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

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

A rebellious and satiric response results from the black female writers' confrontation with a modern Judeo-Christian religious institution founded on chronic racism and sexism. Even black theological critics who tend to analyze the evolution of the church from a racial viewpoint and identify its bane with racism only end up swapping racism with sexism. According to Jacquelyn Grant, the liberation theology of the 1960s, espoused by the black church and which defended the interests of the working class, attempted to "assert that the reigning theologies of the West have been used to legitimize the established order" and that "those to whom the church has entrusted the task of interpreting God's activity in the world have been too content to represent the ruling classes". 21 Yet the black church failed in its sustained criticism of Western religion; Grant complains of "a case of sex discrimination in the black church-keeping women in `the pew' and `out of the pulpit"'.22 By this act, the black church marks its conscious complicity with those principles and ideals which it has, ironically, thought it opposed. Taking up the same point, Maya Angelou dramatizes the case of Black Grandmother, in her poem," Our Grandmothers", who stood in midocean, seeking dry land./She searched God's face./ Assured, she placed her fire of service / On the altar, and though clothed in the finery of faith when/She appeared at the templedoor no sign welcomed/Black Grandmother.23

Black Grandmother's rejection by the church, despite her avowed commitment to serve God, is complete. She is "clothed in the finery of faith" but her blackness and womanhood and even low social status are taboo, hence no sign welcomes her at the temple door. Sexism, racism and class-consciousness have precluded the temple's recognition of Black Grandmother's piety. The temple's negative attitude toward black women, even as early as the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance, pushed the black feminist novelist, Zora Neale Hurston, to jettison Christianity, and all it professes, and to embrace her traditional African religious belief in "death [which] will mean a return to the infinity of creation":

[Hurston] is quite cynical about the urge to pray to a God..she has no faith in the notion of a Divine Being who will intervene in human affairs already directed by the exercise of will-power. Personal salvation is something in which she professes no belief but she anticipates that death will mean a return to the infinity of creation.24

As a literary foremother to modern African American female novelists, Hurston's stance was of strategic importance: it set the pace for the modern black women's perspective on religion.25

African women have adopted a similar attitude toward religious issues. They have exposed and denounced the racist/phallocentric/capitalist project of modern religions in Africa with the sole novelty that most view the past ancestral worship as the way out.26 In her characteristic radical self-assertiveness, Calixthe Beyala states inter alia that: