Remembrance as the Key to Redemption: Ancestral Healing and Historical Re-assessment in Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar

Genuine black history has been excluded from academia for years as being fragmented and invalid. Black people have been trained to deny their native qualities, and the denial- whether voluntary or imposed- has shattered their true communal cultural identity. Alice Walker, like her contemporary African American authors, has taken up the task to reconstruct the forgotten African history. It is only through this willed return to one’s ancestral legacy and acknowledging the inherent historical continuity that black people can achieve wholeness and unity. Walker’s 1989 novel, The Temple of My Familiar, is an attempt at the reconstruction of history through storytelling. Walker’s innovative way of historiography is a total reconstruction of the traditional, linear version of history. Multiple perspectives and polyphonic voices are chosen to restore the forgotten past. It is in the unremembered past that the true wisdom and knowledge necessary for self-healing is restored. This communal African memory is re-visited by different characters: growth is encouraged and new identities are formed. This paper is a careful analysis of the strategies taken by Alice Walker to visit the collective African past through remembrance and recount the whole history of Man through the revisionary, goddess-like figure of Miss Lissie. Described by Walker as a “romance of the past 500000 years”, the novel transcends time and place to complete the process of personal healing.