'Daughters of Zion': Spiritual power in Black womanist narrative (Zilpha Elaw, Virginia Broughton, Gloria Naylor, Gayl Jones, Octavia E. Butler)

Modern black womanist literature adopts ideologies of divinity, authority, and restoration from the tradition of black women's autobiographical conversion narratives. These spiritual narratives establish historical and methodological frameworks for expressions of psychological renewal and for the development of womanist theology in twentieth-century fiction. As such, the genre of spiritual autobiography is the earliest discursive exemplar of singular expressions of black feminist divine power. The narratives of Zilpha Elaw and Virginia Broughton, nineteenth- and turn-of-the-century American black feminist exhorters of the Methodist and Baptist denominations, respectively, rely on obvious literary devices to convey religious intentions. Instituting a rhetoric of (black feminist) transformation and leadership, their texts bequeath spiritual discourses that undergird the assumptions modern authors make about black women's ontology as a literary means of reconciling the fractured black psyche. Grounded in this tradition, author Gloria Naylor constructs a paradigm of womanist redemption and divine empowerment through her latest novels. Naylor's Bailey's Cafe (1992) initiates the healing process of black female characters who suffer very pronounced psychic disturbances by positing a revised Judeo-Christian ethic within a New World Order. As a correlative, the author's previous work, Mama Day (1988), employs its heroine to exemplify the spiritually empowered woman who renews other ailing characters. Gayl Jones's The Healing (1998) also considers the state of fractured womanist identity. Her work posits spiritual triumph as a curative for womanist pathology and as a resolution to self-destructive womanist tendencies. Ann Allen Shockley's religious empowerment of a lesbian pastor in her 1982 novel, Say Jesus and Come to Me, sanctions an “outsider womanist spirituality” and anticipates exceptional notions of womanism. Shockley's challenge to conventional Judeo-Christian theology resurfaces in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993) as a specifically womanist constructed theology. Butler's adolescent heroine founds a futuristic cosmopolitan community and faith, called Earthseed, which is based on the simple truth that “God is change.” However varied in approach, contemporary black womanist fiction considers the influence of early black women's Christian conversion narratives while presenting alternative spiritual possibilities to restore more integral black womanist identities.