Faithful Vision: Treatments of the Sacred, Spiritual, and Supernatural in Twentieth-Century African American Fiction

3 Critiquing Christian Belief: The Text as Prophecy of Different Ways of Seeing Salvation

chapter 3 Critiquing Christian Belief The Text as Prophecy of Different Ways of Seeing Salvation the main difference between the works analyzed in the last chapter, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and A Visitation of Spirits (1989), and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and John Edgar Wideman’s The Cattle Killing (1996) is that postmodern approaches subvert the Bible in Morrison’s text, and in Wideman’s (re)write the Bible’s oppression in the attempt to revise the larger oppressive Western narrative tradition. Beloved is a boldly different novel that uniquely challenges the biblical and the traditionally sacred at the level of patriarchal privilege and power. It suggests that a different black text can be written that repositions Christian values centrally in the experience of black women, as well as in a cognizance of a wider African and African American folk tradition.Beloved does not ignore or trivialize the importance of Christianity for African Americans, but using a subtle, oblique approach, it succeeds in thoroughly challenging and critiquing the text of the Bible and the traditionally Christian. The Cattle Killing is a great novel for many reasons. It takes a postmodern approach that also challenges the Bible and the tradition of an African American belief in God that is seemingly inseparable from what is written in a pervasive oppressive Western intertext . Unlike Beloved, The Cattle Killing becomes more immersed in the Western narrative tradition that it opposes and thus is a problematized rewriting of the tradition. Its own narrative opposition to itself is intentionally an important part of the novel’s overall impressive critique. In its own way, each novel reflects African American faithful vision in a postmodern form. Generally speaking, the postmodern mode can be one 77 that restricts the writer to the self-conscious concerns of textuality. But as African American writers, Morrison and Wideman use the flexibility of the postmodern much more creatively to explore the possible impact of received written and oral tradition on black culture and life. Wideman thematizes the pressures and limitations of narrative for the black writer, but even in doing so he manages to demonstrate the power of his writing to interrogate oppression and thus in a sense to challenge it, if not to get beyond it. The postmodern turns out to be a more useful mode for black writers to explore African American history and culture than the modernist was. It is a vehicle of exploration that always challenges faithful vision grounded in the biblical and the religious, but it also shows that vision’s central importance in the culture. As must have been true for millions of black people, the rememories of characters such as Sethe in Morrison’s Beloved traumatized them to the point of distorting their concept of love and the relationships that define the positive aspects of humanity. Figuratively, the text speaks the “unspeakable thoughts, unspoken” of “the black and angry dead” (198–99), which are also the thoughts of Sethe, Denver, and Beloved inside their house, 124 Bluestone Road, and of all the other living black people who suffered the same kinds of abuses. White hatred has deprived black people of any truly “livable life” (198) and created a rememory of suffering, pain, and consequent anger that can create the need for love that is possessive, greedy, and, in essence, evil. Beloved represents the aggregate black self whose need to be loved is so strong that it pervades everything as a supernatural and possessively evil consciousness. The white oppressors’ live their variation of rememory through their internalized “jungle” of black bestiality that they have imagined and imposed on black people out of their need to justify oppression; ironically, what white people have created and carry within themselves is the source of their own fear and hatred of black people (198–99). Implicitly, “whitepeople” need to address their form of rememory that causes black oppression but dominates the oppressor as well; the novel, however, deals much more with the potential of “blackpeople” to change oppressive black consciousness through spiritual and sacred rituals. The epigraph from Romans 9:25—“I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved”—calls attention to God and the influence of the Bible at the very beginning. However, 78 faithful vision although the biblical God as implied by the text is truly inscrutable and may have...