Abstract
In Soul Talk: The New Spirituality of African American Women, Akasha Gloria Hull revises the usual reading of the 1970s and 1980s in terms of political regress to argue that this period, of diminished militancy as compared to the Civil Rights moment, was actually a time of spiritual maturation “as preparation for grappling with social issues on a more profound level” (Soul Talk, 24). This she saw in the outburst of spirituality erupting concomitantly among African American women in the 1980s. This contribution is an illustration of Hull’s statement, based on fiction by Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor, with an emphasis on the narrative nuances in their literary expressions of the spiritual.
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Notes
- 1.
Another notable exception is Baker’s 1991 Workings of the Spirit. The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing, which grants theoretical attention to the spiritual dimension of African American writing, or Alice Walker’s own poetic collection of essays In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983). To the best of our knowledge, there has been so far no such critical endeavor in academic circles.
- 2.
The phrase “African American Women’s Literary Renaissance” is used by Akasha Gloria Hull in Soul Talk: The New Spirituality of African American Women, page 5.
- 3.
“Toni Morrison’s writing name, Toni, was birthed out of her own religious experience of converting to Catholicism. Raised in an African Methodist Episcopal church, Morrison converted to the Catholic faith at the age of 12, taking the confirmation name St. Anthony” (Meagan Jordan, “The Religious Dimensions of Toni Morrison’s Literature,” Sojourners, Aug 23, 2019).
- 4.
Not until 2006 was a whole book dedicated to the link between Morrison’s fiction and the Bible: Toni Morrison and the Bible. Contested Intertextualities (Shirley Stave A, ed., New York: P. Lang). The other major title about her “moral and religious vision” was published the year of her death: David Carrasco, ed., Toni Morrison. Goodness and Literary Imagination: Toni Morrison Harvard Divinity School’s 95th Ingersoll Lecture with essays on Morrison’s moral and religious vision (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019). Finally, in his Longing for an Absent God. Faith and Doubt in Great American Fiction (Fortress Press, 2020), Nick Ripatrazone examines Morrison as a “storyteller shaped by a catholic faith based in visceral narrative” (Ripatrazone, “On the Paradoxes of Toni Morrison’s Catholicism,” Literary Hub, March 2, 2020).
- 5.
TULIP is the acronym of the Puritan doctrine that reads man’s innate nature as “totally depraved.”
- 6.
In this respect, I find Nick Ripatrazone’s assertion that “Morrison’s Catholic faith […] offers a theological structure for her worldview” (“On the Paradoxes of Toni Morrison’s Catholicism”) quite illuminating.
- 7.
One famous instance is Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity.”
- 8.
Epigraph in Jazz:Verse
Verse “I am the name of the sound and the sound of the name I am the sign of the letter and the designation of the division. “Thunder, Perfect Mind,” The Nag Hammadi
- 9.
As the “bad one,” for instance, Sula exposes the sheer cruelty with which her community casts her into the role of the evil one and thus questions the neat division between good and evil upon which that community is built. This same division between righteousness and wrong is very much the structuring principle in the first four novels as my study of the parable of the Fall in these novels tried to show.
- 10.
In Walker’s own introduction to the tenth anniversary of the publication of her novel.
- 11.
Warren does suggest that “purple, used within the context of Christian liturgy, often during Lent season and for Easter, signifies pain and suffering and the royal resurrection” (Warren, Alice Walker’s Metaphysics, 95).
- 12.
Introduction to the tenth anniversary edition.
- 13.
“[Shug] say, My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day […], it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything […]. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed” (Walker, The Color Purple, 190–1).
- 14.
Dedication in The Color Purple.
Works Cited
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Bambara, Toni Cade. 1982. The Salt Eaters. London: The Women’s Press.
———. 1984. Broken Field Running. The Sea Birds Are Still Alive [1982]. London: The Women’s Press.
Carrasco, Davíd, Stephanie Paulsell, and Mara Willard, eds. 2019. Toni Morrison. Goodness: Altruism and the Literary Imagination, Harvard Divinity School’s 95th Ingersoll Lecture with essays on Morrison’s Moral and Religious Vision. University of Virginia Press.
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Le Fustec, Claude. 2011. ‘Never break them in two. Never put one over the other. Eve is Mary’s mother. Mary is the daughter of Eve’. Toni Morrison’s Womanist Gospel of Self-Knowledge. E-rea 8, no. 2 (March). http://journals.openedition.org/erea/1680.
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———. 1993. Nobel Lecture, December 7. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1993/morrison/lecture/.
———. 2008. A Mercy. London: Chatto and Windus.
———. 2019. The Source of Self-Regard. Mouth Full of Blood: Essays, Speeches, Meditations. London: Chatto and Windus.
Smith, Pamela A. 1998/1999. Green Lap, Brown Embrace, Blue Body: The Ecospirituality of Alice Walker. (Winter) Cross Currents 48(4): 471–487.
Stave, Shirley A. 2006. Toni Morrison and the Bible. Contested Intertextualities. New York: P. Lang.
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———. 1983. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. Womanist Prose. San Diego: Harvest/HBJ.
Warren, Nagueyalti. 2019. Alice Walker’s Metaphysics. Literature of Spirit. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
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Le Fustec, C. (2024). African American Women’s Literary Renaissance: A Template for Spiritual Fiction in the Twenty-First Century?. In: Louis-Dimitrov, D., Murail, E. (eds) The Persistence of the Soul in Literature, Art and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40934-9_14
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