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“My Soul Is A Witness” • Carol E. Henderson “My Soul Is A Witness” Reimagining African American Women’s Spirituality and the Black Female Body in African American Literature Edited by Carol E. Henderson Printed Edition of the Special Issue Published in Religions www.mdpi.com/journal/religions “My Soul Is A Witness” “My Soul Is A Witness”: Reimagining African American Women’s Spirituality and the Black Female Body in African American Literature Editor Carol E. Henderson MDPI • Basel • Beijing • Wuhan • Barcelona • Belgrade • Manchester • Tokyo • Cluj • Tianjin Editor Carol E. Henderson Emory University USA Editorial Office MDPI St. Alban-Anlage 66 4052 Basel, Switzerland This is a reprint of articles from the Special Issue published online in the open access journal Religions (ISSN 2077-1444) (available at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions/special issues/soul). For citation purposes, cite each article independently as indicated on the article page online and as indicated below: LastName, A.A.; LastName, B.B.; LastName, C.C. Article Title. Journal Name Year, Volume Number, Page Range. ISBN 978-3-0365-0082-9 (Hbk) ISBN 978-3-0365-0083-6 (PDF) Cover image courtesy of pixabay.com user Doungtepro. © 2021 by the authors. Articles in this book are Open Access and distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows users to download, copy and build upon published articles, as long as the author and publisher are properly credited, which ensures maximum dissemination and a wider impact of our publications. The book as a whole is distributed by MDPI under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. Contents About the Editor .............................................. vii Carol E. Henderson Between Self and Spirit: Mapping the Geographies of Black Women’s Spirituality Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 619, doi:10.3390/rel11110619 ................... 1 Belinda Waller-Peterson “Are You Sure, Sweetheart, That You Want to Be Well?”: The Politics of Mental Health and Long-Suffering in Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 263, doi:10.3390/rel10040263 ................... 9 Keith Byerman Talking Back: Phillis Wheatley, Race, and Religion Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 401, doi:10.3390/rel10060401 ................... 23 Reginald A. Wilburn “Looking ‘Foreword’ to Milton in Toni Morrison’s Paradise” Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 562, doi:10.3390/rel11110562 ................... 31 Georgene Bess Montgomery Spiritual Eroticism and Real Good Loving in Tina McElroy Ansa’s The Hand I Fan With Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 267, doi:10.3390/rel10040267 ................... 51 Melanie R. Hill Set Thine House in Order: Black Feminism and the Sermon as Sonic Art in The Amen Corner Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 271, doi:10.3390/rel10040271 ................... 63 Maurice Wallace “Precious Lord”: Black Mother-Loss and the Roots of Modern Gospel Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 285, doi:10.3390/rel10040285 ................... 77 Heather Hathaway Rewriting Race, Gender and Religion in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Paradise Reprinted from: Religions 2019, 10, 345, doi:10.3390/rel10060345 ................... 91 Trudier Harris Christianity’s Last Stand: Visions of Spirituality in Post-1970 African American Women’s Literature Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 369, doi:10.3390/rel11070369 ...................103 Elizabeth J. West Community and Naming: Lived Narratives of Early African American Women’s Spirituality Reprinted from: Religions 2020, 11, 426, doi:10.3390/rel11080426 ...................115 v About the Editor Carol E. Henderson (Ph.D.) is the Vice Provost for Diversity and Inclusion, Chief Diversity Officer, and Advisor to the President at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and is Professor Emerita of English and Africana Studies at the University of Delaware. The recipient of several community, professional, and research awards, including the University of Delaware’s Excellence in Teaching Award, she has been an educator, teacher, and scholar for over twenty-five years. The author/editor of four books and numerous essays in critical volumes and journals, she has also been Special Issue editor for four journals: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS), Middle Atlantic Writers Association (MAWA), the Journal of American Culture (JAC), and Religions. She has a forthcoming article, “All Eyez on Me: On Being Black, Female, and a First-Gen Leader in the Academy” in a Special Issue of Palimpsest on Black women, leadership, and academic service (2021). She is currently working on an article that examines James Baldwin’s influence on writers Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jesmyn Ward. vii religions Editorial Between Self and Spirit: Mapping the Geographies of Black Women’s Spirituality Carol E. Henderson Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Emory University, Emory, GA 30322, USA; [email protected] Received: 26 October 2020; Accepted: 11 November 2020; Published: 20 November 2020 “There wasn’t enough for Indigo in the world she’d been born to, so she made up what she needed.” —Ntozake Shange sassafrass, cypress, and indigo “ ... the Spirit, or spirituality, defies definition—a fact that speaks to its power as much as it reflects its mystery.” —Gloria Wade-Gayles My Soul is a Witness I love the character of Indigo. She has to be one of the most unique female child characters in African American literature. A child of few words, Indigo creates her own world because “there wasn’t enough for Indigo in the world she’d been born to” (Shange 1982). She is shaped by author Ntozake Shange as a girl-child who had a “moon in her mouth”. Wise beyond her years, complex in spirit, Indigo embodies folk and ancestral culture, a spiritual reorientation of Black feminine consciousness personified in the many dolls that become her community of witnesses, her vocal expressions of defiance, protection, agency, and empowerment when the world seemed too big for her, and words were not adequate enough to speak into existence that which she needed. Made of and filled with cotton root bark, comfrey leaves, and dried sunflowers, Indigo’s dolls—Jamaican, Caribbean, and American—weave past and present into a creative interrogation of the intertextualities of collective African identities. Shange’s critical intervention—a practice that, at once reaffirms and yet destabilizes ineffectual discourses that efface resistive narratological frameworks in Black women’s literatures—resituates divine Black feminine consciousness in a literary methodology that moves the margins to the center. Shange’s text calls into question the ways Black women’s bodies become written texts—marked by racism, sexism, colorism, and otherism. Yet they are spiritual beings, nonetheless. Shange’s novel utilizes creativity—weavers, dancers, midwives—as symbolic linkages of culture, community, and history. And just as Indigo’s spiritual offerings become her four-foot tall dolls whose arms she crawls into to find soul comfort, Shange develops another “Creation story” where Black women become the center of her universe and recipes, rituals, dream stories, and letters the beatitudinal moorings that anchor Gullah/Geechee mores at the center of her narrative. This special collection seeks to explore the ways in which writers reclaim the Black female body in African American literature using the theoretical, social, cultural, and religious frameworks of spirituality and religion. In order to more fully consider the ways Black women have spiritually represented themselves and their bodies in African American literature, one must consider, as Katherine Clay Bassard reminds us, a variety of religious traditions that shape their religious experiences, including Christianity, Islam, African and neo-African traditional, among others (Bassard 1999). This practice of interpreting Black women’s intertextuality (what Bassard terms spiritual interrogation) structures visions of reading that provide a richer understanding of the ways in which the sacred and secular, the spiritual and political, become a lens through which to see African American female subjectivity in all of its Religions 2020, 11, 619; doi:10.3390/rel111106191 www.mdpi.com/journal/religions Religions 2020, 11, 619 nuanced complexity. This collection critically engages these ways of knowing as it simultaneously enters into conversation with other collections who have done this work in notable fashion (Henderson 2014; Hopkins and Pinn 2004; Weir-Soley 2009; West 2012). Of key importance to this current collection is Black women’s agency within these realms—acknowledged and affirmed in prose, poetry, essays, speeches, written plays, or short stories. Whether it is Indigo (sassafrass, cypress, and indigo) creating a world with her dolls that shepherds her through her rite of passage to womanhood, or Baby Suggs declaring in her “fixing ceremonies” in the Clearing that “in this here place, we flesh” (Morrison 1988), authors have sought to discuss the tensions of the sacred and secular through concepts such as forgiveness, redemption, passion, alienation, motherhood, sex, marriage, just to name a few. In “Are You Sure, Sweetheart, That you Want to Be Well?” Belinda Waller-Peterson considers mental illness, the journey to wholeness, and its ties to Black women’s spirituality in Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters. Navigating the complex realities of a mental health crisis which manifests itself in an attempted suicide, Salt Eaters’ central character,