Beyond Sacrifice: Gloria Naylor Rewrites the Passion

We need a god who bleeds now a god whose wounds are not some small male vengeance some pitiful concession to humility a desert swept with dryin marrow in honor of the lord --Ntozake Shange According to contemporary feminist theory, the process of rewriting and reinventing cultural texts is a liberatory practice. The challenge is to rewrite the established, influential texts of dominant culture in such a way as to explode the myths and symbols that support oppressive ideology. (1) Contemporary black women writers participate in this process in order to critique both racist and patriarchal power structures. I argue that by focusing the rereading and rewriting process on the text most central to Western culture, the Bible, Naylor successfully challenges dominant ideology. Contemporary African American women writers are part of a long tradition of black writers who have focused their practice of rewriting on the language and narrative of Christianity. The early slave spirituals are examples of this discursive practice where Christian stories and symbolism were recuperated to protest slavery and sometimes to pass information and thwart the white masters. Slave narratives such as Harriet Jacobs' challenge Christian definitions of sin and purity in order to argue against slavery in general and the fugitive slave laws in particular. Black writers such as Zora Neale Hurston identify the struggles of African American people with those of the Israelites in Egypt, as does Martin Luther King, Jr. in his speeches. And Malcolm X challenges white images of Christ with the notion that Christ was a black man. Renita Weems asserts the importance of such a project: It has proved the task and responsibility of marginalized readers today, both female and male, to restore the voice of the oppressed in the kingdom of God. In order to do this, they have had to be able as much as possible to read and hear the text for themselves, with their own eyes and with their own ears. And in the final analysis, they have had to be prepared ... to resist those elements of the tradition that have sought, even in the name of revelation, to diminish their humanity. (77) There is power in this practice, particularly as the focus is on reenvisioning the Christian myths central to maintaining existing power structures. Continuing this practice, while at the same time transforming it, contemporary black women writers make more extensive critiques of Christianity and the biblical text from both feminist and antiracist positions. Gloria Naylor uses biblical allusion to critique foundational myths of Western, and specifically American, culture. She aims a pointed critique at the central New Testament myth--the birth, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ--questioning in particular the concept of sacrifice and its relationship to systems of oppression. As part of this critique, "Naylor recasts female sexuality as shaped by Judeo-Christian tradition in which the virgin/whore dichotomy is inescapable" (Alexander 92) and argues for the celebration of female sexuality as necessary for spirituality. Like Shange's poem quoted in the epigraph, Naylor envisions a religion based on female sexuality and its role in the creation of life, and focused on salvation from the racist and sexist oppression supported by traditional Christian theology. Naylor includes biblical intertextuality to extend her critique to the whole of the biblical narrative as it is most often interpreted by mainstream Christianity. In Bailer's Cain, she constructs a cast of characters who closely parallel the biblical characters who prefigure Christ's birth and death. These characters serve to set up George Andrews as a Christ figure. In Mama Day, George's own early death parallels Christ's crucifixion and ultimately calls into question the necessity of such a sacrifice. In most Catholic and Protestant doctrines, interpretive focus is placed on the crucifixion as emblematic of salvation. …