The Temple of My Familiar

Alice Walker is a celebrated American writer. Her poetry and fiction delve into the lived experiences and culture of the African American community, with a particular focus on women. The Temple of My Familiar is no exception.

Walker is the eighth child of African American sharecroppers. Growing up, she spent a year with her grandparents in rural Georgia, though they had a turbulent marriage because of her grandfather’s past alcohol usage. Pondering how people she loved could have such a terrible past is what led her to write her most acclaimed novel, The Color Purple. There is also some exploration of this idea in The Temple of My Familiar in the stories of Suwelo’s and Hal’s respective fathers, and The Temple of My Familiar is often viewed as a type of sequel to The Color Purple. Characters from this book, including the protagonist Celie and her eventual lover, Shug, feature in The Temple of My Familiar—Celie is Fanny’s maternal grandmother, and Fanny is raised for a time by Celia and Shug.

Walker studied at Spelman College on a scholarship before transferring to Sarah Lawrence. She then moved to Mississippi and became involved in the civil rights movement before marrying Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a white Jewish civil rights attorney, in New York City. The couple became Mississippi’s first legally married interracial couple. These different aspects of Walker’s life find their way into character details of the book. Most of the women in the story—Zedé, Carlotta, Fanny, Nzingha—receive a university education, though with differing experiences. Fanny remembers growing up during the civil rights movement and watching it unfold in Mississippi, while Ola and Mary Jane marry at a time when interracial marriage is technically illegal in Ola’s home-country.

With respect to race, Walker’s work is noted for its emphasis on “the inner workings of African American life,” rather than on interracial relations between Black and white people (Whitted, Qiana. “Alice Walker.” New Georgia Encyclopedia, 18 Sept. 2003). The Temple of My Familiar exemplifies this. Some threads of the story trace Black characters’ roots and connection to Africa and African culture; other threads explore their feelings about racism and white oppression, but focus on working through and overcoming these feelings through forgiveness and compassion, rather than retaliatory action.

Walker is famous for her coinage of the term “womanist.” She asserts this term describes her stance on the issue of gender, as she “sees herself as someone who appreciates women’s culture and femininity” (“Alice Walker.” Poetry Foundation, 2019). In keeping with this, her work often centers women, specifically Black women, but also explores the universality of human experiences through their stories (“Alice Walker.” Poetry Foundation, 2019). In The Temple of the Familiar, too, Black women or people of color are in focus; the ones who are not have a close affinity for African or African American culture, like Mary Jane and Tanya. However, the biggest example of how Walker’s belief regarding the universality of human experience plays out in the book is through Lissie’s stories. Lissie has lived multiple lifetimes, some of them even as a white man and a white woman, leaving her with anger about the state of the world, but also an understanding of how it came to be this way.