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Volume 13 Number 1, April 2012

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Whose Religion is it Anyway? Decentering the White Male God in African American Women’s Theatre

 

by

 

T.Sarada

Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati, India. 

 

       Alice Walker’s short story The Diary of an African Nun (1970) would be an interesting point to begin this short discussion of the paradoxically dialectical relationship between African American women and Christianity. Enchanted by missionary education, a young African woman embraces Christianity, expecting to move into its professed planes of liberation, but  shockingly discovers the tyranny within that negates her inner fecundity and plenitude. As the “wife of Christ”, she is “shrouded in whiteness”, yearning for a coalescence with the “sacred dance of life”, but  she remains ineffectual to overcome  the “loveless, barren, hopeless, western marriage” (Walker 41). While deftly encoding the ethnographic gaze of the colonizer that “others” the colonized,1 Walker’s work also generates much thought on the uneasy relationship between White patriarchal Christianity and its Black avatar, its larger engagement with the Black race and the particular power that it wields on women’s consciousness that is ravaged by the race, gender and class issues. How then, do women of colour perceive Christianity? Are the twin processes of adaptation and appropriation insulated from the colonial political enterprise? What is the nature of the dialectical engagement between theatre and religion? How do contemporary dramatists like Kennedy and Shange grapple with these complexities?

      Before moving into these issues, it remains imperative for us to plough the grounds of a feminist philosophy of religion. This is an important tool aimed at critiquing and re-defining religion through the gendered perspective. The  approach  provides alternative paradigms for scholars engaged in  feminist, ethnic and cultural studies, while simultaneously questioning the “revealed scriptures”, intra-textual theologies, its perpetuation of cultural values and by viewing religion itself as a patriarchal construct.    Although  a feminist perspective towards religion is not confined towards Christianity alone, this paper interrogates Christianity from an African American women’s perspective owing to the history of  conversion of the race by the colonial powers.   The ascendance of a distinct feminist philosophy of religion then needs  to be evaluated in a larger Euro-American context, wherein

 

(a)      Its rise can basically  be attributed  to the largely male-dominated Euro-American history of philosophy.   

    

(b)     The insulation of academic philosophy departments from ethnic and gendered perspectives, which led to illogical conclusions of “pure” philosophy as being embedded only in traditional study methods.

 

(c)      The absence of academic infrastructure in the departments, concomitantly combined with a paucity of prior scholarship and gender bias in the academic domains which initially hindered the emergence of such a perspective.

 

Its maturity was evident in the appearance of two books: Pamela   Anderson’s A Feminist Philosophy of Religion: The Rationality and Myths of Religious Belief  (1998) and Grace Jantzen’s Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of
Religion
  (1999). Other important works include critiques by Mary Daly, Luce Irigaray,, Kristeva etc. Finally, an important anthology: Feminist  Philosophy of Religion: Critical Readings (Anderson and Clack eds. 2004) exhibited numerous theoretical approaches towards the study of philosophy.

 

     At the foundation of all this is Stanton’s resonative thought of 1885 which declared that “the word of God is the word of man, used to keep women in subjection and to hinder their emancipation” (http:plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminist-religion) A gyno-centric space for the interpretation of  the “divine” appeals  to feminist studies to both challenge and enrich philosophy’s substantive assumptions. But such gendered perspectives alone did not end differences, since it had to  encompass within itself the ethnic dimension. The two  approaches intersect, and deflect a unifocal perspective towards  the analysis of religion. These intersecting spaces have been  interrogated by feminists of colour in their creative works such as poetry, fiction, drama etc.

                    

(i)

    Religion and drama share an intimate relationship in the west. Karl Young2 proposed the thesis that drama emerged from liturgy. E.K.Chambers on the other hand  hypothesized the view of drama’s emergence from folk festivals.To Wayne Rood, theatre is a laboratory in a theological school, owing to its genesis to a pre-historical world where human beings remained awe-struck at nature’s  bounties.  A symbiotic relationship between theatre and religion is therefore unquestionable. But the relationship between the theatre and religion in a post-enlightenment, post-colonial context has seen multiple ramifications, influencing novel modes of thinking. Eurocentric Christianity’s omnipresence across the globe has spawned binarisms, hierarchies, power-play, enslavement and amalgamation despite its professed claims of integration, freedom and peace.  Most importantly, Christianity emerged as a multi-hued prism wherein different  ethnic groups were roped in. It is an ironical fact that the vicious system of slavery thrived during the era of “Enlightenment.” Peter Hamilton summarises the ten paradigmatic features of the movement.Despite its inexhaustibility, Hamilton’s summary is crucial for us to understand how “Enlightenment” emerged as a meta-discourse with a totalizing power since it wrongly interpreted  progress as a modern phenomena. King cites Walter Capp’s five-fold argument, 6 whereby the movement poses and “iatrogenic effect” (King 47) on religious studies. Capps points out that  when “religion” is translated into religious studies, the subject has  been “pared” (cited in King 47). Berger and Luckmann take into consideration the social, historical and cultural factors of religion for their existence. Christianity, therefore on ethnic minorities like the African Americans is more a covert medium of control than  liberation. Its hierarchal power-play generates what Bhabha brands as an “enstellung”- a combined process of “displacement, distortion and dislocation”  wherein the text leads to “a measure of  mimesis and a mode of civil authority and order.” (Bhabha 31-32) Prof. Jan Abdul Mohammed perceives it as being a part of the colonial mission that distorts it as a world that has not been “domesticated” as yet. (Mohammed 18). The enchantment with the text which was easily translated into mimesis could be attributed to numerous reasons:

(a)       Basically the African Americans nurtured emancipatory dreams like the Israelites who were manumitted by Moses.

(b)       Their native faiths with a deeply embedded spirituality provided a fertile ground for zealous religious conversion.

(c)       The new faith provided a balm for their souls that was ravaged by  slavery.

(d)       It also proved to be a unifying factor for the slaves who represented diverse sub-faiths.

(e)        The mimicry of the colonized was  a feeble myopic attempt of the colonized to level the asymmetrical power-relations between them.

But the process of conversion is crucial for the colonizer also since it necessitated numerous ethno-critical and gender-critical perspectives within Christianity to countermand its hegemonic Eurocentric White patriarchal Christian prototypes.

   A pioneering work in the former approach was made by Carter G.Woodson’s History of the Negro Church (1921) which traces the chronicles of the Bla+ck Church as well as its multi-functionary mode. But it failed to cater to the particular needs of African American women whose conscience remained troubled by their confrontation with  a White male god. This does not mean that  the men accepted the faith unquestioningly. As a critic mentions:

 

To hold Christianity while receiving blows from its professed practitioners. . . on Sunday, but beat them on Monday, tried the souls of black Christians. (Sernett 6)

 

Despite such deep moorings within, it is a fact that African Americans (hitherto AA) became more Christian than the whites leading William Wells Brown to declare that   religion was the most dearest thing next to their “cabbage” and “bacon.” (Brown 239). But the race also perceived the deeper imbrications of religion with power, domination and force. The only power of the African Americans lay in their conscience and hence they remained quagmired in a piquant situation where “conscienceless power meets powerless conscience.” (Sernett 466).

     Despite being the pariahs of elitist White patriarchal Christianity, AA women served as a source of spiritual strength. One of the earliest responses to Christianity was by a woman--- Phillis Wheatley  who beholds Christianity as a “deliverance” that “enlightens” her “benighted soul.” (Reinfro 12). Wheatley’s case is a classic example of a devout acceptance of the  nurtured faith in an uncritical manner, since her poems sadly connote the absence of higher spiritual thought in her ethnic faith.

       

(ii)

     AA women’s theatre interrogated the role played by Christianity in delivering justice for its women. Their positioning is a  complex triple diatribe since they waged a simultaneous war against white patriarchy, Anglo American feminist philosophy’s colour blindness and against black patriarchal Christianity. It is evident even in the first play penned by an AA woman which is significantly named after a biblical character – Rachael (1916). The entire gamut of the early anti-lynching plays by these dramatists question the notion  of a divine centre and justice through Christianity. The problem of God, a major issues in feminist philosophy of religion  is evident in these early plays penned by AA women. Georgia Douglas Johnson’s Sunday Morning in the South (19271), and Zora Neale Hurston’s The First One (1927) are just a few other plays where dramatists cross-examine the lofty ideals of Christianity in the process of the dehumanizing treatment of AA women. These playwrights question the notion of a divine aseity  or self-sufficiency wherein divine existence is supposed to be absolutely self-sufficient and sovereign. Later, when dramatists like Adrienne Kennedy and Ntozake Shange delve into the roots of Christianity in the AA women’s context and suggest  manifold ways of conflict-resolution, one clearly evinces a deep-rooted pattern that interrogates the religious foundations of AA women.

          In the post-Hansberry phase, many AA women dramatists considered religion as a conditioning agent and  as a politico-cultural tool of enslavement rather than enlightenment. But the paradoxical power of religion lies in the fact of its inevitability  as an all-pervasive force.  Religion is subject to the highest form of inquisition, questioning its professed androcentricism, omnipotence, immanence-transcendence and most importantly the relationship between God and female subjectivity.    

       Adrienne Kennedy’s plays clearly encapsulate the above-stated issues as is evident in her autobiography  People who Led to My Plays  (1987) which displays the typical Kennedian brand of Christianity that forms an interesting conglomerate of fear, awe, wonder and other such conflicting emotions whose simultaneous presence presents a perplexing attitude towards Christianity.7 Her deepest anguish and love are both for Christianity as is evidenced in her multiple references to the faith in her autobiography and its depiction in unexpected contours that shocks the audience and belies a facile acceptance  of the same. A clear, four-fold pattern emerges in her play and it is imperative to note that these patterns do not exist in isolation. Rather, they deeply conflate upon each other, adding complexity to her religious vision that eludes  simplistic definitions.

   

(a)        Religious figures are presented in a unique/unconventional light that defies easy androcentric models. As a testimony of her ethno-feminist  perspective, traditional religious figures are deconstructed  to  critique the conventional philosophy of religion.

(b)        Her innovative use of religious symbols that question traditional theistic notions and ontology.

(c)        Rape, as a major religio-sexual idea that connotes the deepest angst  of AA women

(d)        Feminist reconstructions of Transcendence through revisionist myth-making.

 

Each of these approaches needs to be discussed at length to understand Kennedy’s multi-pronged approach to feminist religious epistemology.

 

(a) Kennedy’s debut play Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964) (FH from now) presents Jesus as a “hunch-backed”, “yellow skinned dwarf” decked in “white rags and sandals”. Christ emerges as a debilitated White patriarch, impotent to provide the healing touch for Sarah’s psycho-spiritual wounds. In a postmodern vein, Jesus is both a God and one of the selves of Sarah-a poor black woman, his yellow colour connoting religious anemia and lack of spiritual virility. A  parallel Christ-like figure in the play is Sarah’s father, about whom his mother nurtures a vision that he would someday “walk with a white dove and heal the race, heal the misery.” (Kennedy, In One Act  14). Contrarily, he turns a Judas-like figure by raping his wife and haunting the diseased conception of Sarah who genetically inherits his psycho-somatic tensions and emotional deliriums, paving the  way for her  fractured psyche.

    Jesus is a recurrent figure, symbolizing religious incapacitatedness in her other plays also. In both A Rat’s Mass (1966) and A Lesson in Dead Language (1966), he is presented along with Joseph, Mary, Two Wise Men and  a Shepherd   as being impotent to deliver AA women out of their debilitating conditions. The two leading figures in the play: a pair of siblings  Kay and Blake, are half-rat and half-human, who are haunted by a paranoid guilt of incest and violence, so much so that blood flows down the aisle in the course of the mass. The duo remain enticed by Rosemary, symbolising Catholicism, who is medusa-like with a head full of worms. In the latter play, the biblical characters are a helpless witness to the incessant turmoil experienced by  adolescent AA girls who are simultaneous victims of religio-cultural genocide, rape and epistemic violence.  Kennedy’s Beast Story  (1972), presents a picture of a downcast Christ and that of a doleful Virgin Mary who are little equipped with spiritual power to assuage the tormented psyche of a Black family that has committed the gruesome sins of infanticide and rape.    

       The biblical characters in Kennedy’s plays illustrate the problem of god that so troubles feminist philosophers of religion. Western White feminist philosophers like Mary Daly, Naomi Goldenberg, Kristeva and Irigaray question the validity of the signifier “God” who is stubbornly a gendered male in Western thought and is male only. “Whether taken as real or unreal, inferred validly or invalidly. . . experienced directly or projected illusorily, the divine identity in classical theism and atheism is  unmistakably male” (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminist-religion//). But Kennedy is not merely questioning a patriarchal god or godlike figure, but is pertinently expressing a distrust of white religious figures both male and non-male. While the gendered perspective is unmistakably present, the added ethnic dimension intensifies the religious dilemma that AA women experience.  Her plays  doubly question the White male patriarchal construct of traditional philosophy of religion as well as the Euro American models of feminist philosophy that do not take cognizance of the existence of coloured women.  The supreme White father is in a relation to the hierarchial dominion of the world. The implicit socio-political structures of White patriarchy and the traditional prototypes of theistic male power, together consolidate socio-intellectual structures, leading to discursive practices that posit the divine as a White male, while relegating AA women to a state of doubled otheredness. The religious characters in Kennedy’s plays compellingly intrigue its audience, since their machinated forms invalidate the deeper purpose of religion.

 

(b)   Religious symbols form an apt accompaniment in Kennedy to heighten her incisive attitude towards Christianity. The gendered dynamics  of religious thought in traditional religion have been espoused by feminist theologists and feminist hermeneutical positions that question the supposed validity of traditional religious symbolism.

      In The Owl Answers, God’s White dove and the owl form juxtoppositional symbols. While Clara yearns to become God’s white dove, she is reduced into a mere owl; instead of being elevated into the kingdom of god, she is reduced to owldom. An allied symbolic intersection in the play is that of St.Peter’s Basilica with a cheap hotel room in Harlem. While Clara yearns for spiritual fulfillment at the basilica, her boyfriend gratifies his bodily fulfillment  in the room at Harlem.8 The symbols epitomize Clara’s deep spiritual yearning. Feminist philosopher Pamela Anderson perceives “yearning” as a cognitive act produced by a “creative and just memory.” (Anderson 2003) bell hooks on the other hand opines the act as a positive one in quest of a higher justice (hooks 1990). Yearning is crucial for shaping one’s spiritual terrain since it is a vital reality of human life that is necessary for spiritual fulfillment. 9

       Kennedy’s Beast Story is a powerful depiction of a metaphysical vacuum experienced by the four members of a family who resemble beasts. The unending gloom of the play is  consequential of deep-rooted violence that  taunts the characters. Religion fails to act as the requisite antidote, since the picture of the downcast Christ, and the Virgin Mary, effectively combined with that of a dead toad ,10 a dead blue crow empty wine bottles and a book of hymnals present a schematic configuration of the lofty and the mundane that  depict the religious vacuum which leaves the characters in a state of spiritual anarchy. Elinor Fuchs draws attention to the intricate vision of the dramatist that sees religion as a “punishing and vengeful force” wherein its affirmative power is “exactly balanced  by a sign from another culture” that leads to “spiritual  and paralysis.” (Fuchs 82). Such a fusion of juxtoppositional symbols presents multiple effects on  its  audience, given the  polysemic nature of the symbols. A post structuralist and feminist perspective,  of these symbols are transforms into an endless chain of transcendental signifiers, circulating infinite meanings in direct proportion to the intensity of the creator’s vision which critiques traditional theistic structures.

(c)    “Rape”, “conception” and “”blood” are the triple religio-sexual metaphors effectively employed by Kennedy to depict the deeper religious violence that haunts AA women’s lives. “Rape” as a larger metaphor is repeated in play after play, pertinently inferring to the  violation of the native’s religion, culture and freedom of choice. Sarah in FH, shudders at the thought of her Christ-like father raping her mother: “Christ would not rape anyone.” (Kennedy, In One Act, 21). Clara is both a product and victim of rape. Hence Clara’s mother’s Virgin Mary ideal actually does little to liberate the duo and instead becomes an ideological burden as the sanctioned historical rape of AA women practically negates their possibility of living up to the lofty ideal. It is also a religious rape, since the native religious ideals remain desiccated only to be feebly replaced by the coloniser’s religion that refuses to accept AA women  in toto. It is then  a colonial rape  wherein White America exploits  Black Africa with its superficial mission of “endowing” “enlightenment” onto a heathen race, while in reality it remains a politico-sexual weapon of terror that merely gratifies its libido-exploitative urges.

The resulting “conception” is neither Catholic nor immaculate, but bastardly, involving a gamut of harrowing experiences like coercion, violation and anguish. “Conception” in Kennedy is both biological and spiritual. While they are not synonymous, one impacts on another, since their biological conceptions besmirch the women’s spiritual terrains wherein religion is transformed into an engulfing force, resulting in bloodshed.  “Blood” in Kennedy is a potent polyvalent symbol multiply loaded with religious, ethnic and gyno-centric contours of thought. It is also a seminal symbol in the  book of Revelations where it occurs 19 times.11 Negating stasis, it is dynamic and uni-dimensional attaining  multiplicity of  meaning with complex thought, blending the sacred and the profane, while simultaneously connoting rape, violence, sacrifice, death, bloodshed, deliverance and judgment. The anthropologist Victor Turner labels it as a “dominant ritual symbol” having three attributes:

(i)                  condensation of meaning

(ii)                Unification of disparate significata

(iii)               Polarization of meaning.       (see Hanson 251)

Blood in Kennedy though not dominantly ritualistic, does indeed possess the dynamics of Turner’s study of blood though in multiple levels and diverse perspectives. Its condensation of meaning emerges from the fact that it is a reference to the religio-sexual violence inflicted upon AA women,  while Christianity equates it with sacrifice, sanctity and holiness. In  A Lesson in Dead Language,  the seven adolescent girls repeat the terms “bleed” and “blood” numerous times in this short play of  five pages. Its visual representation through the enlarging circles of blood on white organdy dress unifies the disparate and diverse thought embedded in the idea of blood- mensturation and sacrifice, rape and purity, virginity and  molestation , all of which give a polarized meaning when viewed individually and yet present a complex mélange of thought that adds deeper layers of meaning to the multiple terrors experienced by women. In a performance of the play by Gaby Rogers, Kennedy significantly used gospel music to indicate the religious rape involved. Clara’s mother walks with a vial of blood containing  the lost maidenhead of the daughter. Blood here, is a concurrent symbol of  professed religious ideals, its failure, violation and rape while also not ruling out the inherent notions of pollution vs. purity. The anthropologist Mary Douglas speaks of blood as a symbol of pollution in several cultures, especially menstrual blood 12 whose wide references are also evident in the Bible. (see Leviticus 15:19-24, 25-31). But blood in Kennedy is an all-encompassing dynamic metaphor that evokes religion, violence, rape, sacrifice, pollution and other such similar train of thoughts on account of the multiple violence that is inflicted upon the women. In A Rat’s Mass  blood gushes down the aisle during the ceremony.  In A Lesson  the students’ blind repetition of the lesson “I bleed” as an answer to the White Dog’s indoctrination is an unfailing reference to the awe-filled power that the White religion exerts upon them. The characters experience  an anguish that has the nature of a deep, unhealing, festering wound. In many ways, Kennedy’s stage is like a Maeterlinckian theatre where the essential  tragedy of life lies not in its grand conflicts, but  in “revealing the existence of the soul itself, in the midst of an immensity that is never at rest.” (Maeterlinck 116) The restlessness of Kennedy’s characters lies in the presence of an absent divine centre that ushers chaos. Religion, instead of being a transcendental liberative force, lynches and crucifies AA women’s souls that pine for freedom.

    Erich Fromm contends that “freedom” is a crucial factor in the process of individuation, which is both “dialectical” and paves way towards liberty from “coercive instincts” (Fromm 25). Conditioned religion as in Kennedy’s plays is coercive and a site for power-play, control and hegemony. Wherein lies the panacea for the  endless conflicts that religion posits on the soul of the characters?  Should it be relinquished? This is not an easy  process, since religion is a “primary bond.” 13

(d)   Kennedy’s plays artistically distil the focused moments when they are intensely conscious of their spiritual predicament and yet remain debilitated to rise above their ineffectual conditions. Despite its paralysed stature, religion remains the dominant factor in Kennedy, since the solution arises from the site of conflict. Transcendence is attained by her women through revisionist myth-making like her Electra (1988) and Orestes (1988). Transcendence in feminist philosophy  aims at reconstruction. 14   It is a “process philosophy” that encompasses loftier aspects like the   evolution of the soul, perception of an orgasmic interconnectedness, with a greater focus on the transformation of the soul. If pure theism uses the doctrine of “panentheism” (all in god philosophy), a writer like Kennedy uses Greek myths for that purpose. Kennedy undoubtedly accedes the presence of an ever-resounding violence that haunts AA women’s lives, as seen in her metaphors of blood and the colour red. Any historical study of AA women’s lives cannot ignore the gross violations of their spiritual lives. Violence usually produces counter-violence. It is a strange historical fact  that the quantum of destructiveness increases with the  development of civilization. It is not the opposite. “Indeed the picture of innate destructiveness fits history much better than pre-history.”(Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness 4) The spiritual blitzkrieg experienced by AA women owes its credit to the continuous forms of oppression and violent suppression. Counter-violence is never an answer to such conflicts. The drastic consequences of such an attitude is clearly evident in the opening scene of her  Orestes  where the protagonist exists in a ravaged mental state,  and seized by a “raging fever” as he is haunted by both his mother’s ghost and Eumenides. Kennedy skillfully manipulates the chorus to rise from the particular to the universal, since revenge and hatred can slay the slayer and the slain. “In fact, while the  slain has only one death, the slayers psyche faces death every second, as it undergoes excruciating feelings of guilt.” (Sarada 233)15 Guilt-struck by matricide, Orestes is agonized by insomnia, incurable fever and depression. When the “sweet-wizard sleep” evades him he is gripped by hallucinations, imagining the presence of “snakes with gorgon eyes.” The murder of White America (Clytemnestra) only leads to perdition:

                       Orestes: What had we to gain by murdering

                                      Her? . . . it is hopeless.

                                            (Kennedy, In One Act 146)

The negative reaction paves way only for a pyrrhic victory victory.

    Kennedy’s Electra embodies women’s power connoting power, the embedded energy in women that spurs the slightly hesitant Orestes to action. The play also effectively embodies the conflict between matriarchal and patriarchal values since Clytemnestra rules for a brief period. Both Electra and Orestes remain unhappy since the dramatist effectively envisages the evil-effects of the vicious cycle of murder, revenge and violence. Kennedy is fully aware of the fact that the rarer action is in virtue rather than vengeance. Helen, Menelaus and Tyndareus of the older generation plead for the golden mean of moderation, balance and  tolerance. The re-creation of myths is a crucial process in transcendence since feminist philosophy moves to higher planes of reconstruction, fusing  divergent world-views that are relational, organic and posses a deep inter-connectedness despite seeming divergent patterns. The visionary process of integration implies a deliberate play of forgetfulness of the heinous past on both sides towards renewed relationships and world-views.

 

(iii)

Ntozake Shange’s attitude towards traditional religious epistemes marks the logical culmination of African American feminist philosophy of religion. Shange’s first play for colored girls who have considered suicide when  the rainbow is enuf (1981 ) , fourth play boogie woogie landscapes and her later piece from okra to greens a different kinda love story  (1985) clearly sketch the progressive vision of the dramatist in the process of establishing an individuated ethno-centric religious philosophy for AA women. In the last play mentioned above, Shange projects a distinctly feminine divine that is empathetic to the cause of colored womanhood. Similar models had been proposed earlier by Irigaray and Daly, but Shange’s uniqueness arises from the fact that she proposes a particular feminine model that is sensitive to the battering experiences of non-Caucasian women. The fundamental purpose of Shange’s theatre is to wage a diatribe against its western counterparts and capture the essence of a distinct AA experience. Her “choreopoem” – a medley of song, music, dance and poetry, celebrates coloured womanhood, while aiming at a deeper catharsis. Her theatre intimately fuses the artist, at and audience into an inseparable triad, beckoning  women of colour to partake of a holistic esoteric experience. Her genuine concern for other non-Caucasian  women is a logical corollary of her deeper spirituality that empathises with women of colour. Religion plays a proactive role in her debut-piece for colored girls in providing  a  safe haven for afflicted women.

     Two major religious symbols are advantageously manipulated  by Shange in depicting religion’s palliating role: the rainbow and the pyramid. In connection with the rainbow, Shange recollects the incident of once returning home after teaching Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970). Feeling particularly depressed, she noticed a rainbow:

                         

Women.  . .have as much right . . .and purpose for

being here. . .as air an mountains do. . .we can min

-imise those scars that we don’t want in us.. .so that’s

what the rainbow is: just the possibility to start all over

again with the power and beauty of ourselves [. ..] Rainbows

come after the storm; they don’t come before the storm.

                                                     (cited in Lester 24) (emphasis mine).

The traumatizing experiences of women like rape, infibulation, clitorectomy etc. experience a healing touch with the symbolic rainbow that balms their lacerated bodies and psyche. As  a spiritual symbol, it cascades on the seven coloured women as would divine grace. The rainbow’s conventional association with hope could be biblical, but Shange’s artistry permits no facile replication of the symbol, as she unconventionally includes the colour “brown” that indicates the assimilation of women of colour in the spiritual realm. Bridging the temporal and the eternal worlds, the rainbow’s spirituo-symbolic value is greatly enhanced in its poetic celebration of the innate spiritual strength of coloured women, who have hitherto been excluded from dominant euro-American philosophical epistemes. The hitherto unrecognized spiritual treasures are both unearthed and metamorphosed into a visual symbol of celebration, hope and self-discovery.17 The multi-chromatic hues, with its myriad colours is a collective vindication of their womenhood, leading to aesthetic and spiritual self-discovery that validates their spiritual  esteem. While also effectively combating suicidal urges, the ecstatically glorious moments lead to a pyramid-like formation.

      The pyramid is a seminal symbol that simultaneously connotes spirituality and the AA women’s ancestral roots. Its significant three-dimensional triangular  shape with its pointed peak, represents the focused principle of harmony and divine grace amidst confusion. Anarchy is transformed into peace. Its enigmatic typification lies in its possible inference of a single cosmic force split into infinite atomistic forces, with an underlying principle of unity. Perceived from below, it typifies the diverse, dissonant, earthly forces attaining unity and harmony, while scaling cosmic heights.18

    But Shange interrogates branded religion offering solace in he fourth play boogie woogie landscapes.  It’s protagonist Layla’s psyche is subject to psycho-spiritual angst on account of her marginalized status. Set in her subconscious terrain, the play focuses on her complex identity  and multiple alienations that culminate in her self-discovery through a radio-evangelist’s voice. The contrast between her pre-realisatory state and post-realisatory existence are finely portrayed through contrasting images. Her once “charcoal life” which was “black and crusty”, full of “overwhelming darkness” is transfigured into a “yellow life” laden with “sun” and “great light” steering into her soul. Select poetic diction like “bathed”, “washed” etc. suggest spiritual re-birth, akin to a second baptism that endows her with the spiritual wisdom  to distinguish between the eternal and ephemeral.

    But Shange’s religious prescription is hardly devoid of irony since it is a radio-evangelist who transforms her, instead of a real one. The renewed self-awareness is individual and not collective (as in  colored girls). Which alienates Layla from he folks, ushering dichotomy between the “redeemed” and “unredeemed”. Religious panegyrisation re-defines Layla as Jesus, wherein the object of veneration and the venerator unite, leading to Layla’s  joyful chant of “jallelujah” at the disco.

   Her next play from okra to greens presents Shange’s attempt at projecting a feminine divine. It is a patterned attempt at  clearly delineating a non-western, non-white, non-patriarchal source of spiritual strength that outstrips denominated sectarian faiths, but is empathetic to the  cause of womanhood:

                 We need a god who bleeds now

                   . . .whose wounds are not

                   Some small vengeance

                  Some pitiful concession (from okra 37)

Shange here, purposively interweaves the Chrisitian images of  blood, bleed and wound with feminist images of the same, that echoes a geneology of rape, bleeding and violence that have informed AA women’s lives. The religion ought to be free from “vengeance” and should not be a “pitiful concession”-- an ironical reference to the condescending attitudes of Euro American process of conversion and proselytization.  Shange sees the need for a female God, since the conventional Father god is an idealized depiction of masculine identity. Both Irigaray and Daly project a “female divine” that is both immanent and transcendent. The need for a feminine divine, contends Daly, is a ontological ballast needed by the feminist movement, while Irigaray sees it as a necessary condition of female subjectivity. The symbolic order and the language are both overturned and re-framed for that purpose. Shange envisions a female god

                         . . .who bleeds

                    spreads her lunar vulva & showers us in

                                             shades of

                     scarlet.

                                              (from okra 37)

The god is essentially female and therefore bleeds like all women. Her lunar vulva then, is not an object to be raped or exploited by patriarchy, but a fountainhead that celebrates the divergent contours of gyno-centric experiences. Her vision is simultaneously non-phallocentric and non-phallogocentric in negating a God who is accessible only through fathers and sons. Shange seems to agree with   Feuerbach who claimed that “theology is anthropology” and “god” is a projection cast in a masculine image.   (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminist-religion/ 4.2) Hence, she deliberately challenges conventional stereotypes to counter the AA women’s history of rape, exploitation and plunder. Her “lunar vulva” connotes the fusion of the female life principle with the primordial life force. 20 Women’s bodies, vulvas and oozing blood are no longer badges of shame, but symbolic representations of pride and veneration.

                                 . . ./I am

                                 not wounded, I am bleeding to life

                           we need a god

                           . . .whose wounds are not the

                                             end of anything

                                               (Shange, from okra 37)    

 

With enervated gusto, women envision themselves as belonging to a world devoid of wounds and mutilation. In contrast to a White patriarchal God, they bleed not to death but to life. Blood, then, connotes not insalubrity and death, but is a positive metaphor of hope, suggesting a transcendence into a world of infinitude and immanence for coloured women. Shange is pertinently responding to Irigaray’s call for an “alternative discourse in which women who have the dominant voice must emanate from the vulva, rather than the penis.” (see Ruthven 100)  This is a crucial stance taken by AA women to move from the periphery of the dominant white philosophical discourse, towards being at the centre of feminist philosophical system and also to re-possess the true divinity in the “self”. Such a process of self-discovery leads to new planes of awareness wherein women fuse themselves with cosmic forces: “we are primordial energies: molten, direct, irrepressible.” An autochthonic bond is thus established in the process of sublimating their pristine selves.

 

(iv)

     The two writers present novel modes of conflict-resolution through different perspectives, which generates a heightened interest, since they share  common  ethnic , gender and religious  backgrounds, similar dramatic milieus and a bourgeois upbringing. Religion in Kennedy is highly unconventional, interrogative and deconstructive, emanating out of a consciousness that is doubly endowed with a fervent heart and a surgeon’s eye. A blatant awareness of stark realities disallows any easy acceptance of the same. But, religion paves way for the emergence of a mythopoetic religious vision. Myths form the artistic templates into which all  human behavioral modes could be included. The conflicts posited in the other one-act plays of Kennedy find a resolution in her Electra and Orestes since they probe into the archetypal human experiences. As a metadiscourse,  myths offer a larger  controlling vision. Kennedy’s feminist re-visioning of myths is  in consonance with the feminist philosophy if religion that follows the path of desire for a higher order while foregoing the rational justification of conditioned faith. Religion in Kennedy’s plays is both a site of conflict and an aid in conflict-resolution, since new  paradigms are created from the site of conflict itself. Myths, the metalanguage of human experiences, plead for a higher world that is not divided by the narrow walls of race, gender and class. In transporting herself into a world of myths, she also transports the audience through the viewless wings of dramatic art to project a harmonious, integrative, conflict-free world that could intrinsically elevate humanity to a higher, holistic universe. The heterocosmic universe is an absolute necessary for a life  that is ravaged by narrow strifes.

     Shange, who follows Kennedy, also critiques traditional religious philosophies. Gender ideologies in religion is a crucial subject matter for her since White patriarchy is the material space in which gender hierarchy has been articulated, reinforced and institutionalized. Shange permeates into the White Eurocentric patriarchal gendered space and creates an alternative feminist non-white model. Both Kennedy and Shange question the reasons behind the signifier “god” for being  white male in western thought. Akin to a Kantian autonomous will and the Cartesian cognitive subject, feminist philosophers contend that notions of an ”omnipotent deity” also embeds within itself, traditional masculine qualities. The White male signifier is therefore a conditioning prism that refracts the holistic glory of god into a politicized, gendered White male. In fact, both the dramatists question traditional metaphors like father, king, lord, bridegroom and “He,” since divine attributes are also male attributes.  If the attributes are also male, then conflict-resolution is impossible for AA women writers and hence writers like Kennedy move into a world of mytho-poetic revisioning while Shange creates a feminist ethno-sensitive God. The need for such a creation was imperative for feminist philosophers since, western monotheism constructs God around binaristic values: mind/body, male/female, reason/passion etc. which are the similar constructs around which women’s oppression is also constructed. Therefore, the projection of a feminine divine is needed to provide what Irigaray calls as a “sensible transcendental”. Mary Daly’s Beyond God the Father: Towards a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (1973) , elevates transcendence to a cosmic scale with a larger vision of peace , harmony, justice and ecological harmony. She sees the absolute need for “Quintessence”- the supreme essence, above the four elements, which permeates in all nature and bestows vitality to the entire universe. (Daly 1999)21 If  Kennedy perceives a mythopoetic world of harmony and justice, Shange ecstatically evokes women as embodiments of “primordial energies: molten, direct, irrepressible,” since they are in divergent ways  pursuing transcendence that would unbind women from the narrow confines , towards a peaceful resolution of all conflicts. Such a universe in western intellectual tradition is founded in the philosophy of logos spermatikos  that unites every individual with a divine reason. This is in some ways similar to the Hindu view that sees the earthly life as a microcosm of the macrocosm.

   Such integrationist and universal approaches towards religion makes us suspicious of exclusionist and expansionist approaches adopted by  semitic faiths with its onus on quantitative conversions that lay little stress on inner transformations. Such identity-centric approaches concentrate on an expansionist conversion formula. Ironically, the post-enlightenment intellectual approach precludes the pristine principle of surrender- a cardinal requisite for spiritual ascension. The Mundaka Upanishad reiterates the  fact that “The self cannot be attained by instruction nor by intellectual power, nor even through much hearing.”                               (Radhakrishnan, Principal Upanishads 689.) Attainment is possible only by the one whom the “self chooses.” Branded religions undoubtedly reinstate the institutionalized authority of the text which includes scriptural and papal authority. The text and religious figures symbolize phallocentric religious discourse that oppresses feminist and the larger human freedom to reason. Consequently, the core is deluded in a state of darkness (agnana) wherein its capacity to gain  enlightenment (gnana) is overwhelmingly debilitated. An antidote to such a negative condition is seen only in the  visions of writers like Kennedy and Shange wherein their heterocosmic universes connect he inner self with a larger world. Such transcultural and meta-religious approaches do not draw  individuals into cesspits of  parochial conflicts like race, gender and class and instead elevate them into unconditional worlds that empower them.

     J.Krishnamurthy, an Indian philosopher for instance distinguishes between two contrary mental states : the totally conditioned (“consciousness) and the absolutely free (“intelligence”). 22 While the former state shatters all energy, the latter is a cohesive force that is  endless and unfettered, offering security and harmony at a cosmic level. Religiosity endows the mind with a state of bliss that is at peace with itself. Ascendancy in terms of thought irons all differences into a state of holistic pluralism. Such a transformatory religiosity is needed in Christianity as the world’s largest religion where the majority are marginalized and a few exercise control. It would enable the subaltern to think and speak. A similar unshackled vision was foreseen in Tagore’s mysticism wherein he beckons humanity enmasse to hold a “mind without fear”, in a world that is  undivided into “narrow domestic walls” where the “clear stream of reason” has not been lost into the “dreary sand of dead habit.”, in order to signal a new epoch in the annals of humanity.

  

End Notes

  1. The story sketches the German, French and American attitudes towards conversion of a Black woman that condescendingly approves of her faith.

  2. Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

  3. E.K.Chambers, The Medieval Stage. OUP 1903.

  4. Wayne Roods, unpublished MS, 1980, cited in Friersen 11.

  5.      (i)   Primacy of reason and rationality

(ii)                Empiricism

(iii)               Science – an important cultural and intellectual factor

(iv)              Universalism

(v)                A progressive view of history

(vi)              Individualism

(vii)             Mutual tolerance

(viii)           A powerful rhetoric of freedom

(ix)              Belief in the uniformity of human nature

(x)                 Secularism

                                            (summarized from King 44-45)

 

  1. Walter Capps five fold argument on the foundation of enlightenment, 

       runs as follows:

(a)         Objects of investigation have essences which are discrete   and unchangeable.     

(b)         Religion can be routinely investigated by the scientific method

(c)         “objectivity” makes truth publicly or commonly accessible.

(d)          Analysis can be separated from attitude.

(e)         Dispassionateness [as] a fit mode of scholarly enquiry to make truth accessible.

                                          (summarized from King, 47)

7                   Kennedy’s autobiography People who Led to My Plays  states the dramatist  as being “hypnotized” by the gilted photographs of Christ. The term “hypnotized” is a multivalent term, laden with deep overtones of allurement, colonial subservience and a glamourous enchantment over which the natives had little control.

8                   Kennedy is perhaps mocking at the idea of rape of an AA woman at Harlem- the seat of intellectual renaissance for the American Blacks of the 1960’s. The renaissance, then, is also patriarchal since women need to await another renaissance to ameliorate their grievances.

9                   “Yearning”   is the core of the Indian bhakti  movement. A longing to abandon the egoistic/corporeal self in pursuit of a transcendental fusion with the divine is at the heart of women bhakti  poets like Mirabai, Andal, Janabai, Vitobai, Mahadevi Akka etc.

10                Toad: Toad  as a symbol of carnality and degeneration as in Milton’s Paradise Lost.  ( see end notes no. 20, p-156 in my book African American Women Playwrights: A Study in Race, Gender and Class. New Delhi: Prestige, 2010)

11                See ‘Blood and Purity in Revelation and Leviticus” Hanson.K.C.,Eugene Oregon, JO Rel.& Cul 28 (1993) 215-30. (p-215)

12                 Mary Douglas. “Pollution” in Implicit Meanings  (NY: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975)

13                 Erich Fromm’s The Fear of Freedom (1942) refers to two types of bonds in human life -  the primary  and the secondary. Primary bond is akin to a bond between the mother and a child. Its biological separation at birth hardly  severs its  maternal ties, since it continues to be dependant on the mother. Such ties are “organic.” Though lacking individuality, it endows them with a security. The connection between the church andhuman beings is also a primary bond.

14                One sees this tradition in Thomas Aquinas, Paul Tillich and the early Mary Daly.                        

15                 See my recent book on African American Women Playwrights: A Study in Race, Gender and Class. New Delhi: Prestige, 2010.

 

16                 Rainbow in the Bible: The rainbow appears twice in the bible. In the first book (Genesis 9:13-14) and in the last  book (Revelation, 4:3, 10:1). While in the former it symbolizes the covenant God made with Noah to eradicate the sinful men from earth, in thelatter it epitomizes God’s mercy).

 

17                Shange:

                 “The rainbow is a fabulous symbol for me. If you see only one color, it is not beautiful. If you see them all, it is. A colored girl by my definition, is a girl of many colors. . . when she looks inside herself, she will find love and beauty”  (Shange:1984:21)

 

18                Pyramid and Sri Chakra:

              “Starting from a quadrangular foundation,      

                symbolizing the  terrestrial basis, the edges

                of the pyramid converge to a unique point

                the summit. This point symbolizes the           

                principle of primordial unity, from which the 

                manifestation of  our surrounding world is

                radiating. The final ascent signifies the

                integration o the human and the divine  

                worlds  and really becoming the universal

                being.”                                          

                  (http://users.skynet.be/lotus/intro-en/htm.)

 

19.Indian bhakti poetry places   great emphasis on the concept of saranagati   that  transforms the worshipper and the object of worship. Through extreme devotion, the worshipper is also elevated to a figure of worship as is the case of numerous saints like Mira, Andal, Kabir, Ramanujar etc.

 

20It is not merely a vulva, but a yoni.  In Sanskrit, the term connotes a “divine passage”, “place of birth”, “origin of life”, “fountain head of rest” etc. It is also symbolic of Shakti or other goddesses of a similar nature.

 

21 Although the quintessence can be partly destroyed  by war, poverty, violence , racism and exploitation , it is however invincible and imparts the ultimate measure of  transcendence.

 

22.   According to J.K., consciousness is a large concept, inclusive of the brain, experience, knowledge and thought. It is a substantial entity, but of an ephemeral nature. Most   importantly, it is a divisive force, generating dualisms and conflict. J.K. considers such a state as leading to “bloody wars.” (cited in Parayana 101).

   “Intelligence” on the other hand moves beyond a temporal space   and is a “holistic energy” which is “boundless and immensurable”.    (ibid 101)                

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Abbreviations:

 AA African American 

FH Funnyhouse of a Negro.