The Temple of My Familiar

by Alice Walker

  "My father had such ideas about education, you know," Nzingha continued, taking a sip of her wine and smacking her lips in loyal appreciation, "and it was hard for him to understand that being educated by people who despise you is also conquest. He understood this, to a degree, in his own life, but when it came to me--well, as he put it, he must always shift among alternatives, and the education offered here in Olinka, after secondary school, left much to be desired. I recognized this myself. However. You will never know what misery is until you've been an African student sent off to study in the West."

  Fanny imagined her sister, small, black, alone, headed for that mythical location. Probably none of the clothing she'd carried with her was warm enough. She swallowed a large gulp of palm wine to banish the vision.

  "I was sent to France," Nzingha said, "to Paris, to the Sorbonne." She made a face. "I am probably the only woman in the world who hates Paris! It was a cold place, in more ways than one. The people were so jaded, so played out spiritually. Nothing seemed to move them from the heart. They were only animated by artificial events--hopelessly abstract plays full of even more abstract ideas, for instance. Fashion excited them. Nothing whatever made them smile. I remember one day walking along the Champs-Elysees and watching each face I met to see if one would have a smile. Not one did, and I looked at hundreds of people; and it was a warm, perfectly lovely day. I couldn't stand the grayness, the heaviness of the architecture, the absence of wild trees. I couldn't abide the pieds noirs in the shops or the other little shivering Africans selling trinkets in the Bois. I made a few friends among the Dogon. There was a little Dogonese restaurant near the Rue des Trois-Portes not far from Notre-Dame. I used to go there whenever I could. And there they were: the smiles, the warmth, the courtesy, the edible food I'd come to Paris expecting to find. For, believe it or not, I didn't like French food! Which everyone at home, especially those who'd never tasted it and who had only heard about it from others who had been to France, spoke of as if it were food for the Gods. I detested the heavy sauces, and even the light ones. I had no physical tolerance for anything made of milk or cream. This is an African characteristic, by the way; I didn't know that, though. I just knew almost everything I ate made me ill. I felt sticky internally all the time. And I was! Ugh! And the superior attitude the waiters took when you ordered. I've sat in many a Parisian restaurant too angry to swallow a bite."

  At this point, Nzingha refilled their glasses, had a sip of her wine, and smiled blissfully at its home-grown taste.

  "I hated everything," she said somberly, coming out of this happy state. "I was as unappeasable as a three-year-old. I hated the Louvre! There was all the booty from other countries on display, because, really, that is what most museums are for. Instead of these looters stealing just for themselves and their own houses, they steal for their countries, their continents, their race. I couldn't stand it. And I got lost, there in the Louvre. I couldn't find my way out, and the guards were as unhelpful as any other Parisian. At last I found an open window, two stories off the ground, and I climbed out of it to a ledge and was going to jump. I couldn't stand being inside another second. But one of the tourists ambling by, an American, a man, just casually stuck his head through the window too and, as I stood there pressed against the wall looking down, he said, 'Phew, this place sure is short of fresh air.' It stank, in addition to everything else! All those dead things. All those thwarted spirits who never dreamed their physical remains would wind up in Paris under glass. The Louvre smelled like what it was: a grave. So I laughed. And he said, looking about for a way, 'How do you get out there?' And I certainly didn't want to share the ledge, or the jump, with him, and so I said, 'Let me come in first.' He was one of those tall, rangy fellows you see in American films set in Texas or Montana. But he turned out to be from Georgia, in the South, about which I knew nothing I hadn't learnt in the cinema watching Gone With the Wind. But that wasn't the Georgia he knew. He was poor; his family always had been. This is hard for Africans to believe, you know--that there are Southern whites who have been or are now poor. We look at them oddly when they tell us this, and mentally we are going: 'What? Poor? And after all that!'"

  Fanny laughed. She was feeling pretty good from the wine, and slavery from this perspective had never occurred to her.

  "They'd always, his family, been decent, he wanted me to know," said Nzingha, who was beginning to slur her words a bit, and to get that slightly argumentative tone that Africans get when they drink with someone they like but have a story to tell that they don't like. "This was code for decent to colored, your people. He was in Paris, at the university, on scholarship. We saw each other a lot after that. I really liked Jeff. I felt the kind of affection one feels for a child or someone wandering about in the world absolutely lost while confident he or she is finding, and can show others, the way. There was so much he couldn't understand.

  "When he'd left his hometown in Georgia, the whole town had turned out--though not the colored people they'd all been so decent to!--to cheer him on. And he'd been thrilled by everything since the day he arrived. The mustiness of the Louvre was the largest misfortune of his visit. He couldn't understand the torture of classes in which Africa was ignored, historically, as if it didn't or hadn't existed; and where, if a professor said something about Punt or Cyrene being African nations with whom the ancient world traded, he almost always referred to them as 'mythical' or 'mysterious'! It seemed impossible for the professors to acknowledge that ancient Cyrene was Libya, or that the ancient Egyptians were black. This seemed as hard for them to fathom as that the Sahara Desert hadn't always been a desert, or that Egypt is a part of Africa. I don't know where they thought King Tut came from, with his little black self! When they did discuss Africa, they did so in terms of its problems, its 'backwardness,' never in terms of its contributions or its centuries of oppression under whites, including the smug, self-righteous French themselves, who, even as we studied African history without a word about French colonialism, were trying to finish off the Algerian resistance by the foulest possible means. It was so degrading to sit there."

  There was more anger in Nzingha's voice than Fanny had heard the whole time she had been in Olinka. She began to wonder, not for the first time, about the bottled-up, repressed anger of the African woman, silent for so long. She thought of this anger as an enormous storehouse of energy and wondered whether the women knew they owned it. Anger can also be a kind of wealth, she thought.

  "I remember, though, the day I was finally fed up," continued Nzingha, now drinking in an alarmingly rapid fashion, and attempting to refill Fanny's glass so that she could keep up with her. "It was in an art history class, and the professor was discussing the Greek foundations of Western civilization and art. He presented a slide, at the front of the classroom, that depicted Perseus slaying Medusa. Well. It had been carved into a wall somewhere--I think in Melos--and looters had just chopped off the part of the wall that interested them and that they could carry." She laughed, as did Fanny, at this image. "Well, anyway, there was Perseus in his chariot, and in his hand, hanging over the side, was the severed head of Medusa, her snakelike locks of hair presented as real snakes--everywhere in Africa a symbol of fertility and wisdom--and there were even two snakes floating about the corners of her mouth. Her face was horribly contorted, as yours would be, too, if someone had just hacked off your head. The rest of her rather large, womanly body is still on its knees, and in fact she looks decidedly, if you know how to read the carving differently from Westerners, like an angel. Because she is an angel. She is the mother of Christian angels. She is Isis, mother of Horus, sister and lover of Osiris, Goddess of Egypt. The Goddess, who, long before she became Isis, was known all over Africa as simply the Great Mother, Creator of All, Protector of All, the Keeper of the Earth. The Goddess.

  "Now, I had learned all this--" and here Nzingha burst into quite wild laughter at the absurdity of it--"from the nuns back home. And I began to understand, while I studied at the Sorbonne,
why those nuns were permitted to stay in my country, when so many other white people were encouraged to leave." Nzingha grimaced violently as she pantomimed the attempted removal of a large, heavy, obstinate object. Fanny appreciated the mental spectacle of white oppression she'd created, and the two of them laughed until tears came to their eyes.

  "They were nuns who," continued Nzingha, regaining her poise as much as a rather tipsy person can do, "in the peace and solitude of Africa, far away from the indoctrination of their church's teaching in Europe, had debunked every spirit obstructionist, antifemale, white-supremacist theory they'd been taught.

  "'Haven't you ever wondered where angels come from?' one of the nuns--my favorite, Sister Felicity--once asked our class sweetly. 'Well, when you study Egyptian art and life you will see where they come from. They come from the Gods and Goddesses of Africa.'

  "Ah, so!" Fanny could only utter, in delight.

  "African angels, of course! That's just what's been missing from everyone's life, right?" said Nzingha, a hand on her hip and her black eyes ablaze.

  "I immediately visualized them," she continued, "my mother among them, not as she was in her final days, but as she was when she and I shared the same mat. Her kind face, her sweet breath and tender voice. Her psychic connectedness to events and people hundreds of miles away. I knew that Notre-Dame was built on the site of a shrine to Isis, who was later called the Black Madonna, and I hurried there as soon as I arrived in Paris, for my teachers, the nuns, had said I must. There is no trace of Isis there, of course, nor anywhere in Paris; certainly not today in the souls of its people. But at least I stood there, in Notre-Dame, where her ancient, more likely preancient, worshipers had also stood. Except, they had stood with their feet on the bare ground, under trees, and it was this feeling of being connected with the Universe directly that I missed. Notre-Dame to me was no different from the Louvre. It had been built for the same purpose. Only it had been built to colonize the spiritual remains of a goddess, as the Louvre had been built to colonize the material remains of devastated cultures.

  "Dutifully I sent the nuns a postcard showing this somber edifice, and they wrote back to remind me that the Goddess is not confined in the monuments men allegedly create for her to dwell in, and which are really erected to themselves. That She--the spirit of Mothering, of Creating, of Blessing and Protecting All--lives within us, and is confined neither to shrines nor to any particular age.

  "But," said Nzingha, "back to the professor. The story he was telling was about the ugliness of the face of the African Goddess, with her dreadlocked hair--snakes, ugh, right?--and its tendency to turn men to stone. And so this brave white man, Perseus the Greek, takes on the challenge of slaying her, as he would any other 'dragon,' for it is as if the only invitation the white man accepts from anything that is powerful is that he come at once to kill it. And so he cuts off her head, and in all his stories says the face is hideous, and the hair like writhing snakes, and that there is nothing redeemable about her whatsoever."

  There was a look of deep sadness on Nzingha's face. "Except," she said, in a whisper, "if you are from Africa you recognize Medusa's wings as the wings of Egypt, and you recognize the head of Medusa as the head of Africa; and what you realize you are seeing is the Western world's memorialization of that period in prehistory when the white male world of Greece decapitated and destroyed the black female Goddess/Mother tradition and culture of Africa." She paused for a moment, as we considered this. "Actually," she continued thoughtfully, "the earliest known 'Athene,' though Greek, has snaky hair. Only later did they give her those flowing blond locks that the black-haired Greeks even today pretend they had." Nzingha had the last swallow of wine from the glass in her hand and shrugged, looking, for just a moment, very French. "It was hardly a challenge," she said, "to move on to my Western literature class and discover that Athena was created to be a flunky of the male order that created her. That one of her first acts, in The Orestia, was to deny that there is any bond between a mother and her child, other than that of a letter to its envelope. According to her, at Orestes' trial for the murder of his mother, woman merely carries the seed, the child is totally the fruit of its father. She herself, she declares, never had, nor ever needed, a mother, having sprung full blown from the forehead of her father, the God Zeus!"

  Nzingha pulled herself upright and wrapped her arms tightly around her legs. For a moment she looked remarkably like Ola. Fanny didn't think either of them had a hangover yet, but it was clear that their wine-induced euphoria, what there had been of it, was short-lived. Nzingha's story made her think of universities in the United States, and all the lies in academia that had driven her to the practice of massage.

  "So what did I attempt to argue," Nzingha said wearily, sounding a bit like Ola too, "there in the Sorbonne, in one of the foremost bastions of Western civilization: that the reason Athena had sprung 'full blown' from the mind of Zeus was because she was an idea, given by Greek men to their God; and that 'idea' was the destruction of the African Goddess Isis and the metamorphosis of Isis into the Greek Goddess Athena. But since no one at the Sorbonne had been taught anything about Isis, it was impossible for them to connect her with Athena. I must have appeared to be simply another raving African.

  "I left France that night. I refused to be taught that 'Black' Africa--'Negro' Africa, as they called it--was unconnected to 'Colored' Africa, that is, Egypt, or that a civilization founded on the destruction of the black woman as Goddess in her own world was superior to what I had at home, no matter how 'backward' or impoverished."

  "And you were right," Fanny said emphatically, kissing her cheek.

  "Father was badly disappointed," Nzingha said regretfully, putting her fingers to the spot Fanny had kissed. "He had such dreams for me! That I would know not only French and English, but also German. So he fussed quite a bit when he saw I would never go back. I learned to educate myself in the way I'm sure it must have been done in the days of old. Whenever I met someone who seemed to know a lot about a subject, and who evinced, moreover, a certain happiness in his or her being, and if I were interested in the subject, I asked to be taught what they knew. To my father I said one day: 'Show me how you write plays. Take me with you so that I can learn how they are performed. Tell me what to study in order to help develop our culture.' To the village people I said: 'Tell me about the war, tell me about the old days; show me how you made things; tell me the stories so that they will not be lost.' One thing I know," said Nzingha decisively. "Learning from one's elders does not permit pessimism. Your day is always easier than theirs. You look at them, so beautiful and so wise, and you cannot help trying to emulate them. It is courage given by osmosis, I think." She fell silent for several minutes, gazing out over the lake, which had turned maroon from the deep red rays of the setting sun.

  "You give me courage, Nzingha," Fanny said, after a while.

  Nzingha sighed, looked at her sister without any of the resentment of the long-lost sibling Fanny once or twice had glimpsed in her eyes, and smiled.

  "It was the play Ola wrote about your mother that brought him around," she said. "He remembered how much he'd learned from the missionaries, but he also remembered how learning from them and not from his own people made him feel inferior. This had caused him to become almost mindlessly aggressive, especially against females, over whom he exerted power because of his size and because he was a man. It was when I started to work with him, first learning to write plays and then as his assistant at the Ministry of Culture, that I began, like everyone else, to call him 'Ola.'"

  Nzingha gathered the food scraps and numerous empty wine bottles and put them back into the picnic hamper. Fanny rose from her mat and began to roll it up.

  Isis, Athena. Egypt, Greece. There on the shores of enormous Lake Wanza it was easy to think of them, shimmering just above the horizon, Egypt itself a kind of place angel, ever beckoning on those in need of reassurance of their beauty, their worthiness, their goodness. Their place in histo
ry. And yet, as Fanny said to Nzingha, as they brushed off each other's skirts, "the fact that one felt so involved with the black and mixed-race Egyptians was not so much because of their rulers, or even their gods or their religion, but because of their artists. It is the art, above all, that is exquisite," she murmured, "and no doubt the music was beautiful also."

  She should not have worried about the white paint. She dressed in the simple white informal clothes she had and rode to her father's village with Nzingha and Metudhi. When they arrived, the village women took them in hand, and within minutes Fanny's face and hands and legs had been plastered with white mud.

  "In the United States," she told Nzingha, "my grandmother used to whitewash her fireplace with this stuff."

  Nzingha looked puzzled, and Fanny could see she couldn't visualize it.

  "Never mind," she said.

  This funeral was as long on chanting and singing as the one in the capital had been on speeches. Fanny preferred it. It had been hard to sit still as one unctuous government official followed another, praising Ola for his "bold," "revolutionary" work. She felt that most of them were simply relieved he'd had the tact to die of a heart attack while at home--right in the middle of an antigovernment quip, she'd been informed--and not bloodied, on the floor, in one of their jails.

  "I realize," she whispered to Nzingha, "that there is not a single government in the world I like or trust. They are all, as far as I'm concerned, unnatural bodies, male-supremacist private clubs."

  Nzingha yawned. "Yes," she said, making no attempt to disguise her restlessness, "and by this time we are too bored to want to join."

  WHILE THE GUMBO HAD cooled a bit, Mr. Hal had set the table with beautiful linens, crystal, and cutlery that belonged to Uncle Rafe, and that Suwelo had never seen. There was, first of all, a thick snowy-white tablecloth; over this was laid an old cream-colored square of handmade lace. There were lace-edged napkins to match. Then there were settings of bone china that resembled alabaster and that rang when hit with a spoon. Suwelo struck his teacup over and over with his spoon, with the charmed expression of a child. There were blue crystal goblets that pinged. There was richly glinting silver everywhere, picking up the flames of the candles in the heavy silver candelabra that Miss Lissie set on the table with a graceful flourish.