Eroticism, Spirituality, and Resistance in Black Women’s Writing (review)

In this provocative yet diffuse text, Donna Aza Weir-Soley articulates the importance of embodied, erotic spirituality to black female subjectivity and empowerment. Weir-Soley underscores the fusion of the sexual and the spiritual as a source for creative agency and political transformation and emphasizes how black female writers across the African diaspora employ religious symbols found in Voudoun, Kumina, Santeria, Condomble, and Hoodoo traditions. In unfolding how texts by Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Opal Palmer Adisa, and Edwidge Danticat draw upon New World syncretic belief systems, African cosmological systems, and creolized religions, Weir-Soley calls attention to how literary texts harness spirituality in order to channel and shape affective and erotic energies, contesting hegemonic models of Western discourse in their development of liberating paradigms for the expression of black female sexuality, spirituality, and subjectivity.

Weir-Soley begins by providing a historical framework for the symbolic and psychological complexity involved in present-day literary and cultural representations of black female sexuality. Her opening chapter, “The Cult of Nineteenth-Century Black Womanhood,” outlines the long-standing impact of the historical subjugation and oversexualization of the black female body by mobilizing a range of texts, people, and events that shaped the “cult.” Despite the historical framework indicated by this chapter title, Weir-Soley ultimately focuses on early twentieth-century texts—Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), and Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun (1929)—in order to examine the long afterlife of this “cult” in the form of the codes of bourgeois propriety and respectability that came to suppress, haunt, and silence expressions of black female sexuality long after the nineteenth century. Over the course of the remaining four chapters, she examines representations of black female sexuality and spirituality in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Adisa’s It Begins with Tears (1997), and Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1998), while drawing on critics such as Audre Lorde, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Houston Baker, Jr., Karla Holloway, Joan Dayan, Candice Jenkins, and Barbara Christian.

Weir-Soley frames the publication of Hurston’s modernist novel Their Eyes Were Watching God as a watershed moment in the representation of black female sexuality, for it connects spirit and flesh “in the making of a nonidealized, possibily self-contradictory, assuredly self-seeking, folk-directed, black woman whose ontological motivation is a divine quest for wholeness” (pp. 7–8). For Weir-Soley, Hurston’s work not only reinscribes the erotic as a source of agency powerfully connected to spirituality but also joins African American women to those in the Caribbean through Hurston’s referencing of Haitian folk culture, particularly the figure of Erzulie, the Haitian Voudoun goddess of love and sexuality.

Chapter three explores how Morrison’s Beloved consciously creates an erotic model of black female subjectivity that draws upon African and New World religions. For Weir-Soley, Beloved is a disruptive figure who presents an erotic excess that forces us to think about what a healthy synthesis of sexuality and spirituality might look like. Chapter four addresses Adisa’s It Begins with Tears and underscores how a female-centered, Afro-Caribbean spirituality serves to link modernity and tradition, thus enabling and binding together community. Finally, chapter five’s discussion of Danticat’s The Farming of Bones examines the destabilization of Haitian identity in the Dominican Republic in the wake of the Haitian Massacre of 1937. Here, Weir-Soley situates black female sexuality as a key trope through which questions about identity, historical trauma, and spiritual and political well-being can be understood. While Voudoun is, in her reading, an “absent presence” in the text, downplayed in order that the reader can witness and engage with the central historical trauma of the massacre, Weir-Soley unfolds how its subtle presence invokes memory, continuity, history, and ancestry in ways that evoke a specifically Haitian folk experience while linking Haitians to other New World blacks (p. 192).

A study...