Over the semester we have seen many ways that religion and spirituality have played a significant role in the lives of Black Americans. In Iola Leroy; Or, Shadows Uplifted, a novel published by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in 1892, we see Black people relying on Christianity to comfort them as they experienced pre- and post-emancipation trauma and turmoil. When asked by a fellow bondsman if he felt bitter towards their master, the man responded, “the Lord says, we must forgive (81). Here Harper represents those Black Americans who decided to listen to what God said about forgiveness and loving your enemies. Notably, Yvonne Chireau in Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (2006) argues that, overwhelmingly, Black Americans chose to follow a Christianity that was different from their masters’ form of Christianity because “the dogma taught by whites had no place in the Bible” (127). They relied on the written text in the Bible and their relationships with other people to understand what Christianity meant to them. Black people claiming their own Christianity in the 18th and 19th centuries resulted in “the emergence of independent black churches, the organization of denominations, the involvements of black ministers in political organizing within black communities and in electoral politics, and the development of church-related economic enterprises” that have remained until today (Weisenfeld 138).
Not all Black Americans relied on only a Christian God however, many also believed in conjure. Chireau emphasizes that “the simultaneous emergence of African-based supernaturalism (later identified as Conjure and Hoodoo) and Black Americans’ embrace of Christianity resulted in the reinforcement of magic and religion as convergent phenomena” (Chireau 7). At the same time, as Julie Dash shows us in Daughters of the Dust, many Black people held on to West and Central African spiritual practices and Muslim teachings that merged with Christianity in uneven ways. In this section we explore the many ways Blackness is expressed/understood through spirituality and religion.
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Daughters of the Dust // Lemonade
Upon first viewing Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade, I lacked the cultural history or knowledge to recognize the film’s references and inspiration stemming from the seminal classic film Daughters of the Dust. Lemonade’s cinematography and stylistic decisions signal an appreciation of the film, released in 1992, and its striking portrayal of distinctly black, rural, and woman-focused narratives. I only knew that the movie was so strikingly beautiful and haunting that I would eventually return to it one day with new perspectives and ideas than what I had as a senior in high school. Although I haven’t watched the full film since, the clips and songs come back to me now, as a senior in college, with the knowledge and awareness of multiple histories, religious practices, access to memories, and personal experiences that I could not have imagined only four years ago. Now I look back on my initial response to Lemonade and think how superficial my feelings were, how much I missed without understanding all the references and inspiration embedded in the work. This section will specifically analyze the aesthetics of the seminal film Daughters of the Dust as represented in Lemonade.
Both films explore the particular experience of black women regarding family, loyalty, forgiveness, pain, and power. Lemonade incorporates long, white, flowing dresses, rolling waves of the ocean, stunning imagery of southern moss, and a detailed depiction of black material culture to represent key aspects of Daughters of the Dust. The striking visuals accompany Lemonade’s non-linear narrative, one which draws on black feminist thought to investigate how memory functions as a cultural process. Much of Lemonade occurs within distinctly rural, Southern spaces, predominantly near water and the land. Thus, Beyoncé connects not only her black femininity to her Houston hometown, but intertwines gender, the land, and healing. Just as Daughters of the Dust gained “its power as a woman-focused counter narrative that works across…and against the powerful popular stories of community narrated by African American men” in various forms of artistic representation, so too does Lemonade explicitly link divine, spiritual feminine energy to black women’s cultural practices (Abron, 95). In Lemonade, Beyoncé’s aesthetic choices mobilize memory and healing as productive spaces for political and personal meaning, especially for black women. Her work, albeit implicitly, is positioned in contrast to an urban and masculine dialogue – one which her unfaithful husband, Jay-Z, represents as the former King of Rap. Yet understanding Jay-Z’s reasons is not the intention of the short film. Rather, Lemonade addresses infidelity as a lens through which the viewer can more fully understand the power of black families and the strength of black women as bearers of children, family, and remembrance.
The relationship between Lemonade and Daughters of the Dust embodies the necessity and importance of fluid and flexible practices of remembering and re-enacting. Although many Americans are collectively conditioned to be “unaccustomed to seeing what women do as defining moments in African American culture,” as a source of knowledge dissemination and production, Lemonade and its predecessor shift a cultural analysis of black identity to African American women (Abron, 102). In the film, Beyoncé’s sense of self is actualized through the embodied rituals of her family, practices passed through her family to connect ancestors to their descendants. Lemonade represents the cycle of forgiveness, understanding, and family through the lens of the black female experience, one that is both deeply spiritual and grounded in everyday life. Knowledge disseminated through visual forms, particularly in this contemporary digital moment, can offer valuable insight into blackness as a fluid and multifaceted concept.
Though Zora Neale Hurston is most widely known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, her take on Moses and the Exodus story in Moses, Man of the Mountain proves revolutionary (despite its relative lack of fanfare upon its release in 1939). Hurston explores the Exodus narrative and includes not only Judeo-Christian tradition but also Egyptian gods, voodoo, Yoruba myths, and black folklore. It is an amalgamation of various religious and cultural traditions and yet can be understood as a novel about black America, as narrated through Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt and into the Promised Land.
In the introduction of 1984 edition of Moses, Man of the Mountain, Blyden Jackson, a professor at Chapel Hill, delves into the idea of the text being a story about black America. He writes,
Yet, from the beginning to the end, her novel is also, on a second level of narration, a story about black America, not because Hurston anywhere says it, but because Hurston’s folklore everywhere happily transports Hurston’s readers to a position from which every Jew in Goshen is converted into an American Negro and every Egyptian in Old Pharaoh’s Egypt into a white in the America where Hurston’s folk Negroes live.[1]
By retelling the Exodus story in an innovative manner, Hurston directly applies the story to Black Americans during the Harlem Renaissance and better situates the story in context of black life. In the Exodus story, Jews work tirelessly in Egypt as builders, cooks, and slaves with severe rules put in place against them, such as not being allowed to raise male children. Though the Jews are initially hesitant to follow Moses to the Promised Land, Moses (along with Miriam and Aaron, perhaps his biological siblings through the novel never directly says) convince them to follow him out of Egypt. He is leading them to a life where they will be free from oppression and will be able to live freely. Moses’ liberation of the Jews in anticipation of a better life could be seen as a parallel to black Americans living during the Harlem Renaissance who are imagining the possibility of one day being free from racism and structural oppression.
Hurston took a particularly unprecedented route in writing Moses, Man of the Mountain at the time she did as, “Christianity and the Bible were deprecated [during the Harlem Renaissance] because Scripture had often been used to oppress, terrorize or degrade Blacks.”[2] Through religion has always played a role in the lives of black Americans, publishing Moses, Man of the Mountain in the late 30s reworks a story and a text that had been used to justify slavery and more. Hurston explores the possibilities of writing an Exodus story, and engaging with the Bible, in a way that feels applicable to the time.
Hurston additionally plays ideas about ethnicity, nationalism, and origin in her text, urging viewers to confront their own ideas about what race and ethnicity mean. As scholar Julia Zeppenfeld writes, “Moses is a person between different ethnicities – Hebrew, Egyptian and Midianite… By leaving the identity of Moses‟ biological parents open, Hurston stresses that his identity does not depend on the ethnicity of his parents.”[3] How then does this shift readers understandings of identity? What can we, as readers in 2020, discern from the ideas Hurston presents? Certainly she seems to be arguing that identity, race, and ethnicity are all intertwined and more complex than perhaps initially thought.
Even through her rhetoric and use of Black English, Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain brings forth ideas of black perseverance and culture. In her book Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America, Geneva Smitherman writes, “It [Black Language] has allowed blacks to create a culture of survival in an alien land…”[4] Later on, she continues, “Black English, then is a language mixture, adapted to the conditions of slavery and discrimination, a combination of language and style interwoven with an inextricable from Afro-American culture.”[5] Though the Exodus narrative is set before the common era, deciding to use Black English firmly establishes a text that attempts to portray the perseverance and strength of black Americans
By writing the Exodus narrative from an African-American perspective, Hurston gives readers a glimpse into her own worldview and plays with concepts such as ethnicity, identity, and nationalism. Though at its core, it is a religious story, Hurston shows that it can be so much more.
[1] Blyden Johnson, Introduction in Moses Man of the Mountain by Zora Neale Hurston, New York: Lippincott, 1939. Reprint, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984. xv-xvi.
[2] Julia Zeppenfeld, “Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain: Rewriting the Biblical Exodus Narrative from an African American Perspective,” AAA: Arbeiten Aus Anglistik Und Amerikanistik 43, no. 1 (2018): 45-62, Accessed May 7, 2020, doi:10.2307/26556724, 47.
[3] Zeppenfeld, “ZNH’s Moses,” 51.
[4] Geneva Smitherman, “From Africa to the New World and into the Space Age,” in Talkin and Testifyin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977), 2.
[5] Smitherman, “From Africa to the New World,” 3.
Religion not for black people?
Malcolm X’s speech “The Ballot or The Bullet” speaks against religion. He delivers this speech during the Civil Rights Era, a time when black people would benefit from unity. He argues that religion divides people, and because black liberation requires black unity, black nationalism is what black people should preach in public spaces. He declares “So today, though Islam is my religious philosophy, my political, economic, and social philosophy is black nationalism” (Npatou, 2017). He believes that his religious beliefs are separate from his political and social beliefs. Malcolm X’s message is that black people have a common enemy, which should be enough reason to come together. He defends this idea by talking about the importance of black social and economic power.
So the political philosophy of black nationalism only means that we will have to carry on a program, a political program of re-education to open our people’s eyes, make us become more politically conscious, politically mature, and then we will whenever we get ready to cast our ballot, that ballot will be cast for a man of the community who has the good of the community at heart (Npatou, 2017).
He argues that it is the responsibility of black people to be engaged politically so that when it comes to exercise the right to vote they will elect a black man. His statement suggests that no one other than a black man will act in the black community’s best interests. The black community has already been failed by a white, male-dominated government, so why trust someone that does not look like them? The white men in the American government have proven that they are not helping the black community. Towards the end of his speech he says “…the strategy of the white man has always been divide and conquer…” (Npatou, 2017). This is Malcom X’s argument for eliminating religion in the public sphere, at least for black people. Black people do not need another reason to be divided.