Black Coffee discussion

This is where we will be discussing The Temple of My Familiar by Alice Walker.

A visionary cast of characters weave together their past and present in a brilliantly intricate tapestry of tales.

It is the story of the dispossessed and displaced, of peoples whose history is ancient and whose future is yet to come. Here we meet Lissie, a woman of many pasts; Arveyda the great guitarist and his Latin American wife who has had to flee her homeland; Suwelo, the history teacher, and his former wife Fanny who has fallen in love with spirits. Hovering tantalisingly above their stories are Miss Celie and Shug, the beloved characters from THE COLOUR PURPLE.

Will you be joining the discussion?

I have just ordered my copy. Looking forward to reading this book.

You can currently get a three-book set of Color Purple, Temple of My Familiar, and Possessing the Secret of Joy from Kobo for $1.99 (The Kobo price for just Temple of my familiar is $12.99.) Not necessarily plugging Kobo, but it's a good deal.

Thanks Sarah!! Amazon has the collection for $1.99 as well .. https://www.amazon.com/Color-Purple-C....

Or

If you just want the single title, it’s 1.99 as well: https://www.amazon.com/Temple-Familia...

Awesome. I should be able to read that book in time.

I should be able to read this book for the January book read. Count me in! Thanks

Just ordered the trilogy..it’s $1.99 on Amazon

The Temple of my Familiar is a trilogy? I missed something? Is it three books under one cover?

No. It’s book 2 in The Color Purple trilogy.

Aha! Thanks Lulu

Oh this should be interesting 🤨

I will pass on this one because it's magical realism and I read a magic or magical book for something this year, or fantasy--neither is something I care to read much of (The Gilded Ones although I gave it 3 stars because the writing is strong, just not my thing).

But I'm looking forward to other reads this year :)

I’m a slow reader, in my old age. I started the book more than 2 weeks ago and only have progressed a few chapters. I knew I was going to need that head start! I will hit it hard in the next week and make better progress. I promise!

Karin wrote: "I will pass on this one because it's magical realism and I read a magic or magical book for something this year, or fantasy--neither is something I care to read much of ([book:The Gilded Ones|40024..."

I totally understand Karin! I have moments when I have reached my fill of certain genres as well.

Angel wrote: "I’m a slow reader, in my old age. I started the book more than 2 weeks ago and only have progressed a few chapters. I knew I was going to need that head start! I will hit it hard in the next week a..."

How are you enjoying it so far?

I'm going to start The Color Purple today (hopefully) and then start on this one. I hope to finish the entire trilogy this month.

So far, I am intrigued by Zede, Carlotta, and Arveda. I am just being introduced to Suwelo.

How is the reading coming along for everyone?

How are you finding the language?

What format are you using? Physical, eBook, Audio?

Any thoughts or concerns? Comments? So far?

I am reading the physical copy. I'm still trying to get attached to main characters. I hope it picks up soon.

I am plugging away at the paperback. Sadly, I am only to page 60, but not because the book is not interesting. Just have a lot of external commitments keeping me from reading. I want to finish it though. So far I am starting to learn about Suwelo, Lissie and now have been introduced to Hal. The first chapter was intriguing: Carlotta, Zedé, and their journey through the Panama Canal to San Francisco. I was captivated by Arveyda and his sensuous description. Now it seems they were a lifetime ago, and I have only gotten a few pages past that torrid encounter. I am hoping to swing back around and see how these characters intertwine. I have been having to re -read a page or so when I pick the book back up because the time between readings has been so long. I hope to hit it hard in the next week so I can participate in the next month’s selection. Is anyone else feeling like we need two months to read a book?

Angel I can definitely relate! I feel like I’m behind on February’s read already. Lol

I did order Southside Girls but I will probably get a late start on it.

I just received South Side Girls. I might start that one as well.

I feel the same way.. like I just haven’t had time to read..

I’m reading this on Hoopla. I may have it somewhere on Dropbox🤔. I wish I could find the audio (may have to check one of the subscriber audio apps.)

Anyway, I’ve only read about a fourth of the book so far, because it’s triggering and that first set of characters broke my heart🤬. Sigh. Then I come back almost a week later and the description of the Middle Passage (well even before they get on the ship) had me in an emotional rage. But I will keep pushing through.

Lulu are you re-reading this with us? I saw where you’ve read it before.

I hope I like the book enough to complete the trilogy. Alice Walker’s writing is so vivid and personalized. So there’s that!

Yes. I’m re-reading. I read it years ago and honestly I don’t think I knew it was part of a trilogy at that point. Lol!

I don’t think their is an audible version. I was looking for one as well.

Ok! This is definitely not the book I read before. Lol. I’m about a quarter of the way through. I’m not really sure where this is going or what I’m reading….but I’m getting Toni Cade Bambara “The Salt Eaters” vibes and now I’ve got PTSD.

Needless to say this read is definitely gonna extend beyond January.

Has anyone finished or close to finishing?

I’m slowly progressing. I just finished the chapter where Miss Lissie is describing her previous lives to Suwelo (the animal cousins) and I don’t know how to feel about that. It gives connotations of humans evolving from animals? But then it seems like it has a racist connotation. I am white and reading her description of the animal cousins just made me feel uncomfortable, because we have all seen and heard white people in history referencing black people in such terms. Did anyone else feel disturbed or uncomfortable by these descriptions? I feel a little uncomfortable even mentioning it.

I am curious if anyone else has other interpretations of the animal cousins.

Lulu wrote: "Ok! This is definitely not the book I read before. Lol. I’m about a quarter of the way through. I’m not really sure where this is going or what I’m reading….but I’m getting Toni Cade Bambara “The S..."

I am right there with you. I really have to push myself thru this one

Angel wrote: "I am curious if anyone else has other interpretations of the animal cousins."


The ape cousins. I didn’t originally read it as derogatory or racist. My interpretation was simply the women learning from nature what a family or society should be; co-existing without any one group being dominant over the other. But at some point man got it in his head that women were weak and he should be ruler of it all.

Maybe I should go back and re-read that section.

I agree with you,Lulu , and upon rereading that portion I see maybe she was referencing the evolutionary theory humans descended from apes and are our cousins. Funny how women being perceived as the weaker gender hasn’t evolved completely. I still know many men who think this! Pfft!

I did not finish it but plan to. I remember reading this years ago but nothing stood out. As I was recently reading, nothing grabbed me like oh, you need to read this.

I am engaged by the characters. I am fascinated with Miss Lissie’s time travels. I am just a very slow reader these days. My attention and focus is just all over the place, with all the things I am managing at the moment. I just read with rapt attention the birth of Lulu! (Yes, that’s how behind I am.). I am going to start Southside Girls also and read them in tandem. Has anyone finished Temple of My Familiar yet?

I have just finished the short chapter that refers to the title. I had been curious about the meaning of the title. The temple and her familiar. I am thinking they are metaphors. Her familiar perhaps a metaphor for her femininity? Or her sexuality? Her vagina? The temple a metaphor for love or her relationship with Suwelo? Anyone else think these are metaphors? Or any other ideas?

I’m still reading Temple and have acquired Southside.

I too have just completed the animal cousins section and have some thoughts on it as it relates to familial hierarchies and rl cousins and how those friendships are built and influenced by adults. When I first read this part I had to backtrack several times because I just knew the story wasn’t jumping from human families to animal families(huh)? So now we move forward back to Suwelo, I believe.

Lulu, these stories and timelines connect somewhere right? Or are there 2 or 3 main shorts being introduced to the reader nonconsecuticely?

Mo wrote: "I’m still reading Temple and have acquired Southside.

I too have just completed the animal cousins section and have some thoughts on it as it relates to familial hierarchies and rl cousins and ho..."

The stories didn't connect from what I can see. The characters did. lol

Ok. I've finally finished and this novel was massive! I in no way feel like I caught everything Alice Walker was giving in this one, so I will definitely be picking it up again in the future. I did find some notes online to try and help digest the read so I'll be posting them below with the spoiler tag.

To those who have finished, what are your thoughts?
If you didn't finish....do you think you'll pick it up again?

CHARACTERS .... SPOILERS AHEAD
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The Temple of My Familiar contains more characters than all of Walker's other novels combined, including several that reappear from The Color Purple (1982). Drawn from various continents, the number and diversity of these characters are appropriate to the theme of the connectedness of each and all. The concept of the unity of all people is further reinforced by having the central characters, who live continents apart physically and mentally, cross paths and develop intimate relationships during the course of the novel.

(view spoiler)[Lissie and Zede are the two characters who most clearly carry the novel's message of the need for a new vision.

Zede, like Lissie, has "dream memories" of her ancestors who trace their lineage from Latin America back to Africa. In her many incarnations, Lissie has been both animal and human, male and female, white and black. Although she has more often been exploited than the exploiter, she has been and done all. Both characters (especially Lissie), function primarily as symbols rather than realistic characters.

The other female characters, Fanny and Carlotta, struggle to achieve the self-realization Lissie and Zede have already won. They chafe within the narrow roles defined by the dominate culture. Fanny is unhappy with her subordinate role in both her marriage and a racist society. She has a hatred of oppressors that she fears she cannot control. To develop her sense of selfhood she travels to Africa to observe and learn from female relatives. Carlotta, a much different type of woman, faces essentially the same problem.

Abandoned by her husband, she becomes the submissive woman for Fanny's husband that Fanny refused to be.

She acts and dresses the part but ultimately, like Fanny, remains unsatisfied. Her search for identity also takes her through new age approaches such as massage and yoga. However, she only discovers her identity through community with other womanists, in particular, through her relationship with Fanny.

If female characters in Walker's novel have to learn to reject the marginalized roles assigned them, Walker's male characters have to learn to accept the side of themselves that they have marginalized — the feminine side. Two of the three male characters have a developed feminine side. Hal, Lissie's husband, is so sensitive to the birth of his wife's first child that he gives up sex to avoid causing such pain, yet he loves delivering his wife's babies (who are fathered by other men). He is effective as a symbol, but as a character he borders on the absurd. Arveyda, the other sensitive black male character, is a new age music star, but with a domestic side. He bakes whole-wheat bread and after reading some womanist tracts his wife brings home, he recognizes their author, Shug, as his spiritual mother. Suwelo is the male character most intent on learning to develop his feminine side. Through Lissie's tutelage, he learns to give up his love of pornography, a fetish that symbolizes his desire to continue the oppression of women, and is brought to see women as equals.

By the novel's conclusion, Walker's main characters have all reached the same philosophical viewpoint: nothing is to be excluded from the circle of life except that which oppresses. In The Color Purple, Celie says that if God listened to black women, life would sure be different. The Temple of My Familiar illustrates the efforts of black womanists to transform the world by reviewing the past and countering divisive forces in the present. (hide spoiler)]

SOCIAL CONCERNS .... SPOILERS AHEAD
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In The Temple of My Familiar, Walker tries something almost destined to fail.

She challenges the West's Eurocentric vision of the world — its myths of human origins, its concepts of history, its ideas on political relationships, its attitudes toward the environment, its views on male/female relationships.

(view spoiler)[The male-dominated white culture has written the script and cast the players for thousands of years. In The Temple of My Familiar Walker recasts the roles and rewrites the script. Formerly marginalized people (principally African American females) take center stage — a much broader one than just Europe and North America — and play the heroic roles. Walker undoubtedly chose this approach because she knows, as does every chronicler of a people, that a people's concept of themselves and their prospects for the future are influenced by the accepted stories of their past. Those whose pages of history are cast in a dim light or worse, no light at all, must often struggle with an imposed, unacceptable identity or none at all. So, by rescripting history, Walker hopes to better the prospects of people marginalized by the hegemony of the white male.

A central social concern of the novel is the importance of a new vision of human interaction that emphasizes inclusion rather than exclusion. An old saying goes: "There are two kinds of people in the world — the kind who divide the world into two kinds of people, and the kind who don't." Walker — who has been accused of seeing the world in terms of black and white, female and male, right and wrong — celebrates in The Temple of My Familiar the connectedness of all things. Certainly racism and sexism are concerns in the novel, but Walker has a larger concern here which has not been central to her fiction previously. Walker is still concerned with race and sexism; she still views the world from the perspective of a black womanist. But with her focus on cosmic consciousness, the label "black womanist" seems too narrow to define her new approach. Although some critics have expanded the label to "new age black womanist," Walker has supplied her own description: "My full title that I've given myself at this juncture is pagan agnostic ecstatic."

Since Walker has always expressed a strong concern for the rights of the excluded and exploited, it is not surprising that she would extend that concern to animal rights and the protection of the environment. The "familiar" of the title, in fact, refers to animals, principally the lion, which have long suffered in their relationship with humanity. According to one of Walker's characters, Lissie, familiars were once treated by women as companions and equals, but that relationship threatened male egos and they were driven away. In other stories in the book, Walker describes with equal indignation the wanton destruction of South American rain forests, African complicity with Western powers who dump radioactive wastes in Africa, and the destruction of the ozone layer. In the face of these assaults on the defenseless, Walker contends that "it is fatal to see yourself as separate." For her, healthy change will come only when society learns to see itself from a holistic perspective and with the understanding that all are one. (hide spoiler)]

THEME ..... SPOILERS AHEAD
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A central theme in the novel is the challenge marginalized people face everywhere in creating an identity.

(view spoiler)[Fanny, for example, faces two unacceptable roles — either as a victim of racism and sexism or as a possible perpetrator of retaliatory violence. She, like many characters in the novel, seeks a new role. The source of new ideas does not seem to be from traditional books. Witness Suwelo, the college history teacher, and Carlotta and Fanny, college literature teachers who are spiritually lost. The sources seem to come from other places, principally women's lives — specifically from women with past lives in the case of Lissie and Zede, or from dreams which hold archetypal memories as Franny's dreams do. These sources are better guides to achieving a viable identity.

Walker puts the importance of these sources of knowledge this way: "a people's dreams, imaginings, rituals, legends . . . are known to contain the accumulated collective reality of the people themselves." In The Temple of My Familiar the wisdom that comes from these founts directs the characters to seek their identities in the connectedness of all things rather than in opposition to anything.

In Walker's novels, a new identity cannot be achieved without support.

There are no lone heroes. Those who struggle up from oppression, those who are lost and find themselves, succeed within a community of support.

The first place to look for support is the family. Fanny travels back to Africa to consult her father. She seeks out her mother for advice and makes alliances with her sister. She also tries reading books by little-known women writers, joins consciousness-raising groups, and enters therapy. Carlotta reconciles with her mother, and in an act that demonstrates that she has stopped competing with women for the attentions of men, she befriends Fanny. It is Fanny who, through her massage sessions, puts Carlotta in touch with her body, which she became alienated from in her drive to attract men. Suwelo, who lost his parents in a car accident, finds his support from surrogate parents, Lissie and Hal, who help him undergo values realignment. Arveyda, who lost his mother early in life, falls in love with his wife's mother, who renews his passion. He also discovers a new "spiritual mother," as he calls her, in Snug.

The novel ends with the four central characters living communally.

It is no surprise that in a novel with a central theme about the necessity of recreating the world, that the importance of artistic vision would also be a theme. Artists, after all, create worlds.

All the major characters in the novel practice some creative art on the way to building a new vision of themselves and their relationships with others. Hal and Lissie, both painters, paint portraits of each other, an act which symbolizes their re-creation of each other in their relationship. Arveyda sings his wife, Carlotta, "into understanding her mother." Carlotta, a costume designer, like her mother, takes up painting and eventually becomes a musician, a bell chimist, in order to play with her husband. Fanny takes up playwriting after her father, and with her sister writes a play of her father's life. With her husband, Suwelo, who has taken up carpentry, Fanny designs their house, a symbol of their finally reconstructed relationship. No less important is the fact that all the characters are storytellers — an art which Walker sees as the central art in re-creating the world.

In all of Walker's novels the protagonists undergo spiritual transformation from depression and ignorance to hope and understanding. Grange Copeland transforms from self-centered to caring; Meridian Hill, from sickness to physical and spiritual health; Celie, from poor and degraded to financially independent and respected; Tashi, from victim to martyr. The theme of spiritual transformation is central to The Temple of My Familiar as well. Each of the characters search for wholeness.

They are split by a world in conflict, by a world that is divided into sides -— by race, by sex, by religion, by political system, and so on. The novel suggests that by the will to find identity, by community, and by artistic vision people can transform into whole human beings. (hide spoiler)]

QUESTIONS


Inasmuch as The Temple of My Familiar can be classified, it resembles a novel of ideas and perhaps it is best approached in that way. A place to start might be with the controversy over a premise influenced by the Black Aesthetic Movement that the history of oppressed peoples can and should be rewritten imaginatively in order to deconstruct "the ideological assumptions underpinning Western constructions of reality." Was Walker successful anywhere in the novel with this technique?

A second thrust of the novel is in advancing ideas about where the world should be headed in areas such as the institution of marriage, directions for social change, attitudes toward racism, mankind's relationship toward animals, and so forth. Walker's ideas should stimulate an interesting discussion.

1. All the central characters seem to evolve to a higher consciousness. What social responsibilities, if any, are part of their new consciousness?

2. Does it seem to be true that Walker's homogenized view of the sexes and races through Lissie dilutes moral responsibility for sexism and racism?

3. What various roles do love triangles play in The Temple of My Familiar?

4. In Walker's novels the central female characters often make a big to-do over their discovery of masturbation. In what ways is masturbation used symbolically in this novel?

5. Does Fanny's experience show the way one can combat racism without becoming a racist?

6. Walker took much criticism for her depiction of black males in The Color Purple. How do the black male characters appear in this novel?

7. Suwelo obviously has much to learn about how to treat women. Does Arveyda share any of his oppressive tendencies?

8. Why does Lissie write to Suwelo in disappearing ink?

9. What relationship does Lissie's story of the familiar have to do with the stories involving the central characters in the novel? What do they need to set free?

10. Is modern African society as it is depicted in the novel any better or any worse than Western Society?

11. Can you identify where the source of all trouble comes from in The Temple of My Familiar?

12. What link does there seem to be between memory and imagination in the novel?

Reading time has been at a premium in Feb, so I just got to this. I'm only about 30 pages in, but I'm finding Alice Walker very easy to read. I was a little worried about the page length, but so far I am enjoying the book...even though I don't quite know where it is going yet...

I did not finish but I will at some point.

I am still reading Temple of My Familiar. There are many interwoven characters that initially was hard to keep track of, but they are all meshing together. I was very intrigued by the title of the book, wondering what the Familiar represents. I googled “Familiar - Alice Walker” and have discovered that it could be referring to a spirit animal of sorts. But I thought it represented the female femininity or essence which each female character possesses and each male character is drawn to. I could be wrong. Maybe I am missing the point entirely. I know most people have probably finished this book and moved on. I am interested in other people’s interpretation.