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

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

She say, I love you Miss Celie. And then she haul off and kiss me on the mouth. Um, she say, like she surprise. I kiss her back, say um, too. Us kiss and kiss till us can't hardly kiss no more. Then us touch each other..Then I feel something real soft and wet on my breast, feel like one of my little lost baby too...38

The universe of discourse, which emerges from the foregoing, is sapphist-oriented and indicative of Celie's attainment of complete freedom from male hegemony. The sapphist eroticism, which she experiences, marks her final spiritual rebirth.

In her later novel, Walker actively, albeit moderately, pursues her assaults on orthodox religious beliefs. Lissie, the heroine of Temple of My Familiar, for example, observes that the white man has used God and religion for racist, sexist and exploitative ends:

The white man, in his dual role of spiritual guide and religious prostitute, spoiled even the most literary form of God experience for us by making the Bible say whatever was necessary to keep his plantation going, and using it as a tool to degrade women and enslave blacks..39

Here, as in many other instances, Walker reinforces her firm conviction that racism, sexism and sexual and economic exploitation-all bogeys of black women the world over-are deeply entrenched in the modern Christian religion. She extends her contentions in Possessing the Secret of Joy to indict religion for its complicity with the black people's environmental degradation, systematic rape of women, and harmful traditional practices such as female genital mutilation. In the novel, Raye, a character, contends that "religion is an elaborate excuse for what the white man has done to women and to the earth".40 She then goes on to trace the tradition of systematically subjecting women to sexual mistreatment back to the biblical story of Joseph, Mary and Jesus: "If Joseph was not the father of Jesus, and `God in heaven' was not, and Mary, because of custom, fear or depression could not speak up about what happened to her, who then was the father?"41 This rhetorical question implies that Mary was raped thus setting in the tradition in which women, most especially black women, are sexually abused under such patriarchal alibis as custom and religion. To another extent, the practice of female genital mutilation in most African societies-the novel identifies a practice, which is one of the bones of contention within present day feminist circles in Africa and the diaspora-with the Judeo-Christian religion. By so doing Walker (in)directly accuses Christianity for validating a traditional phallocentric practice that is staking the lives of millions of black women today in Africa. Thus Tashi, the heroine of Possessing, intrepidly asserts:

They circumcised women, little girls in Jesus' time. Did he know? Did the subject anger or embarrass him? Jesus himself was circumcised; perhaps he thought only the cutting done to him was done to women, and therefore, since he survived, it was alright 42