Cultural Sites of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women's Writings

3. Making the Awakening Hers: Phillis Wheatley and the Transposition of African Spirituality to Christian Religiosity

3 Making the Awakening Hers Phillis Wheatley and the Transposition of African Spirituality to Christian Religiosity ELIZABETH J. WEST From the late eighteenth-century poetry of Phillis Wheatley to the spiritual narratives and autobiographies of nineteenth-century black women writers, the transformation of traditional African cosmologies into an African American cosmology translated through the language of Christian religiosity is apparent. Even as slaves in a foreign land, Africans and their descendants in America transformed their centuries-old cultures into a worldview that fused their past with present experiences in the so-called New World. Black women were central to the maintenance and transformation of African-rooted survivals, and their contributions in this regard have been explored in a number of highly acclaimed works by modern black women authors. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1983), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Song of Solomon (1977), and Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1989) explicitly celebrate the African spiritual presence in African American culture. Unlike their literary descendants, early black women writers left works that show little evidence of proclaiming an African self. However, even in the face of this contrast, there lies a significant link between those modern black women writers who have openly claimed a connection to Africa and those early black women writers who seemingly gave no voice to their African selves. Despite their silence, early black women writers often recounted principles and practices that scholars have only recently recognized as originating from a precolonial African worldview. The poetry of Phillis Wheatley exemplifies an early landmark work whose connection to Africanity has been given only cursory consideration by 47 scholars. Wheatley’s poetry is central, however, to a more comprehensive understanding of African spirituality in black women’s writing. A product of one of America’s deepest transgressions, Wheatley was nevertheless shaped and defined by more than the slave system. She was also influenced by the religious wave in colonial America that afforded blacks an entry into the formal discourse of their humanity.  The Great Awakening of the mid-1700s has been recognized by many scholars as central to African American Christianity and activism. In contrast to the early Puritan theology maintaining that only a small (and yes, white) elect would be saved in the final days, the Awakening promised salvation to all and opened the floodgates to new groups of converts. Blacks, who had for the most part been ignored, excluded, or given incidental consideration in Puritan religious reflection, could appropriate the language of Christian salvation to proclaim their humanity and their rights in the eye of the divine authority. The Bible became the written authority for African American calls for equality and justice, as well as a guiding spiritual force for a disenfranchised black population. In the poetry of Jupiter Hammon and Phillis Wheatley; the autobiographical narrative of Olaudah Equiano; and the nonfiction writings of Benjamin Banneker, Prince Hall, and Lemuel B. Haynes, we find that people of African descent in America had begun to internalize and interpret the Bible as their own by the end of the eighteenth century. In these early writings there is an African American typology of Scripture much like that of the Puritans a century before, which marks the beginning of a tradition in African American arts and letters and political activism. Interpreting their struggles in America as the reenactment of key biblical stories of struggle and suffering, these writers gave historical and religious legitimacy to their cause. Phillis Wheatley’s hallmark 1773 collection of poems (edited and reprinted by John Shields [1988]) exemplifies the birth of a longstanding tradition of black writers who transformed an Anglo-Christian discourse into a language of self-affirmation. Wheatley’s criticized poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America ,” illustrates this literary manipulation. Her use of understatement and her seeming acquiescence in this poem leads many readers to dismiss it as self-denigrating. Her use of the word “brought” to represent the horrific transportation of Africans to the Americas can be read as an appeasement to her white audience. However, in its entirety, the poem 48 CULTURAL SITES OF CRITICAL INSIGHT asserts the place of Africans in biblical history and affirms their place at the gates of redemption. With Wheatley’s call to her Christian/white audience to remember that “Negroes, black as Cain, / May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train...