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 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4 Summary
One evening before he sells the house and moves home, Suwelo invites Hal and Lissie over for dinner. He tells them about Fanny and Carlotta. Suwelo and Fanny knew things between them wouldn’t work when Fanny returned from Africa the first time. Her love for Suwelo was unmistakable, but she hated the institution of marriage. Suwelo agreed to the divorce, and they spent some happy times after moving to San Francisco together. When the divorce was finalized and Fanny moved out, Suwelo grew depressed. As a result, he began watching pornography and live sex acts.
Suwelo feels a growing attraction to Carlotta, who works in the same university. She knows about him and Fanny. Fanny used to teach in the same university as them, before moving into administration and ultimately opening a massage parlor down the street, which Carlotta frequents. When Fanny returns to Africa upon Ola’s passing, Suwelo and Carlotta begin an affair. However, she never speaks to Suwelo about her problems and claims she has no parents, and her children no father. Suwelo later tells Fanny that Carlotta had no substance.
Suwelo describes the time he and Fanny spent together in a yurt, on a ridge top overlooking fields and vineyards. Though there was no one else around, Fanny claimed to occasionally see Indigenous American people. Suwelo didn’t understand or share this gift of “second sight.” Fanny was able to notice things intuitively and psychically, and even wish them into existence. A week after she first expressed her desire to live in a yurt, for instance, friends of theirs called and offered their yurt which was due to be demolished, as they were moving into a new house. Suwelo feared this power, especially when Fanny and he had arguments, but Fanny didn’t wish bad things in anger; rather, she withdrew.
Suwelo recollects how he would try and pressure Fanny into wearing attractive lingerie. This was a conflict for years, until her resistance solidified into outright denial, as the clothes made her feel uncomfortable and degraded. Suwelo reflects on how people marry for love, but eventually stay together because of things like a house, shared payments, and children. Fanny and he shared none of this, eventually not even marriage; they connected because of an intrinsic relatedness. Fanny hated the institution of marriage because she didn’t think the state needed to legitimize the bonding of souls that are anyway eternal. These beliefs lead to no dearth of conversation topics between Suwelo and Fanny, and despite his exasperation with her sometimes, he knows she loves him.
Fanny and Nzingha
Fanny attends Ola’s funeral with her sister, Nzingha Anne. She reflects on the day they first met: Nzingha was Ola’s assistant at the Ministry of Culture, and Ola casually introduced them to each other one day. Both women were surprised to learn of the other’s existence, and Fanny felt like she was “looking into a mirror as an African-American […] and the mirror was reflecting only the African” (253).
Over drinks and dinner at Nzingha’s place one evening, she tells Fanny about her own mother. She was from the bush, uneducated and illiterate, but joined the Mbeles and grew to be a great guerrilla fighter. She saved Ola’s life, and he married her at a time when they were both fighting the white regime. When the regime was overthrown, however, Ola became important to the country and was sent abroad to be educated. Nzingha’s mother was left with nothing to do and spent her time raising Nzingha in her hut, waiting for Ola’s return.
When Ola returned, he was displeased to see how Nzingha was being brought up. He visited often, eventually taking Nzingha away to give her a Western education. Her mother didn’t fight it, but began drinking heavily after Nzingha’s departure. Eventually, she died of illness and heartbreak. Her absence weighed heavily on Ola, who was already writing plays by then. He wrote a play about Nzingha’s mother, depicting how she struggled all her life: first as a soldier, then as a wife and mother. He portrayed his own flaws as well, from his affairs with white women to taking Nzingha away. His writing showed the oppression of Black women for the first time, carried out by Black men. It was the first of his plays to be banned.
On another occasion, Nzingha describes how Ola sent her abroad for her education. Nzingha hated Paris; she thought both the place and people were cold and jaded, and hated the Louvre especially because of the “booty from other countries on display” (267). Nzingha was angry about the way Africa was either ignored or depicted as “mysterious” in her university classes. There was no acknowledgment of its ties or contributions to ancient civilization, or the colonial oppression it had undergone for centuries.
The last straw was the portrayal of Medusa, when talking of the Greek foundations of Western civilization. Medusa was depicted as a horrifying beast with snakes flying out her hair, needing to be slain by the hero Perseus. Anyone from Africa, however, would recognize Medusa as the mother of Christian angels, or Isis—or, preceding this, the mother Goddess that she was in Africa. Nzingha pointed out to her professor that the earliest known “Athene” had similar snaky hair, arguing the connection between Isis and Athene, but she was dismissed.
Nzingha left Paris that night, refusing to be taught that “a civilization founded on the destruction of the black woman as Goddess in her own world was superior to what (she) had at home” (272). Ola was initially disappointed that she threw away her education. When he wrote a play about Olivia, however, he understood—he remembered how much he learned from the missionaries, but also how inferior they made him feel.
Part 5 Summary
The Gospel According to Shug places value on generosity; self-discovery; forgiveness; rising above anger; love for all beings, including the earth itself; an appreciation of diversity; and striving for harmony and peace. It ends with the statement, “HELPED are those who know” (291).
Carlotta visits Arveyda and shows him The Gospel According to Shug, a pamphlet Fanny gave her during one of her visits to the parlor. Carlotta explains that Fanny is the wife of the man she was once interested in. Fanny used to teach women’s studies in the university, before inexplicably moving to administration and then leaving altogether to open the parlor.
Carlotta started going to Fanny because she was in pain following Arveyda and Zedé’s affair. Once, she asked Fanny why she pivoted to this work, and Fanny claimed it was so she would be forced to touch people in gentleness; she is afraid she will murder them otherwise. When Carlotta asks Suwelo about this later, he claims it stems from Fanny being over-sensitive to racism and says she is seeing a therapist for it.
Carlotta explains that Fanny’s grandmother of sorts, Shug, founded a church, just like Arveyda’s mother. Arveyda reads the gospel and for the first time in years, since meeting Zedé, he is reminded of and curious about his own mother.
Fanny
Fanny is shaken by her violent fantasies and discusses them with Suwelo. She professes her anger and hatred toward white people for their oppression and exploitation of other peoples and the planet. Suwelo asserts that her feelings cannot help stop racist oppression in the world; Fanny decides to put a stop to it within herself.
Fanny remembers a conversation with Ola where he talked about the need for a world language before the world can have peace. He understood Fanny’s frustrations with white people as a natural reaction to what they had done to her people, race, and culture. He advised her to make peace with the people she loved and reassured her that her conflict and questions were not unique to her alone.
Olivia advises Fanny to forgive white people, asserting they do not know the true impact of their actions. She believes the white man is their brother, but is sick, and cannot be held fully responsible for what he does. She also asserts that adults do to others what was done to them as children; forgiveness is the way to break that cycle. When Fanny points out Celie as the exception, Olivia tells her about how Celie would mistreat her dog, Creighton, despite the dog worshiping Celie. Shug finally took him away for a summer and rehabilitated him. After they returned, he finally retaliated and bit Celia when she tried to beat him, and Shug laughed. Only after this did Celie finally stop hurting Creighton and begin to feel deeply for all creatures and living beings equally.
Fanny begins seeing a therapist named Robin Ramirez and tells her about the recurring fantasies of beheading white, blonde-haired people. Robin helps Fanny explore how white people represent oppression to her. Fanny talks about the only blonde person she knew, growing up: a girl named Tanya, who lived down the street from Celie’s house. Tanya’s family was poor, and Celie and Shug’s house was much nicer and better kept; nevertheless, Fanny was not allowed into Tanya’s house.
Fanny grew up watching the integration of the University of Georgia, the riots in Mississippi, and other similar events on television. She has come to believe that white people cannot stand to have those different from them live among them. However, Fanny doesn’t feel better after beheading white people in her fantasies; in fact, she feels worse. She also always imagines herself trying to reconnect the heads to the bodies after, not wanting to do to them what they do to Black people.
In one session, Fanny tells Robin how she ran into Tanya in Oakland and went to visit her at home. She now lives with her partner, a Japanese-American woman named Marie, and is separated from her husband, Joe, who is Black, and with whom she had two children. Tanya confessed she had thought of Fanny many times over the years; she believed Fanny was right to be angry at white people, as Tanya felt the same way herself. Watching the integration across institutions, the civil rights movement, and the many riots that followed affected her deeply. However, she didn’t know what to do as a white woman in the South, and marrying Joe was her act of rebellion. The marriage slowly fell apart once Joe realized this.
Tanya remembered details about their shared childhood that Fanny cannot recollect. Tanya spent lots of time with Fanny in Celie and Shug’s house and described that as the happiest time in her life. She remembered being told not to ask Fanny into her own house, though, as it would hurt Fanny. It was common in Celie and Shug’s house for people to kiss goodbye; one day, Tanya’s grandmother saw Fanny kiss Tanya on the cheek and came out and slapped Fanny hard. Ashamed, Tanya begged Fanny not to say anything to her grandmothers. Fanny didn’t, but they stopped playing together after this. Fanny didn’t remember any of this, but after repeating it to Tanya, she discovered—to her shock—that she was crying.
Suwelo
Suwelo visits Fanny in the yurt, where she is living by herself now. Fanny theorizes on the differences between white and Black people. Because their melanin allows them to be comfortable in the sun, Black people have always loved and worshipped it. There was an African man born without melanin, however, who eventually moved to mediterranean Europe and settled there. He couldn’t bear the sun, and so he stopped others from worshipping it by creating a god in his own image: cold, jealous, and violent.
Fanny tells Suwelo that she feels betrayed not by his affair with Carlotta, but because he claimed she had no substance. As her masseuse, Fanny recognized that Carlotta’s entire substance was pain, but Suwelo didn’t engage with her enough to see it. Fanny tried to explain things to Suwelo multiple times before, through books and conversation, but he was never receptive. However, changed by hearing Hal and Lissie’s stories, Suwelo indignantly demands that they don’t give up on their relationship—he wants them to communicate, even fight, if need be. Fanny is surprised and pleased by this declaration, and the couple decide to try again.
Parts 4-5 Analysis
Walker touches upon the search for identity African Americans experience with respect to their traditional and cultural roots through Fanny and Nzingha’s stories. When Fanny meets Nzingha for the first time, she likens the experience to looking in a mirror with only the African part of her identity reflected back. This is paralleled by how even the sisters’ names mirror each other.
Additionally, the three central themes intersect at different points of the story, and Nzingha’s experiences are one example of this. She tells Fanny about her mother’s life, which exemplifies both the white oppression of Black people and the oppression of Black women by Black men. Nzingha’s mother struggles against the white regime first as an African, and then again against her government as a woman. Here, themes of The Historical Trauma of Colonization and The Feminine Experience intersect.
Walker constantly suggests that the erasure of goddess worship and a respect for the feminine was eroded by Western imperialism and colonization, leading to the exploitation and oppression of Black women. Nzingha’s experiences at university reiterates this, where her professor refuses to acknowledge any link between the African mother goddess or the Egyptian Isis, with the Greek Athene.
The horrific portrayal of Medusa is the last straw for Nzingha, who sees it as the vilification of a sacred symbol and figure from Africa. Once again, African Spirituality in the Diaspora is denigrated through the lens of Western civilization and contributes to both historical trauma and demonizing of the feminine. Fanny later opines to Suwelo that the difference between Western and African religions is because of the white and Black man’s differing relationships to the sun. This theory becomes significant toward the end of the book.
Nzingha’s anger about the treatment of her people and culture is mirrored in Fanny, with the latter briefly directing that anger toward white people specifically. She is compelled to begin therapy to deal with the compulsive fantasies she has of harming white people. This exemplifies the harmful effects of historical trauma. Some of Fanny’s anger stems from a personal incident that is later unearthed and involves Tanya’s grandmother. However, Ola astutely divines that most of it stems from what her race has experienced at the hands of white people.
Olivia reiterates this idea to Fanny but preaches forgiveness, asserting that anger and violence only beget more of the same; she uses Celie’s example to drive home her point as well. Forgiveness is a virtue also emphasized by Shug’s take on the gospel. Shug’s version stresses on the need for self-discovery, appreciating all living beings, rising above anger, and aiming for harmony and peace.
These virtues, and the existence of The Gospel According to Shug, directly connect to the African American experience: There is a need to reclaim or reinterpret spirituality through a Black lens, especially when white people have historically used religion as a tool for oppression. There is a need to reconnect with one’s roots, because generations of historical trauma have negatively impacted how one feels and views one’s culture and traditions. There is a need to make space for all living beings when one’s race and community have been historically treated as less equal, and even less than human. However, there is also a need to rise above the justifiable anger one may feel because of these experiences and work toward forgiveness for the sake of harmony and peace, lest the cycle of violence and oppression continues.
Just as Nzingha’s mother’s experiences highlight this idea, so does Fanny and Suwelo's relationship. There is a problematic pattern that Suwelo fails to recognize, which stems from deeply ingrained sexist and misogynistic attitudes. The incident with the shopping cart, his refusal to read the books Fanny puts out for him, and how he approaches sexual intimacy all highlight this. He repeats his pattern of dismissing and refusing to deeply engage with The Feminine Experience even in his affair with Carlotta. He uses her as a distraction, and later callously proclaims that she had no substance, despite never trying to talk to her about her pain. Later, when Suwelo and Fanny reconnect, she explains that this is what left her feeling betrayed, rather than the affair itself. Changed by his time with Hal and Lissie, Suwelo is finally able to see and understand this.
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By Alice Walker
