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

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

After 2000 years of tenacious Christianity, nearly 1400 years of Islam, God has still not got a woman .... When we observe our present world and the state of atrophy in which it is found, we might well think that God does not deserve to have a woman...For one to get rid of anti-feminism, one must get rid of God, of Christianity or Islam, whether avowed or not, one must cease being religious.27

The above assertion represents a prototypical African radical feminist's perspective on modern religion, and a powerful statement of the African feminist writers' breach with the "Master's religion." Other writers such as Mariama Ba28 have equally posited critical views of modern religious practices, especially Islamic practices, in Africa. Flora Nwapa, on her part, falls within the group that explores the past goddess religions of Africa. In her classic novel, Efuru, she presents a goddess, Uhamiri, who is feared and worshipped by many Ibo women as a goddess of wealth, happiness, self-assertiveness and sterility.29

CALIXTHE BEYALA AND ALICE WALKER'S PERSPECTIVE ON RELIGION

As already noted in the introductory part of this paper, both Beyala and Walker express a vision of religious issues that is humanist and committed to spiritual survival and wholeness of entire peoples. Thus, they have shied away from the separatist tendencies of some of their white sisters who claim that patriarchy is irredeemable and women have no choice but to set up an alternative separate female culture.30 Rather, both women proffer a vision in which women can attain spiritual self-fulfillment within the patriarchal order. By working ceaselessly to change the basic system of logic, which governs the patriarchal orthodoxy, both women have opened up black women to spiritual possibilities that have hitherto been absent.

In charting a background toward her concern with religious issues, Alice Walker affirms in an interview with Claudia Tate that:

I've also been trying to rid myself of the whole notion of God as a white haired, British man with big feet and beard..As a subjugated people, that image has almost been imprinted on our minds, even when we think it hasn't. It's there because of the whole concept of God as a person. Because if God he has to look like someone. But what I've been replacing that original oppressive image with is every thing there is so you get the desert, the trees.. the birds, the dirt, every thing. 31

The foregoing reveals Walker's newfound, womanist32 spiritualism, an essentially re-visionary notion of God rendering Him everything natural (birds, trees, rocks, etc). Stripped of His identity as a Man and rendered natural (that is, resourceful and invigorating), He becomes non-sexist, unoppressive and unrepressive. In her classic epistolary novel, The Color Purple, the notion of God is quite capital. From the epigraph till the end of the novel, "God" occurs in the novel passim. The novel begins with an enunciation of an interdiction on Celie, the heroine (a fourteen-year-old, poor, illiterate and abused black girl) by Pa, her foster father whom she has all along taken for her real father. The enunciation reads: "You better not never tell nobody but God. It'd kill your Mammy".33 Pa pronounces this threat just after enacting a rape upon his foster daughter and Celie, believing literally in the myth of God's retribution-Pa to her is only a domestic replica of God-decides to write letters to God to express her woes since she is psychologically and physically shattered. By ordering Celie not to confide her ruinous sexual experiences to anyone but God, Pa (un)consciously identifies God as a patriarchal overlord, protector of men (His human henchmen), and an accomplice in black women's ruinous sexual experiences. (It is a unique aspect of both Walker and Beyala to relate religious issues to the negative sexual experiences of their characters). Celie herself views God as an absolute patriarch: speaking in her mother tongue, the black vernacular English, she describes Him as "big and old and tall and grey-bearded and white,"34 that is, He is reified, anthropomorphic and above all, racist and sexist. He is simply a male and that explains her slavish submission to the abuses of the men around her.