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

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

Through her investigations, therefore, Gordon reveals how the present day practice of systematically excluding women from religious events in most religious communities is a heritage of the early Judeo-Christian creed. Feminist scholarship has subjected the Bible and other such books of God to a critical re-reading and have uncovered lost feminocentric meanings and traditions. Feminists have also demonstrated, not withstanding irrational hostility, that the male language and imagery used in worship should be supplemented by female terminology. Mary Daly has engaged in a gigantic project of demithifying religious institutions of those phallocentric myths that have for long ensured male dominance and female subordination and replacing them with feminocentric ones.16 To her, therefore, every male myth is a reversal of a female tale and that:

Christianity had incorporated Goddess religion and transformed its symbols into a new mythology stripped of female power..Patriarchy selects particular myths in order to create an emblematic woman more identified with male aims. 17

Faced with the politics of radical phallocracy upheld by the Judeo-Christian tradition, Mary Daly has desperately argued that it is not possible to reform patriarchal religious institutions and has thus called for a separate women's culture. Such a view is not considered as fair by the novelists Alice Thomas Ellis and Muriel Spark whose works, contrarily, express a strong attachment to the traditional nature of the church. Yet the English novelist, Sara Maitland in her novel, Virgin Territory, while not espousing the separatist tendency of Daly, has wittily and vigorously confronted the problems of misogyny, patriarchal inflexibility, and the phallocentric contradictions inherent in the church.18

Finally, white feminists equate the religious institutions as they presently operate in most societies with the politics of radical phallocracy. A new feminist revolution can only be effected if phallocentrism is cast out of the Bible as well as the pulpit or (as is the case with Mary Daly's suggestions19) if a separate women's religious institution is put in place.20

BLACK WOMEN WRITERS' PERSPECTIVE ON RELIGION

As a matter of fact, black women's triple consciousness as women, blacks and black women constitutes a major difference between them, and their approach to religious issues and white women, white men and black men. Consequently, the experiences of gender, color and class have rendered their relationship with the religious institutions complex and even problematic. Having lived and evolved within a traditional set up in which gods and goddesses were equally feared and revered by all and sundry, the ebbing in of colonialism with its phallocentric religious hierarchy of God, Jesus, Jacob, Abraham, male Popes, male Bishops and male Priests, certainly constituted a traumatic experience. And owing to the belated start of their literature, very little or no serious critical attention has yet been focused on their recent, but vibrant, bid to widen the spectrum of their literary world and hence create a larger space of representation.