Activism and the American Novel: Religion and Resistance in Fiction by Women of Color

Conclusion: Toward a Literary Activism

Conclusion: Toward a Literary Activism To position their own writing as enacting a form of activism, contemporary writing by women of color often alludes or directly refers to historic interracial rebellions inspired by the religions and spiritualities of people of color. For example, in her foreword to This Bridge Called My Back, Toni Cade Bambara claims that writing by women of color “can coax us into the habit of listening to each other and learning each other’s ways of seeing and being,” much like when “New Orleans African women and Yamassee and Yamacrow women went into the swamps to meet with Filipino wives of ‘draftees’ and ‘defectors’ during the so called French and Indian war” (vii–viii). Bambara strongly emphasizes continuity between direct political action in the past and literary activism in the present. Since This Bridge Called My Back’s 1981 publication, writing by women of color has more carefully distinguished historic rebellions from new attempts to enact a literary activism. However, this distinction has not stopped efforts to use literature to call for material change. In her preface to This Bridge We Call Home (2002), Anzaldúa defines literary activism not as waging war, but as “the courage to act consciously on our ideas, to exert power in resistance to ideological pressure” (5). Literature by Anzaldúa and other contemporary women of color suggests that writing about the beliefs shared by multiple peoples, and how they have been used in the past to oppose oppression, can help readers resist contemporary “ideological pressure.” However, resistance requires active behavior (“to act consciously”) on the part of the reader. Linking 174 / AC TIVISM AND THE AMERICAN NOVEL ideological resistance to changes in behavior, the literature urges readers to reconceive of the past’s relationship to our present and future actions. These texts reveal the potential that literature has to inspire social change; however, this promise threatens at every moment to slip into utopianism. The ease with which a desire for social change and new forms of community can be converted into simplistic utopianism is often evident in the texts. For example, in Almanac of the Dead we see a profound tension between upholding traditional Pueblo prophecy, which describes gradual social change through spiritual means, and expressing utopian, revolutionary rhetoric that advocates social change through immediate and violent ends. Silko discusses prophecies regarding social transformation in her interviews; in 1998, she argued that social change will be the result of a “spiritual” “change in consciousness”: “walking on this land. You get this dirt on you, and you drink this water, it starts to change you” (Arnold 171, 180). When people live in the Americas and consume its water, the land gradually teaches them to respect the earth and each other. In keeping with this view, Almanac of the Dead portrays a Hopi religious leader who “talked about peaceful and gradual changes,” leading one of the main characters, Calabazas, to realize that “the change was in motion and was a process that had never stopped; it would all continue with or without him . . . the changes were inevitable” (739). The novel asserts that the ongoing process of gradual change is already occurring through spiritual means; characters are shown changing their behavior after listening to religious leaders, the land, and ancestor spirits that visit them in dreams. However, a contradictory impulse is present within Almanac of the Dead, and this tension reflects the novel’s attraction to and rejection of utopianism. While Almanac often presents social change as gradual and occurring within the realm of the spirits, the majority of the text is devoted to sympathetically describing the activities of armed, interracial gunrunners and grassroots leaders planning a material revolution to take back Indigenous land in the Americas. Although Calabazas is told by his elders, “the world that the whites brought with them would not last. . . . All they had to do was wait” (235), the text seems to try to accelerate this process, to encourage individuals to change their mainstream/“white” perspectives toward the land or risk violent revolution . Almanac ends on the eve of a hemispheric uprising led by Indigenous forces that threatens to overtake the United States. The tensions between peaceful and violent social change cause the novel’s message to oscillate, warning readers about a future prophesied uprising and trying Conclusion / 175 to spur it on. The narrator states, “One day a story will arrive in your town. . . . [A...