An Evolution Of Walker's Womanist Spirituality In The Temple Of My Familiar

This paper deals with the logical extension of Alice Walker's Womanist ideology in her fourth novel, The Temple of My Familiar. As a leading voice of African American woman writer, Walker has described herself as a "Womanist"—her term for a black feminist—which she defines in the introduction to her book of essays, In Search of Our Mother's Gardens: Womanist prose, as one who appreciates and prefers women's culture, women's emotional flexibility…women's strength and is committed to the survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. This Womanist philosophy has both been shaped by and done much to shape Walker's life and, above all, her writing. Indeed, the threads of Womanism prevail through all of her works. Once Walker has shown her women capable of breaking the bonds of oppression and defining themselves as whole persons, she make a further step into the goddesses'construction, which constitutes part of womankind's distant past. And it is a search for the inner spiritual truth of contemporary black women in a new matriarchal religion. Furthermore in exploring the fanciful history of relationships between the two sexes, Walker has redefined the relationship between men and women by putting more emphasis on individual freedom as well as on unity between the two sexes. Finally in discovery of the graceful history of women, she verifies the divinity in all human and nonhuman elements of the universe and has rediscovered and reestablished a harmonious relationship between (wo)men and non-human elements in the universe.