The Temple of My Familiar

The Temple of My Familiar (1989) is a magical realism novel by American author Alice Walker (1944-Present). The book tells the interconnected stories of characters turning to find their sense of identity while overcoming oppression. Walker uses the novel to analyze themes of race, gender, and time.

The Temple of My Familiar: Summary

The Temple of My Familiar focuses on the intertwining lives of three couples and contains several narrative voices. The first story focuses on a woman named Zede, who grows up in an impoverished South American village. Zede learns seamstress skills from her mother and excels at school. After earning a scholarship to college, Zede begins to work as a teacher and becomes involved in the country's Communist revolution.

Zede is arrested and placed in a prison camp where the guards subject her to physical and sexual abuse. After giving birth to a daughter, Zede escapes the camp and flees to San Francisco. In America, Zede finds work as a costume maker using the skills she learned from her mother and raises her daughter Carlotta. Although the pair enjoy a safe life, Carlotta feels separated from her mother's culture. While delivering a costume, Carlotta meets Arveyda, a famous rockstar. The pair bond over their struggles growing up as the child of an immigrant family.

Fig. 1 - Zede uses her talent as a seamstress to make it in America.

Arveyda and Carlotta soon fall in love and get married. They have several children, and Carlotta is content until she discovers that Arveyda has been having an affair with her mother. A heartbroken Carlotta takes the children and returns to her mother's home country in South America to find her sense of self.

The narrative then switches to Suwelo, a thriving black professor who struggles to feel comfortable in the predominantly white environment. His personal life is also in turmoil when his wife, Fanny, tells him that his toxic masculinity has killed their relationship. Reflecting on his life, Suwelo wonders if black men like him have failed black women. Fanny feels frustrated by her relationship and the everyday racism she faces as a black woman in America. She confides to her psychiatrist that she dreams about killing white people, who she views as the oppressor.

When Suwelo inherits a house from his uncle, he finds old notepads and books on the property. Many of the books contain scribbled references to someone called "Lissie." An old man named Mr. Hal shows up at the house and claims to have known Lissie. Hal tells Suwelo that he met Lissie when they were children and later started a relationship with her, helping to raise her children.

Lissie appears to Suwelo as a frail 113-year-old woman who tells him that she is an entity that has reincarnated through countless lives over the past 500,000 years. A shocked Suwelo listens as Lissie recounts her many lives through human history. Starting from a prehistoric time when animals and humans co-existed as equals, Lissie tells him about humanity's development. She speaks fondly of when men and women lived separately but cooperatively in small African villages.

As time progressed, men and women started to live together. However, this cohabitation proved disastrous for women as the men always wanted to dominate them. From this point, men began to develop warfare and the concept of private property, which led to slavery and suffering. The violent oppression has separated men from their once peaceful balance with nature, leaving women as the ones with the spiritual connection to the past. Lissie recalls being a captured slave, shipped across the Atlantic to work in the cotton fields of the American South.

Fig. 2 - Lissie recalls the trauma of the slave ships.

Suwelo absorbs Lissie's epic story and considers his role in the world. As a black man, he recognizes that as well as having suffered oppression, he has also inflicted it through sexism, especially the repeated infidelities in his marriage.

On her mother's advice, Fanny travels to Africa to meet her father, Ola. She confides in him about her violent dreams. Ola admits to his daughter that he committed acts of violence against white settlers during his country's revolution and tells her that it did nothing to help him feel more whole. He advises his daughter to find a balance with the world to cope with her suffering.

Fanny continues to look into her family's past and recalls memories of her grandmother, Celie. She discovers a pamphlet Celie produced with her close friend, Miss Shug. "The Gospel According to Celie and Shug" contains a series of simple recommendations that help several of the characters in the book to discover peace. Fanny follows the pamphlet's advice and attempts to come to terms with Suwelo's infidelities and connect with her past. Arveyda also discovers the gospel and uses it to reflect on his shortcomings.

When Fanny attends a woman's support group, she discovers Suwelo had an affair with Carlotta. Fanny embraces a new, more adventurous outlook on life and embarks on a short affair with Arveyda. While Fanny enjoys her sexual freedom, Suwelo realizes, with the help of Lissie's lessons, that empty physical encounters are fleeting compared to the love he once shared with Fanny. The pair reconcile and begin a new life but buy a house with separate wings, allowing them to grow together while living their own lives.

The Temple of My Familiar: Characters

In The Temple of My Familiars, Walker uses many interweaving stories with many characters.

Zede

Zede grew up in an impoverished South America and became a teacher. Placed in a prison camp because she supported the country's revolution, Zede gave birth to Carlotta and escaped to America. Working as a costume designer, Zede can provide for her daughter but worries that she may be separated from her past and identity.

Fanny

Fanny is a black woman who feels the constant pressure of living in a racist and sexist society. Frustrated by inequality and male complacency, Fanny recognizes that her husband's infidelities stem from his inherently sexist views and toxic masculinity. Determined to find peace, Fanny embarks on a journey of discovery and self-reflection.

Suwelo

Fanny's husband, Suwelo, is a black man who works as a history professor in a primarily white college. Having grown up through the radical sixties, Suwelo wonders if black men have let down black women by not supporting their liberation struggle. His marriage difficulties and repeated infidelities compound this feeling. With the dissolution of his marriage, he begins to look into his past and meets Lissie, who teaches him about life.

Lissie

Lissie is an entity that has lived many lives over 500,000 years. Inhabiting women's bodies, Lissie has witnessed the development of humanity from small villages in Africa to modern American cities. Through her many lifetimes, Lissie has gained a great deal of insight into the complex relationships between men and women. By sharing these lessons with Suwelo, she can guide him toward being a better man and husband.

The Temple of My Familiar: Themes

In The Temple of my Familiar, Alice Walker tackles important racial, gender, and identity themes.

Racism and Oppression

Through the character of Lissie, Walker traces the root of racism and oppression, which stretch back in time and continue to impact the Black community. Lissie can provide first-hand accounts of the generational impact of centuries of racism and oppression. She tells Suwelo about being abducted from Africa, transported to the American South, and forced to work on plantations.

Fig. 3 - The generations of trauma inflicted during slavery had a long-lasting effect on the black community.

The legacy of this oppression continues to affect the community for generations and leads to more racism. In the contemporary world, Fanny resents the everyday racism she encounters as a Black woman. She fantasizes about committing violence against white people but becomes determined not to perpetuate the cycle of racism and violence. Characters like Fanny and Suwelo can only overcome this sense of injustice and anger by investigating their pasts and considering the collective experience of Black people. Walker uses their experiences to show the Black community must reclaim its history and create a new sense of meaning and hope to overcome the past trauma.

Gender

As the characters uncover the past, they realize that society's patriarchal nature hurts both men and women. Many of the novel's female characters suffer oppression and even violence at the hands of men. Zede suffers physical abuse and sexual exploitation at the hand of her prison guards, while Fanny feels oppressed and ignored at work and in her relationship.

As a man, Suwelo has a limited outlook on his job and marriage. He teaches history from a white perspective and completely disregards the female viewpoint, admitting he hasn't read any women authors. Even though he suspects Black men have failed Black women, he remains dismissive of Fanny's suggestion to change his perspective.

The characters are operating in a society that values men more than women. The book examines how women, especially Black women, have been marginalized and suffer even more repression than Black men. Walker points out that as well as suffering the racism of the world, Black women have also suffered sexism and a lack of support from men in their community.

Fig. 4 - Walker challenges many gender norms and expectations.

To challenge the traditional standards of gender, Walker shows the novel's female characters in the traditionally masculine role of breadwinner or hero. Many of the women are sexually free and unconstrained, while some men, like Hal, are shown to take on maternal duties. Walker suggests that humans should return to a more natural state, as the era Lissie recalls before the creation of warfare. This compromise is shown through the Fanny and Suwelo's arrangement to buy a house with separate wings.

The Temple of My Familiar: Analysis

In The Temple of My Familiar, Walker employs aspects of supernaturalism and mythology, making the novel an example of the magical realism genre.

Walker uses magical realism to present the relationship between humans and animals as a profoundly spiritual bond that stretches back through time. The women in the novel can overcome the sexist limitations imposed on them and become heroes of their own stories. Through dreams, memories, and intuition, they connect to their past to create a better future for themselves. Alice Walker said that the idea for the book came to her in a dream: "I saw that our essential 'familiar' is our own natural, untamed, 'wild' spirit and that its temple is the cosmos, that is, freedom... the relationship of humans (women, in particular) to animals, who, in the outer world, symbolize woman's inner spirit." ²

Fig. 6 - Women have retained a spiritual connection to nature throughout time.

Through Lissie's many lives, she recalls a time when humans and apes were cousins and co-existed peacefully. The animals lived as humanity's "familiars." However, this balance is interrupted by the creation of warfare and private property, which Walker presents as the foundation of an unequal patriarchal society. Walker shows that women have retained some mystical connection with animals despite this rupture.

The Temple of My Familiar: Quotes

The section below looks at some important quotes relating to gender and time.

Many of the novel's female characters are victims of sexism and misogyny at the hands of men. While men engaged in warfare and commerce, women remain connected to nature and animals. Walker presents this connection as something men view with both suspicion and awe.

Fanny's father warns his daughter that the violent retribution she seeks against white people will ultimately prove unfulfilling and damaging. Walker uses the novel to argue that the past, present, and future are deeply connected, and people need to be aware of their past to build a better present and future.

¹ "Writing to Save My Life": An Interview with Claudia Dreifus from The Progressive (1989)", The World has Changed; Conversations with Alice Walker edited by Rudolph P. Byrd (2010)

² Alice Walker, Anything We Love Can Be Saved (1997)