59 pages • 1 hour read
Alice WalkerThe Temple of My Familiar
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1989A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Parts 2-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2 Summary
Olivia
Olivia tells Lance, the man she will eventually marry, about her history. Her biological mother, Celie, had an unhappy life. Her children, Olivia and Adam, were the result of rape by Celie’s stepfather. He gave them to missionaries Samuel and Corrine, who adopted the children and took them to Africa. Olivia and Adam were raised by their adoptive parents and their aunt, Nettie, who married Samuel after Corrine’s death.
Olivia left America when she was six. The Africa she arrived in was already ravaged through slave trade, the plundering of its natural resources, and the demolition of its native culture by Western colonial powers. Olivia spent all her time with her best friend, Tashi, who grew up to marry Adam. During Adam and Tashi’s courtship, Olivia felt lonely and ignored, and was drawn to an African man whose Christian name was “Dahvid.” Dahvid was silent and restless, and railed against the atrocities the Europeans had done to his tribe and country. Dahvid eventually pressured Olivia into sleeping with him.
Samuel lost faith in Christianity, coming to see it as “a religion of conquest and domination inflicted on other peoples” (156). He, Nettie, and the children eventually returned to America, and Olivia met her mother for the first time when she was in her thirties. Upon arrival in America, Olivia was pregnant with Dahvid’s child. When their daughter was born, Celia and Olivia named her Fanny Nzingha.
Olivia tells an adult Fanny about her time spent in Celie’s house. Celie and her friend and live-in partner, Shug, were warm, loving, and competent women. However, after a while, Olivia felt like she had no place there, as she was a grown woman. Celie and Shug completely took over raising Fanny. Shug also founded her own religion and held church in the house; this made it difficult for Olivia to live there.
Olivia left Fanny with the two women and went to nursing school in Atlanta, where she met Lance, who eventually became Fanny’s stepfather. It took Olivia a while to let him in because he was light-skinned, while she was not just Black, but African. She was also hesitant because of Fanny, having heard Celie’s own traumatic stories. Additionally, Olivia was wary of Lance’s “blues” that arose from conflicted feelings about his identity, as his parents were Black and white. However, they eventually get married and live a long and happy life together, until Lance’s death.
Fanny
When Fanny finally meets the half-sister she never knew about, she recounts her earliest memory, which includes her grandmother Celie, and Shug. As a child, Fanny wasn’t very interested in her own mother, whom she thought boring. She enjoyed spending time with and being doted on by Celie and Shug.
An adult Fanny tells Suwelo that she is going to Africa to spend time with the Olinka and meet her own father for the first time. She writes Suwelo letters, detailing her adventures. Fanny and Olivia pass through London first, where Olivia gives lectures on her time in Africa at the Africa Center. Fanny gains new admiration for her mother, listening to these stories.
At the Africa Center, Olivia and Danny also learn that Dahvid, a writer and playwright whom everyone calls Ola, has been arrested because of his latest play on taxation. When they arrive in Ola’s home country, however, Ola comes to receive them at the airport in a state car. He is the minister of culture and was let out of jail when he told the authorities about his visitors from America. Fanny is initially shy, but she is delighted when Ola draws her into a hug. She sees bits of herself reflected in her father.
One morning, Ola introduces Danny to a local white writer. The writer is trying to warn Ola against reviling the government. Ola is confident that nothing will happen to him, as he is related to many in power. He is adamant about highlighting the current problems of the country, including rampant poverty and the lack of facilities, infrastructure, and women’s safety. Only those at the top of the government hierarchy are living a comfortable life. Ola insists that only when his people stop acting as oppressively as white people will he begin writing plays that portray the government in positive light.
Ola tells Fanny about an idea for his next play, which will use Elvis Presley as a metaphor. Ola believes Elvis is Native American because of his fondness for buckskin, fringed clothing, and silver. Elvis’s success highlights how Americans see him as a way to embrace the repressed, non-European qualities within them. Ola believes human beings want, above all else, to live with each other across and irrespective of tribal differences. Fanny is moved by the idea and excited by Ola’s suggestion that they write the play together some day.
Suwelo
Suwelo dreams of being stranded in a market with no way of taking anything home. He wakes up and remembers an incident from when he and Fanny lived in the suburbs. She acquired a shopping cart to bring back groceries from the market five blocks away, but Suwelo would only use the car when he did the shopping. One day, when the car was in the shop, Fanny gave Suwelo a long list of groceries to bring home. He demurred, refusing to use the cart as it reminded him of women. Fanny was upset but got rid of the cart. Later, Suwelo felt terrible about the incident, but something was irrevocably changed between them ever since.
Suwelo reads one of Fanny’s letters in which she mentions meeting the writer, Bessie Head. Suwelo remembers Fanny’s efforts to get him to read Bessie Head’s books, claiming they changed how Fanny thought and felt about Africa. Suwelo resisted, because he didn’t want to read a woman’s writing on Africa. Fanny brings him another African male writer’s book, but Suwelo doesn’t read this either. He thinks it is all right for Fanny to read such books, as she teaches literature; he has no time for the same, however, as his subject is American history. Shortly after this, Fanny begins sleeping in another room.
Suwelo reluctantly tells his therapist, a middle-aged Jewish man, about how Fanny “periodically (falls) in love with spirits” (184). She discovers one every couple of years, usually a historical figure, though sometimes she has no idea who or what the spirit is She is then infatuated with them for a while, during which time Suwelo feels unbearably disconnected from her.
After many months, Suwelo finally sells Rafe’s home and returns to California. Lissie and Hal give Suwelo paintings as parting gifts. They have each painted “self-portraits” of each other which only feature outlines of a man and woman’s upper bodies respectively, surrounded by infinite blue space.
Lissie also gives Suwelo an envelope with blank pages, and Suwelo later realizes she has written on them in invisible ink. By candlelight, he reads Lissie’s account of being burnt at the stake for being a witch, when she was a “Moor” woman. Lissie describes how “Moor” women were burned at the stake by the Inquisition to prevent goddess worship spreading to Europe and the modern world. Furthermore, women’s closeness with children and animals was taken away from them—children were taken away by their white fathers and sold into enslavement, and “consorting” with animals was considered a crime and a sign of witchcraft.
Months after Arveyda tells Carlotta Zedé’s story, Carlotta notices that the feather earrings are falling apart. She has them encased in plastic and wears them around her neck, after which she begins to dream for the first time in years. Carlotta also takes the three stones of her father’s people and places them in their original formation underneath a live-oak tree in the San Francisco arboretum. She begins to frequently eat her lunch, exercise, meditate, and pray underneath this tree.
Part 3 Summary
Mary Jane
After three decades of living in Africa, playwright Mary Jane Briden reflects on how liberating Zedé and Carlotta was the last act she did as Mary Ann Haverstock. After putting the two of them aboard one of her two yachts, Mary escaped in a third one as originally planned, while everyone assumed she had drowned in the storm.
Leaving her old life behind, Mary Jane opened bank accounts under her new name and kept enough of her old inheritance to live on. She headed to London and visited her great-aunt Eleanora Burnham, pretending to be a student journalist. Eleanor told Mary Jane about her own aunt, Eleandra Burnham Peacock, who was a great adventurer and only returned to England when her health began to fail.
Mary Jane visited the women’s college to which Eleanora had given her papers, which were housed in the Eleanora Burnham room. She read her great-aunt’s diary and discovered that Eleanora spent years in Africa, which she loved. The name “M’Sukta” was written multiple times in the margins, and Mary Jane wonders about it. When she later took some photographs for her great-aunt to identify the people in them, Eleanora sobbed the name “M’Sukta” in response to a painting of an African woman in tribal robes.
The librarian at the women’s college told Mary Jane that all the photographs were originally taken by Eleandra Peacock, later passing into Eleanora Burnham’s possession. She also gave Mary Jane Eleanor’s journal. In it, Eleandra had detailed her lack of desire to marry, shared by her cousin, “T.” He was not interested in women, and Eleandra only wanted to paint.
T. took Eleandra to the Museum of Natural History. One of the exhibits was a life-size replica of an African village, including huts, a granary, and even a painted blue sky on the ceiling. M’Sukta, a little African woman, sat spinning cloth in the doorway of one of the huts. T. explained that she was part of the exhibit; she had been there for 10 years, and the museum let her live there. There was nowhere for her to escape to, as her tribe had been wiped out by intertribal war and slave raiding. Eleandra was shocked and horrified.
Mary Jane began to visit the Eleanora Burnham room frequently to keep reading Eleanor’s journal. Eleandra began to feel a sense of superficiality and decadence after encountering M’Sukta. Still determined not to marry, she questioned her tutors as to what her education had prepared her to do in life. While most were perplexed with her question, her painting tutor impatiently pointed out that in addition to some talent, she had the resources to do anything she likes.
She also began to visit M’Sukta, pondering over the words etched on the compound wall in the “village”—“ME TAO ACHE DAHEN SOMO TUK DE” (230-31)— which translated to “THEY CANNOT KILL US, BECAUSE WITHOUT US THEY DIE” (231). Years later, when Eleandra conversed with M’Sukta, the latter told her that this ancient tribal saying of her ancestors was what kept her going all the years she lived in the museum. Eleandra learned more about M’Sukta’s tribe, the Balawuya, or the Ababa, through the writings of Sir Henley Rowanbotham. He was a commander in the British army, and the one who rescued M’Sukta and found her a home in the museum when all her tribespeople were killed.
Beyond this point, Mary Jane was unable to decipher any more, as Eleandra’s journal was completely moth-eaten. Meanwhile, Eleanora passed away and bequeathed most of her fortune to her American niece, “Mary Ann Haverstock.” Since “Mary Ann” was also believed deceased, the money was diverted to fund an anthropological group in Africa. Shortly after her great-aunt’s funeral, Mary Jane left for Africa with a collection of books Eleanora had written and a year’s worth of painting supplies.
Parts 2-3 Analysis
The Temple of My Familiar is seen as a sequel of sorts to Walker’s The Color Purple, and the connections arise in these chapters. Fanny is revealed to be Celie’s granddaughter; her mother, Olivia, is the daughter that reunites with Celie at the end of Walker’s Pulitzer-winning novel.
The theme of The Historical Trauma of Colonization is explored in these chapters, with a focus on the African American community’s connection to the motherland of Africa. Olivia, who is African American, arrives in a “ravaged” Africa as a young child, a land exploited and drained of its spiritual and material culture and resources. Olivia grows up there. Later, her daughter, Fanny—who has only known America—visits Africa as an adult to connect with this part of her identity. Fanny’s father, Ola, is African; more importantly, his work focuses on highlighting the problems that persist in his home country as a colonial inheritance, including poverty and violence. However, Ola’s writing also indicates that the tendency to oppress is inherent in all human beings: Freed from the white oppressor, the African man oppresses the African woman. Spotlighting this through his plays is what gets Ola thrown in jail.
Olivia’s experiences growing up in Africa provide a Black woman’s perspective on colonization, while Ola’s story provides a Black man’s perspective. Walker presents a white woman’s lens on the same through Mary Jane Briden, previously Mary Ann Haverstock. Mary Jane’s connection to Africa is almost ancestral; she meets Eleanora, a great-aunt who lived in Africa for years, and is further intrigued by Eleanora’s great-aunt Eleanor’s journals. Eleandra is drawn to Africa because of M’Sukta, who is a symbol of the kind of historical trauma left behind by colonization. Her entire tribe is wiped out, and she as the lone survivor of her culture is brought to England, miles away from her home, and housed in a museum like a showpiece.
Eleandra’s encounter with M’Sukta forces the former to come face-to-face with the privilege and power she possesses as a white woman. On one hand, she feels restless and unaccomplished when she sees the skills M’Sukta possesses; on the other, that Eleandra is able to easily move to Africa and live there of her own free will is the opposite experience of the colonized, particularly M’Sukta. Eleandra ultimately uses her privilege and resources toward a good end, as she learns more about M’Sukta’s culture and eventually travels and lives in Africa. She inspires Mary Jane to do so, in turn. The impact of historical and colonial trauma can resound over generations in the colonized. Eleandra and Mary Jane’s connection offers a glimpse of how this same trauma can be redressed over generations.
One common tool used by Western colonizers to suppress and exploit was religion, and Olivia’s adoptive father, Samuel, comes to see this in time. He loses faith in Christianity, seeing how spirituality was weaponized to denigrate and degrade the traditional culture in colonized lands. In keeping with this idea, Walker explores alternative religions through the different characters in the book. Shug, for instance, forms her own church, while Fanny meets and falls in love with spirits. Lissie’s different lifetimes continue to offer different ideas of religion and spirituality, and heavily feature The Feminine Experience.
Lissie uses stories of her past live to describe how women were burnt at the stake to prevent the spread of goddess worship. This narrative also touches upon the concept of the familiar, which is a recurring motif in the book. Lissie traces how the gentle and natural connection that women had with animals was convoluted into something evil and fearsome. This is a reference to the modern-day conception of the familiar as a demon that obeys a witch. The idea of the familiar also appears briefly in Carlotta’s story and the feathered earrings. The African parrot holds significant for her father’s people, and the earrings are an heirloom from his tribe. When Carlotta begins wearing them close to her heart, she begins dreaming again, suggesting that she is reconnecting with past selves, or at least her culture, much like Lissie’s mother did.
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