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Black female writers' perspective on religion: Alice Walker and Calixthe Beyala
Journal of Third World Studies, Spring 2002 by Mainimo, Wirba Ibrahim
INTRODUCTION
Traditionally religious issues as they impinge on the lives of individuals or groups of people have been central to much literary preoccupation. Writers of all times and ages, different socio-cultural backgrounds, and various ideological leanings have delved into religious issues. On the contrary, black female writers only began recently to treat religion as a central thematic concern due partly to the invisibility and silence imposed on them by the traditional mores and partly due to the timid and belated start of their literature. Imported colonial norms which remarkably destabilized whatever niggardly social positions they had, the painful transition from oral culture to writing/modernity and the advent of capitalism, have equally helped to retard their literature. When the literature did start, it naturally occupied a marginal position and tended to center mainly on domestic issues. The last two decades, however, have brought a change with black female writers widening the spectrum and becoming more vibrant and militant due to their radical themes and styles. Themes previously regarded as anathema such as sapphism, pedophilia, rape and incest are now pervading recent black women's writings. Responding to the growing subversive tendency of their literature, some black women have focussed on religious issues. A new consciousness is unveiled as they, former strong adherents of religious institutions, become increasingly and vigorously critical of them. This paper proposes to explore the newfound vision of religious institutions as portrayed in the fictions of Calixthe Beyala, the strident, prolific and strongly self-assertive Cameroonian novelist, and Alice Walker, the radical, subversive and equally prolific African-American writer. It reveals that both women's vision of religious issues is unique and tends toward subverting the established order and unsettling fixed racist/sexist/capitalist meanings. They debunk traditional religious beliefs through a language that is frank, stripped of euphemisms and abstract symbolisms and attain both "spiritual individualism that [is] pregnant with potential,"1 and a humanist spiritualism committed to the survival and wholeness of the entire black community. It is their affirmative expression of a newfound spiritual essence that is black, feminist and humanist that distinguishes both women. Finally, both women's literary project may be seen in terms of canon formation: a new canon, within the mainstream canon of black literature, is born out of this subversive urge to challenge the literary status quo.
MALE WRITERS' PERSPECTIVE ON RELIGION
The tradition of male writers' preoccupation with religious issues dates back to time immemorial. The tendency has usually been two-fold: acceptance and rejection. Male writers have had to (in)directly take a rebellious stance against religious institutions. Writers as famous and varied as Mark Twain, Thomas Hardy, Stephen Crane, Frederick Douglas, Countee Cullen, James Baldwin and John P. Clark, have all either burlesqued the falseness of conventional religions or challenged religious beliefs in a thousand ways.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Mark Twain's epoch-making work, repeatedly unveils the falsehood that reigns in conventional religion. The dominant religious mood of the society as portrayed in the novel ties in with what Will Herberg succinctly describes as "religiousness without religion", a way not of "re-orienting life to God" but rather of "sociability or belonging".2 The hero's description of a scene in the novel highlights this view quite clearly:
Next Sunday we all went to Church about three miles, everybody a horse-back. The men took their guns along, so did Buck, and kept them between their knees or stood them handy against the wall. The shepherdsons done the same. It was pretty ornery preaching-all about brotherly love, and such like tiresomeness; but everybody said it was a good sermon, and they all talked it over going home, and had such a powerful lot to say about faith and good works and free grace and prefore-- ordination and I don't know what all, that it did seem to me to be one of the roughest Sundays I had run across yet.3
The spectacle of people brandishing guris in the church and still preaching or admiring sermons about brotherly love is a profoundly satirical one.
Similarly, other white writers have manifested a negative attitude towards religious beliefs or religious institutions. William Butler Yeats entitles one of his classic poems as "The Second Coming" which alludes to the Christian notion of the return of Jesus Christ, the savior, but ironically situates it within his belief in Spiritus Mundi out of which emerges "A shape with lion body and the head of a man/A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun" and "Slouches towards Bethlehem to be reborn."4 The rebirth, therefore, is that of the antiChrist, a heretic revision of the orthodox Christian belief in the savior who will be reborn.
