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

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

In her later novels, Beyala attempts to show the interrelationship between anti-female traditional mores (such as the ritual circumcision of women, ritual rape, etc.) and religion. The priestess of Wuel, for instance, is a fearsome, sacrosanct and authoritative tribal figure charged with the responsibility to implement such traditional norms. Ironically, the venerable priestess, her own complicity notwithstanding, lambastes Christianity (through the Stranger, a character in Beyala's second novel) for encouraging the most inhuman form of child abuse, infanticide. She says:

Your God is a larva, Stranger. A larva and an egoist. When his son was born, did he not let soldiers kill thousands of babies? Stranger, she continued, your God is bad.. 52

Interestingly, the priestess herself encourages child abuse by presiding over, and validating, rituals that harm children. On account of her spiritual authority, her myth-like voice resounds into the far ends of Wuel and can be heard during important rituals such as the ritual of female circumcision, the ritual of virginity test53 and the ritual of fecundity. Since she instills a feeling of awe in the whole community due to her enormous sacred powers, this elderly priestess can make or mar. Unfortunately, she functions solely as an acolyte of the patriarchal order. Thus she uses her superfluous spiritual authority mainly to validate and even reinforce the sexist orthodoxy. Consequently, despite the people's silent opposition, she forcefully enforces female genital mutilation and effects the ritual submission of women to men's sexual gratification:

The gods love your bodies, love them too! Offer them to the men, your human gods, so they can love them ! Let them rob themselves on your bodies with neither disgust nor rebellion because their backs and necks are in need of resting and dancing on you.54

In such incidents as the foregoing, the priestess marks her conscious complicity with Wuel patriarchy's anti-female practices. Beyala uses the priestess as an archetypal image of the woman-as-traitress, the woman as woman's worst enemy.55 Though functioning as victims of patriarchy's machinations, Beyala's viewpoint is that unless such women are rescued from the state of false consciousness in which patriarchy has plunged them, the "joyful destiny" of black women, its womanist spiritual essence, will for ever be unattainable.

CONCLUSION

Both women's treatment of religious issues connotes a commitment to rid the black community of harmful patriarchal traditional mores that have for long literally enslaved the black woman. Such anti-female mores are enclosed in religious practices-Judeo-Christian, Islamic, traditional, etc.-and serve to reinforce and validate the subjugation and exploitation of women. Black women can attain self-sustenance, independence and self-sufficiency by reverting to the past female ancestral traditions or by taking recourse to a new-found spiritualism in which "God" is stripped of its racist, colonial, capitalist and phallocratic connotations and turned into a sublime feeling of nature, a deep reciprocal (comm)union between women and nature. By revisiting the traditional notions of God/gods, both writers strategically position themselves as vigorous forerunners of modern black literature by women. Consequently, they help put in place a new canon of black women's literature within the mainstream canon of black literature through their urge to subvert the status quo and thus open up black women to a vision of new ways or spaces of representation.