The Temple of My Familiar

by Alice Walker

"'My mother,' said Nzingha, 'was from the village, the bush. She was illiterate, superstitious. That is to say she did not speak anything other than her own language and she knew no other ways than those of her own people. She did not know English or Christianity,' she added pointedly. 'When the repression became unbearable, she ran away and joined the Mbeles, the African "underground." She was a brilliant fighter--her code name was Harriet, as in Tubman; doesn't it make you smile?--but not a scholar or thinker or even, really, a social person. She was very quiet, solitary, spoke more eloquently with her actions than with her words, which were very few and uttered as if she were weary. She saved my father's life, she saved many people's lives, but she was lost without a gun in her hand or an explosive device on her belt. After the people took back the country, there was little for her to do, since the traditional society no longer functioned. Or so it seemed to her. My father married her while they were still outlaws; she became pregnant with me between battles. With the overthrow of the white regime, my father's stock rose very high, because he'd been partially educated in Western ways by the missionaries. He was sent off to Sweden to further his studies. They even tried to send him to Russia! Oh, he went to Russia but came back after two weeks. Only Ola would have done that, come back so soon. The young students we send today are too afraid to miss an opportunity like that; no matter how cold it is, or how, sometimes, uncivil to them the Russians are; they wouldn't think of coming home before getting what they've gone for. And this is good; the country needs the skills they learn there. However, too cold, Ola said. His brain and every other part froze.' She smiled. 'The government sent him to Sweden. He was gone several years, studying and learning for the good of our country. My mother took care of me, and waited. Right there in the little hut he left her in, the hut she'd erected herself. And when he came back, he no longer remembered how she'd saved his life or how heroic she was. If he did remember, it was in that way that writers remember things, as if they happened to someone else, and you needn't be bound by the facts.' She paused. 'Sometimes I try to think what we must have looked like to him after his years in Sweden. Sweden was very cold, too, Ola said, but the women were beautiful and warmhearted.'

  "Nzingha paused, placed her hands together under her chin, rubbed them as if they were cold, and frowned slightly. 'My mother had no education but she was extremely psychic,' she continued, 'even politically psychic, which is rare. She knew that no matter how my father studied, emulated people of other cultures, or otherwise shaped a "modern" self, he would always come into conflict with the government here, even though it was this government that sent him and other young men abroad. It was a government she had helped--through immense risk and personal sacrifice--put into power, but that, once in power, conveniently forgot she existed. This was true of all the women: they were forgotten. This was before our men had any idea there might be a different way of relating to women, other than the one they traditionally practiced. Of course, men always suspend traditional behavior during wartime. A woman was for breeding, a woman was for sex, a woman--well, in our language the word for woman is the same as for seed granary. Women like my mother were so angry, and so hurt. And my father came back from Sweden and looked at us. I remember it clearly, though I was only five or six years old. He came in a big car, with a driver. He brought presents. For my mother he brought a china tea set, bright blue and white, with a quilted cozy, and to me he brought an enormous blonde doll named Hildegarde.

  "'Our hut was neat and, I thought, very pretty, for my mother had painted it the traditional way, with bold colors and geometric designs, but she had gone further, and painted giraffes all over it--small giraffes that seemed to float through the abstract spaces.

  "'My father looked pained. He and my mother sat on a bench in the yard and talked in Olinka, but every once in a while he said something in a different language--English, I later realized--which only the driver seemed to understand. It was as if he spoke it for his benefit; the driver had also been someone my father had known during the emergency. I played with the big blue-eyed, yellow-haired doll, and I could tell that my mother was also enchanted with it--she'd never had a doll--much more than with her tea set. We'd never seen anything like it. She'd seen white people, but not many, and only when she was in the process of trying to blow up their buildings or power stations; neither of us had seen anything so white and splendid as this doll.

  "'I noticed they looked over at me from time to time, and that my father seemed displeased.

  "'Later, I realized he was displeased because of the number of holes in my ears--three in each ear--and because I wasn't wearing a blouse. But none of the women or children wore blouses for everyday. What was the point? Everyone knew bare skin in the humid climate was more comfortable.

  "'He came regularly after that. He was writing plays against imperialism. At that time the government really loved him, and, basking in their favor, he seemed quite content. He was at least confident that his work could be an instrument for change, a change his government would encourage, applaud, and, most of all, attempt to implement. He was a childless man, though, as far as his friends in government knew; at least, it was not definitely known he was married, and no doubt this was beginning to bother him. Each time he came and left, my mother was sadder and sadder. We'd always slept on the same mat, and sometimes in the night I'd wake up and she'd be crying. My mother was the kind of woman who could fight in the mountains or the caves or gorges for months, even years, alongside the men and blow up power stations, and at the same time accept, with obvious gratitude, the shelter of her five-year-old's arms in the middle of the night.

  "'My father came one day and took me and Hildegarde away. My mother didn't fight to keep me with her, for which I blamed her. She told me it was for my own good--of course I couldn't see that!--and that I must study hard and learn to be of service to our country. She was a matriot, and loved our country, though she thought the men who ruled were all gesture and no effect.'

  "Nzingha stopped suddenly and rubbed her eyes, which had begun to shine with unshed tears. 'We left her there in the village to rot,' she said finally. 'I missed her terribly, at first. I didn't know my father at all, and it was disconcerting to realize, once we arrived in the capital, that everyone else did. That he was famous and popular and lived in a big house to match the big car. He put me in a boarding school run by white nuns, some of the more curious of the citizens of our new country, which I now saw had, apparently, as many white people as black. But that was only in the cities. At that time my father was blind to the contradiction of putting me with the nuns, or pretended to be. He wanted to be sure I learned to speak English. The future of our country depended on the ability of its citizens to be at least bilingual, he always said. This view cut no ice with my mother. Once, on a rare visit I made to the village to see her, I said a few words in English to her, and she went into a rage, throwing things--not that there were very many things in the hut to throw--and stamping about. I thought she would attack me. She was drinking the home-brewed beer that she made to sell and smoking a cigarette. She was so unlike the mother I had left! It was really amazing. Her eyes were red, her hair matty and wild. There was a coarseness in her mannerisms and a slackness in her expression I'd never seen and never thought my gentle mother could have. Nor did I understand yet about changes in the personality wrought by grief. She was slovenly, unconcerned. The rain had eaten away a corner of the hut, and the giraffes, which she used to repaint each year at the beginning of the dry season, had faded, so they seemed to be ghost animals, shadows, floating round and round the sides of the hut.

  "'I went back only once after that, while she was still alive. I went, but I wouldn't get out of the car. She came out to see me and sat on a stool beside the car door. I handed her some things my father sent. One of them, I remember, was a book about the indigenous culture of Cameroun; there were lots of photographs of the people's houses--which were made of mud, and decorated colorfully--of their clothes and musical instrumen
ts. She was immediately interested in it, and actually looked at more than the first page before tossing it listlessly to the ground. She had that puffy, slatternly, dissipated look people get when they have no way of seeing themselves. I don't think she even owned a mirror. I didn't know this woman.

  "'She died, after a lingering illness, when I was sixteen. Probably from cancer. Or heart failure. Or heartbreak. The cause of death had no name, in the village. Only the reasons. She was very tired, the villagers said, very lonely. There was not enough for such a woman to do, now that there was peace, and black men ruled the country. They did not say this with the irony my mother would have.

  "'In any event, my father and I had by then become colleagues; our bond was the struggle to improve the country. He was writing skits about the proper behavior of workers in the work place and the importance of a high level of production. I would go with him to the factories where his work was performed. Because he was sincere and his work easily accessible--and, at times, very simple-minded--the workers liked him. He remained, among government officials and workers alike, very popular. And by then I was his little darling. I was very proud of him!

  "'But even before my mother's death he was changing. Becoming less comfortable with being adored. He never saw her anymore, except perhaps once or twice by accident, when business took him back to the village. My father was responsible for getting a water line laid from the river to the village; the villagers, who had always carried water from the river on their heads, praised him highly for this. Yet I honestly think that in her absence, and over time, she became powerfully present to him. Perhaps this is simply the way it is with writers. It is when they don't see you that you matter. Because then you can belong to them in a way that permits them complete possession. You are determined by them. You are controlled. You are, generally speaking, exaggerated.'

  "Nzingha, who had been sitting back on the couch with her legs straight out in front of her, shivered, and drew them up under her. The room was getting chilly. I drew my own legs up and draped my long skirt over them. She reached for a large, striped, earth-toned woolen shawl on a stool beside her--of the kind made in the cooperatives run by the Ministry of Culture and sold in the shops to the tourists--and spread it over our knees. The coffee had made me alert, but calmly so, and passive under the sound of her soft, familiar voice. At times I felt I was talking to myself.

  "'Writers,' she mused. 'Does anybody else cause as much trouble, in the long run? But I can tell you what my father would say: Writers don't cause trouble so much as they describe it. Once it is described, trouble takes on a life visible to all, whereas until it is described, and made visible, only a few are able to see it. Still, there is something about writers ...' Nzingha laughed. 'As the Russians are finding out, they're damned hard people to re-educate. I think it is a kind of curlicue they have in the brain. They come into the world with a certain perspective, and the drive to share it. This curlicue is totally lacking in other people; I don't know why.

  "'It was my father's play about my mother that completely dissolved the government's confidence in him and separated the people from the government. Maybe this was because "the people" contained men and women; the government, only men. Not that there wasn't a struggle among the people, in the cities as well as in the villages, about the issues raised in the play. There were enormous controversies, arguments, brawls. Though the play unmercifully criticized some of the people's ways, they did not take this as an attack on them, as human beings, singled out for abuse. Besides, they knew my father's work too well to take that view. They were seeing themselves, in my father's play, for the first time as they more or less were, without the patina of revolution, the slogans of imperialism, or any concern for production quotas. They responded, really, as if they had been in a fit of hysteria, and someone they knew well and liked very much hauled off and slapped them. The things that they then revealed about themselves were interesting in the extreme. For instance, it was as if they'd never before thought of women or the possibility that women were human beings in their own right at all. This was the greatest sting in the slap. My father's insights into the oppression of women, black women by black men, who should have had more understanding--having criticized the white man's ignorance in dealing with black people for so long--made many of the people uncomfortable, but they were also, eventually, stimulated to change. My father's plays were always somewhat didactic; whatever understanding he gained about life he did not hesitate to share. The people saw--as my father himself had eventually seen--my mother's struggle to be a soldier in the army against white supremacy and colonization, then her equally difficult battle to be a wife and mother, with no models for the new way of life she herself was helping to develop, followed by her complete disillusion with the government of men who took over control of the country after the triumph. My father was pitiless in depicting his own failures. There were his Swedish lovers, one of whom was left with a child, his big car, his grandiose European-style house. His cronies in power and their absorption in beer drinking, women, and soccer. His maid, a meek girl from the village, who acted like he was God, and who reminded the audience of his discarded wife. I found the scene in which the child, who was conceived in the passion of revolt, is taken away from the totally devastated mother unbearable to watch. How he could write it, as well as a scene depicting the mother's decline and death, was a mystery to me. Paradoxically, during the writing of this play, and after, as it was being performed, he became progressively joyous, calmly rebellious, one might even say radiant.

  "'The play was dedicated to my mother, whom he at last publically claimed as his wife. For the first time, I began to feel it possible to imagine them together, in the same room, eating at the same table, sleeping in the same bed. I began to realize there might, indeed, have been love.

  "'Well. It was the first of my father's plays the government banned.

  "'He laughed until he cried when he was informed of this. His response to being hurt was always to laugh like a lunatic. Then he took the play to the villages and performed it one night in each village until the government caught up with him. They fined him, tossed him in jail for a week, and took away his house. It was the beginning of the end. But at least, as he used to say, it was a beginning.'"

  "It was very late when my sister finished this story, and so she improvised a bed for me on the couch. She placed an embroidered pillow under my head and the woolen, earth-toned shawl over my legs and feet. Best of all, as she left for her bedroom, she leaned down and kissed me on the forehead. As if enchanted by her kiss, I fell almost instantly into a deep, restful sleep, interrupted only by Metudhi's return, early in the morning. After he was settled, I drifted off again, and the next thing I knew it was ten o'clock in the morning and I was alone in the apartment. The boys were at school and Nzingha and Metudhi were already at work.

  "OUR FATHER MADE MANY, many blunders, out of ignorance, mainly," said Nzingha, "but in his heart of hearts he was fearless."

  They had been picnicking that day on the shores of Lake Wanza. There were low bluish hills off in the distance, and on the lake weathered fishermen's boats bobbed complacently, their ochre-colored sails flapping in the wind. It was a warm, pleasant day, with large birds wheeling overhead and with that sound of stillness that is like a hum.

  Earlier, Fanny had been speaking about what it was like growing up without a father, and without even mention of one. About her two grandmothers, Big Mama Celie and Mama Shug; about the coziness of being loved by two such emotionally giving women. They laughed at Fanny's description of the way her mother told her she had been named. Mama Celie had named her Fanny, because it was the name she wished she herself had had; if she'd been named Fanny, she'd have had a sassier life, she felt, one with travel and adventure in it. She thought the sound of "Fanny" an adventure in itself. And Fanny thought that, for her, it had something mildly scandalous, rebellious, in it. That turning her "fanny" to someone, or "shaking her fanny in someone's face," was an ac
tion she'd always wished she could take, especially when she was a child, and a young woman, and suffering abuse from all around her. So she'd said, "Fanny!" as Fanny was born. And Fanny's mother, Olivia, said she was so surprised and afraid that she'd come out with some other peculiar name to follow it, like Lou or Jean, that she forgot how weak she felt from giving birth and practically yelled out "Nzingha!" To which Mama Celie and Mama Shug had said, in unison, "In what?" And then Olivia had told them about Anne Nzingha, the ruler of Angola, who fought the Portuguese for forty years; the woman who refused the title Queen and required that her subjects call her "King"; the woman who, like Joan of Arc, always dressed as a man and led her troops in battle. At once woman, man, king, queen, master strategist and fighter, daughter, mother, pagan and Catholic, supreme ruler and wily female. Of all news brought home about Africa, Fanny's mother had told her later, this was the most interesting to Celie, though she was never to pronounce Nzingha correctly. She called her "Zinga" when she used the word at all, and only when she was reprimanding her, which she occasionally did in the mildest possible tone. Generally she called her "Fanny." As in "Fannnneeee, darlin', come here to Big Mama. Where you been, dumplins? Give me some sugar!" This would be followed by a hug and a resounding smack on the cheek.

  "I have heard this is the way some of the black people in the United States speak," said Nzingha. "Is it really true?"

  Fanny assured her it was, and proceeded to carry on a monologue in Mama Celie's voice.

  "I can just see her," said Nzingha, laughing. "There is so much character in how she says things. My mother was the same. When she spoke, you felt there was no greater integrity in language anywhere." She had broken out a chilled bottle of locally made palm wine, which she assured Fanny was the only intoxicant in Africa that made you feel great after drinking it, with no possibility of a nasty hangover.

  Fanny chuckled at this news.