Possessing the Secret of Joy

Tashi is a minor character from The Color Purple who returns to center a novel of her own. Raised among the Olinka, a fictional West African people, she undergoes a traditional female circumcision as an adult, a decision bound up with grief for a sister who did not survive the same rite and with her own search for identity between her homeland and the Western world she enters through marriage.

The novel is built from interior monologues and letters from Tashi, her husband Adam, and the people around her, moving across decades and continents. As Tashi's mental health deteriorates under the weight of what she has lived through, she is drawn into therapy, memory, and an eventual reckoning with the woman who performed the ritual.

Possessing the Secret of Joy confronts female genital cutting, colonialism, and trauma directly. It is a difficult, unflinching novel, but one concerned finally with how a person reclaims a self that has been taken from her.