shine through in these magical and unusual pictures calls attention to the way that photographs, being only static images, reduce and simplify the complexity of life. Beyond any photograph, these pictures of Lissie suggest, is always a varied life history that cannot be captured. Just as Walker suggests that written history excludes the lives of people (or animals) not considered important, even photographs-what we might think of as the most realistic of representations-by their very nature exclude much.

Furthermore, Lissie’s hiding of the photographs from Suwelo until she knows he will be able to be accepting of her unconventional life story marks the connection between Walker’s disaffection with claims to factual truth in written or photographic representation, her belief in imagination and creativity rather than “facts,” and her concern to speak for animals. Lissie later tells Suwelo that, just as she had hidden the photographs, she has always had to hide her past lives. Particularly harrowing is that even though her empathetic husband knew about many of her past lives, she had repressed the memory of her past life as a white boy cared for by a lion because of his intense fear of white people and cats. It is only when she meets Suwelo, in whom she thinks this life stands a chance, not of being believed but “of simply being imagined, fantasized,” that she can divulge it (Walker, 1990, p. 402). It is not only the failure of photographic or written representations, Walker indicates here, that stands in the way of the closeness to animals described in Lissie’s memories being heard. Human separateness from animals is equally reinforced by the added failure of people to imagine the possibility of such a closeness. Rather than in the realm of written history, the realm of verifiable truth, it is only by “imagining” or “fantasising” the very possibility, the novel suggests, that people can get close to animals. In conclusion, I will explore the implications of this, Walker’s ultimate claim, for her desire to “speak for” animals.

Conclusion: Speaking for Animals

As I argued earlier, Lissie has been regarded by Scholtmeijer (1996) as a paragon of virtue, an example of what the critic perceives as the truth of an essential connection between women and animals. In addition, Scholtmeijer writes that the “speaking for animals” entailed by this truth culminates in the novel's having a vegetarian message (pp. 249-250). In this sense, it might be felt that the type of human-animal community that Lissie describes in her memories is the only acceptable one and that hers is the only way to understand human-animal relationships and closeness. This analysis would ignore, as just one example of many in the book, the importance that the wearing of feathers plays in maintaining the cultural identity of the displaced South American people who appear throughout the novel (Walker, 1990, p. 227). I would argue, however, that Walker’s promotion of imaginative understanding and the concomitant loss of faith in verifiable facts calls this analysis into question. Evidently wary of stable “truths” such as those claimed by Scholtmeijer, Walker instead insists that any such “truths” always retain the capacity to oppress other world-views.

Finally, this analysis is borne out in the story of Fanny; her mother, Olivia; her grandmother, Mama Celie; and her lesbian partner, Mama Shug. These latter women are to an extent moral exemplars in the novel, Mama Shug instituting a religion founded on, among other things, compassion for animals (Walker, 1990, pp. 317-319). Yet, it eventually becomes clear that Mama Celie, having herself been battered by her ex-husband, had for a long time repeated the pattern of this abuse by beating the family dog. Her compassion for animals only comes about when Mama Shug, having “liberated” the dog from his subservient acceptance of this and made him bite back, laughs at Mama Celie’s reversal of fortunes, embarrassing her (Walker, p. 344). Here, compassion is not a “truth,” inherent in Celie’s womanhood, but the consequence of a specific action.

More importantly, the novel also reveals that although Mama Shug and Mama Celie are exemplary in their actions toward others; their very competence as parents to both Olivia and her daughter, Fanny, creates a problem: Olivia comes to feel supplanted as a mother and eventually leaves the home, the gap left by her departure creating a deep sense of loss in Fanny. Fanny’s need to recover from this forms a large part of the novel. Thus, while Mama Celie and Mama Shug echo Lissie’s “speaking for animals,” they also exhibit the capability of even the most virtuous personal philosophies to overpower other people and other interpretations of the truth. Their story indicates Walker’s dissatisfaction that anyone should be seen to hold the absolute truth: “the awareness of having faults … opens us to courage and compassion,” she has written (Walker, 1997, p. xxiii). Equally, this acceptance of flaw is reflected in Walker’s disregard for “truthful” or factual history. It is this disregard, as I have shown, that leads to Walker’s celebration of the creativity of imagination that always, she believes, maintains an openness to other peoples’ realities and takes humans close to animals.

Summary

In The Temple of My Familiar, Walker deals with the two-sided concept of the representation of animals. I argued that through her re-writing of the story of Genesis, Walker indicates that racism, sexism, and the abuse of animals are the contexts for human language as it exists in western culture, understood as equivalent to representation as “speaking about.” It is the possession of language that conventionally separates humans from animals. By offering her character Lissie as an alternative to this oppressive western culture, I show that Walker suggests a way for a human representation of (in the sense of “speaking for”) animals to occur, despite the pitfalls of representation (“speaking about”) as I describe it. Later, I developed this analysis to argue that, for Walker, the creative power of the human imagination, exemplified most obviously in the oral history through which her central character describes her life, enables humans to bridge the gap caused by their language use that appears to separate them from animals. This valorization of creativity and imagination has a corresponding disregard for the authority of historical “facts” or the concept of any absolute truth. I conclude by arguing that, for Walker, there can, therefore, be no single way to “speak for animals,” that only by being imaginatively open to the realities of others can people get close to animals.

References

Adams, C. J. (1995). Neither man nor beast: Feminism and thedefense of animals. New York: Continuum.

Adams, C. J., & Donovan, J. (Eds.). (1996). Animals and women: Feminist theoretical explorations. Durham: Duke University Press.

Braendlin, B. (1996). Alice Walker’s The temple of my familiar as pastiche. American Literature, 68, 47-67.

Coetzee, J. M. (1999). The lives of animals. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Fudge, E. (in press). A left-handed blow: Writing the history of animals. In N. Rothfels (Ed.), Representing animals. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ritvo, H. (1987). The animal estate: The English and other creatures in the Victorian age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Rothfels, N. (Ed.). (in press). Representing animals. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Scholtmeijer, M.. (1996) The power of otherness: Animals in women’s fiction. In C. J. Adams and J. Donovan (Eds.), Animals and women: Feminist theoretical explorations (pp. 231-262). Durham : Duke University Press.

Walker, A. (1997). Anything we love can be saved: A writer’s activism. London: The Women’s Press.

Walker, A. (1990). The temple of my familiar. London: Penguin.

Walker, A. (1988). Living by the word. London: The Women’s Press.

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