Taboo Territory : POSSESSING THE SECRET OF JOY <i> By Alice Walker (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $19.95; 305 pp.)</i>

Black people can speak volumes with a gesture.

Months ago, I heard an African-American male scholar/writer say in the manner of a comic throwing away a line, “Hey, did you hear that Alice Walker dedicated her latest novel to “the innocent vulva ?”

He sort of pursed his lips and looked slowly around the room. Then, he raised one eyebrow, sort of chuckled and went on to another subject. As if to say, “ ‘Nough said.” His gesture was part amusement, part embarrassment, part incredulity, part derision.

Having read the novel, I now know why my literary associate reacted as he did, why he made it clear no discussion was necessary. Female circumcision and infibulation--an initiation rite usually performed on a girl before age 11 in which the clitoris and the inner and outer lips of the vagina are cut off and scraped away, and the wound sewn up tightly--is a difficult subject to face head-on without the armor of humor or derision or disbelief. In many societies where this rite is still performed, it has always been taboo to speak of it.

But once again, as she did so stunningly and accessibly in “The Color Purple,” Alice Walker takes her readers into formerly taboo territory--areas of the human soul usually shrouded in silence and shame and fear and anguish. She insists that we look at what we would rather pretend doesn’t exist, that we hear what we want to close our ears to.

As in her previous works, she asks the big questions (What is the secret of joy? How is the sewing up a child’s vagina linked with property and inheritance?) and the small ones (Why is the child crying?). In the process of answering them, Walker proves that the smaller questions are as prodigious as the big ones. This time, Walker skillfully weaves the answers through the life of one 20th-Century African woman--Tashi-Evelyn Johnson, a born storyteller, a griot who knows she will never get to write her story.

Readers of Walker’s works will remember Tashi from “The Color Purple” as the African child of the Olinkan village where Nettie, Olivia, Adam and the black missionaries come to evangelize. Caught in the clash of religions, cultures, continents, Tashi grows up hearing stories from her playmates Olivia and Adam of a pristine America, while watching her slow-gaited mother, herself a “gelded woman,” move about her stooping, laborious African life.

It is, in part, the missionaries’ presence that suspends the ritual mutilations for a while. But then, as a teen-ager, surrounded by the fervor of revolution in her country and struck by the loss of her people’s land, livelihood, power and culture, she makes a defiant act: Spurred on by the words of the Olinkas’ imprisoned leader that “no Olinka man would even think of marrying a woman who was not circumcised,” she defiantly decides to submit herself to the hands of the ancient honored tsunga M’Lissa, a woman who has severed the vulvae of hundreds of little girls, thrown the “insignificant morsel” out the door to the waiting chickens and sewn the girls back up.

Her American friend Adam finds her lying on a filthy mat in an Olinkan rebel camp, her legs bound, flies swarming around her fresh facial and genital wounds. He saves her and takes her back to America as his wife, but Tashi is no longer the graceful, quick impish sprite he knew. She is passive and slow. (“Her soul had been dealt a mortal blow.”)

“It now took a quarter of an hour for her to pee. Her menstrual periods lasted ten days. She was incapacitated by cramps nearly half the month . . . cramps caused by the near impossibility of flow passing through so tiny an aperture as M’Lissa had left, after fastening together the raw side of Tashi’s vagina with a couple of thorns and inserting a straw so that in healing, the traumatized flesh might not grow together, shutting the opening completely.. . . There was the odor, too, of soured blood.”

She not only has a scar between her legs, but one as deep on her psyche as well. The circumcision has not only cut away her clitoris and the possibility of lovemaking that is not painful and humiliating. It has also eradicated her sense of self and her ability to feel.

In her lifelong struggle with the concomitant madness that the clitorectomy brings, she comes with her nightmares, rages, self-mutilation and her terrifying vision of a dark tower to Carl Jung and his tower Bollingen on Lake Zurich, to an African-American woman therapist, even to her husband’s son by his French friend and lover. But it is her own action, her resistance to rituals that mutilate body and soul in the name of tradition and culture, that leads to her healing.

There is a tendency for the reader to try to place this action, this genital mutilation, in a former time, in another century, to put some space between us in our own safe world and them , who would do this to a child, a human being. But Walker won’t allow it. Characters read Newsweek; a floor of the Olinkan prison has been turned over to AIDS patients. This is going on right now, Walker keeps reminding the reader, and this is what it is like. Walker’s novel with its wounded main character struggling for a healing and understanding of what has been done to her pulls the covers off a practice as old as the pyramids and as current as the AIDS epidemic.

Walker, who has called this her most difficult book to write, does not make it easy for the reader, either. In just the way that men instinctively reach to protect their genitals when they see someone kicked in the groin, parts of “Possessing” make a woman want to reach for her vagina and protect herself “down there”: “The obstetrician broke two instruments trying to make an opening large enough for Benny’s head. Then he used a scalpel. Then a pair of scissors used ordinarily to sever cartilage from bone.”

The little-known fact of contemporary female circumcision in African, Far Eastern and Middle Eastern countries as well as its spread into the Western world through immigration is a stunning discovery. (Or rediscovery: I read about the procedure more than 20 years ago in African History class and promptly shuffled it aside because it was too painful to contemplate.) Walker’s use of it in her fiction shows the depth of her ideas, the range of the subjects she is willing to tackle. The imagery of the procedure done on a dirt floor with a tin can, a shard of glass or a sharpened stone’s edge is so graphic, so hurtful, so poignant, and still so obvious as a metaphor for women’s silencing and manipulation and self-loathing.

The idea of female circumcision and Walker’s handling of it is something that remains with one long after finishing Tashi’s story. It is difficult to wash oneself without imagining Tashi’s wound; to make love, to bend over comfortably in the garden, to sprint to the ringing telephone without thinking how labored, how painful, how nearly impossible all these quotidian actions would be if one’s vulva was mutilated.

That is the power of “Possessing,” that an image one would rather forget is impossible to put out of one’s mind. Impossible to ponder and imagine and feel.

Alice Walker’s dedication of her fifth novel--”With Tenderness and Respect to the Blameless Vulva”--is not only not enough said; it is only the beginning.

As Tashi makes clear, “It is only the cruelty of truth, speaking it, shouting it, that will save us now.” Not nearly enough has been said about this topic.

“Possessing the Secret of Joy” is a stunning beginning.