Black female writers' perspective on religion: Alice Walker and Calixthe Beyala

Journal of Third World Studies, Spring 2002 by Mainimo, Wirba Ibrahim

Ateba's letter to God symbolically casts a further doubt on His identity since she employs words with double and uncertain meanings. Hers is a meaningless play on words to imply God's meaninglessness. According to her, He assumes the patriarchal role of omnipotence and omnipresence but turns out to be absolutely incapable of providing answers for the general malaise, the inhumanity and the degradation of women and children that haunts Awu, her African tribe. She thus opts for a revolution that will revitalize the black woman's spiritual self-perception. That revolution, as is the case with Celie, crops up in a revised version of God as autonomy and self-sufficiency. Independence conceived especially in sexual and moral terms becomes the modus operandi of a newfound spiritualism. She, like Celie, begins developing a sapphist attraction towards women with whom she aspires to construct a powerful camaraderie whose walls will constitute a bulwark against sexism and racism. She asserts:

Woman, you fill my desire for love. To you alone, I can say certain things: I will not be myself anymore, but merge with you, for I say these things better to you than to myself... you have taught me passion, the joy of living. Without you, I will be the shadow of life that regrets to live.47

The above monologue represents Ateba's attempt to effect a total spiritual union with women through a, sapphist investiture. Here Beyala posits a similar religious perspective to Walker's, namely that female spiritual self-fulfillment cannot be divorced from sexual, psychological and even economic self-fulfillment. Consequently, when Ateba decides to address a lettered plea to women in the wake of her "acquired" authority as a moral/spiritual guide, she entreats them to effect a total union because "the world is no more... only Nothingness reigns"48. Patriarchy has sapped the world of its essential spiritualism and only female spiritual rebirth can redress the situation.

Like Walker, Beyala equally sees religious issues from a folkloric viewpoint. She specifically resorts to folklore to dramatize the depth and validity of Ateba's spiritual rebirth. Ateba, for instance, manifests her newfound, womanist spiritual rejuvenation via a deep communion with natural phenomena. She communes with stars and even astounds her Awu community when she begins speaking the language of stars. These stars also have a cathartic effect: they help jolt her out of the jarring reality of Awu and endow her with a fresh sense of spiritual wholeness. They equally occur in the etiological legend she narrates to an unreceptive crowd of mourners who have gathered in the wake of the death of her friend, Irene, after a botched abortion. Women, according to her legend, were originally stars shining high in the sky, long before the mysterious appearance of men on earth. The latter, when they came, were miserable and the women were heart-stricken to see them suffering, so they descended to the earth to comfort them. But the men turned out to be traitors as they imprisoned the women by surrounding them with an iron thread. The women cried and supplicated for seven days and nights in vain. Their tears formed the seas, rivers, brooks, and lakes. As Richard Bjornson has noted, "Ateba's point is that the consciousness of women originated in a state of harmony and must be liberated from its present bondage to fulfill its joyful destiny".49 That joyful destiny, precisely, is its spiritual essence. There is thus a real sense in which Ateba tries to revisit the original spiritual values of women, represented by the stars, from which she seeks empowerment to assail patriarchy. When she finally rebuffs her boyfriend's request for her hand in marriage by simply retorting that "I am already married. I have married the stars,"50 she is, in a sense, re-echoing that spiritual essence. The most radical expression of the new-found trinity-the union between Ateba, women and stars-occurs toward the end of the novel when she subjects her sexual assailant to cold murder and claims to have "regained the stars" and that "even God cannot be opposed to the will of the [black] woman".51 A spiritual revolution is thus born of the black woman's seizure of her will from God and male hegemonic/totalitarian order.