• Zeyneb Benhenda

  Author

• Yousef Awad

  Author

The paper explores the nature of the relationship that exists between African-American women
and animals in Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar while emphasizing how these women
are awakened from their deep slumber. In other words, because of their consort with animals,
these black women manage to awake from the long-established white-cultural hypnosis and to
break free from the chains of silence and forgetfulness. In doing so, the female characters
become able to reconstruct their identities as independent, powerful and free. Thereby, in The
Temple of My Familiar, Alice Walker invites metaphorical animals to inhabit her text in order to
vindicate the female characters and to re-instate their self-defined identities as powerful
Goddesses. Hence, Walker digs deep in the memory of humanity to bring back the lost and the
ostracized black matriarchal history to the surface of African-American people’s consciousness.

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