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

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

Since the Bible does not give answers to the above questions, Tashi implicitly indicts Jesus for his silence over the crime. By the mere fact of his silence, he helped keep it there intact. Tashi's solution to these problems is a radical, frank, suggestion to (black) women to adopt a new God, the God of autonomy and self-sufficiency:

I [Tashi] knew it the moment when the pain was greatest, when it reached a crescendo, as when a loud metal drum is struck with a corresponding metal stick, that there is no God known to man who cares about children or about women. And that the God of women is autonomy.43

Finally, her treatment of religious issues does not stem from an idiosyncratic urge to indulge in some exercise of the imagination. Rather, she focuses on religion for a political purpose: to assail those customary practices encoded in religion and agents of the black-male/white-male hegemonic subjugation and sexist oppression and exploitation of the black woman.

The Cameroonian francophone novelist, Calixthe Beyala, equally presents a subversive view of the Judeo-Christian religion as chauvinistic and hence patriarchally oriented. In her first novel, Ateba, the heroine, intrepidly undertakes a satiric rendition of the biblical story of God's commandments:

Thou shall kill in the name of God...

Thou shalt kill in the name of Man...

Thou shalt kill in the name of Fatherland... 44

There is an ironic inversion of the biblical formula "Thou shall not kill...," to "Thou shalt kill..." The capitalized words "God", "Man" and "Fatherland" are shibboleths of patriarchy, hence Ateba's conception of them in murderous terms connotes a subversive viewpoint. Ateba's point is that man has killed for religious, nationalist and even egoistic reasons. Patriarchy, in her view, has perpetrated endless wars and pogroms. God, the father of phallocracy, is thus conceived in murderous terms.

Yet she still doubts the identity of this absent patriarch. Ateba persistently questions God's identity as well as His authority:

... obsessed with God, she interrogated Him. From where did He come? Who was He? Was he married? Happy? To create in order to exist at the deepest core of being ! Was He mad? Might life not merely be a picture painted by a mad man in order to escape from the madness assailing him? There is much disorder in His art. Was He suffering? Was He feeling dizzy where He was? Did He have nausea? 45

God's hidden identity coupled with His inability to respond to her plight (as a black woman) seeing that she lives in Awu a community in which violence, child sexual abuse, rape, wife battering and other such inhuman treatment of women and children are the order of the day, leads her to rebellion. She rebels against all religious institutions and becomes a worshipper of women and their ancestral spirits. Initially, though, she makes a last desperate attempt to know God:

God is probably old and deaf. If God cannot hear, then only a gesture or a written word remains. She decides to write. She writes to him as if to those lovers to whom one hesitates to declare her emotions, using words with double or uncertain meanings.46