Recalling Religions: Resistance, Memory, and Cultural Revision in Ethnic Women's Literature by Peter Kerry Powers ( University of Tennessee Press ) Excerpt: Throughout The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston's primary metaphors work against many of our common understandings of not only self‑identity but of religion and literature as well. An icicle in the desert is an oxymoron in the strictest sense, a violent linking of two things we would rather keep apart, calling to mind other hybrid anomalies in Kingston's work: an individuality that exists together with others, a present that does not exist in opposition with the past, a voice made up with the voice of others, a tradition that is altered without losing connection to its past. Chanted descent lines suggest an understanding of religious ritual much at odds with the grand visions of narrative coherence that religions often see in themselves, and also at odds with the even more grandiose vision of philosophical "Religion" that believes it can melt every particular human difference to a fundamental purity, discarding the incident of human place and time as so much cosmic slag. Kingston 's images also speak against the notion of literature common to the modernist canon that has formed so much of our thinking even to the present; this is no literature of the verbal icon, of the self‑consistent and purified whole existing in an impossible space apart from the particularities of human existence in time. Rather, these images are images of the con­trary and changing realities of the street. Here is the way religious traditions and literary texts work for people who live without the luxury of time to form a universal vision.

These images of literature and religion as hybrid forms are use­ful figures for the work of all the writers taken up in this book. Consciously or unconsciously all these writers address religious tra­ditions to and through literature, and in the process they discover the ways in which traditions themselves can bend and be remolded without breaking. Traditions reveal themselves as having less the stony logic of a philosophical edifice and more the practical delicacy and stubbornness of the spider web, plunging here and there to make itself in the context of the moment, as if from air. A good thing this, since in the logic of stones the larger crush the smaller into insignificance. It is also the logic of stones that they are not eas­ily reshaped to fit the practical needs of the moment. These practi­cal needs are the things to which these writers have addressed themselves. Thus Cynthia Ozick fills out her stories with images and anecdotes pasted together across millennia, reminding her readers to remember and not forget. Similarly Alice Walker grabs hold of what is useful in the Christianity she inherited in order to find a place for the women that Christianity has typically disregarded. Leslie Silko creates new ceremonies in the pages of a book, drawing not only from Navajo and Pueblo and other Native American sources, but also from Hegel, Flannery O'Connor, and James Wright. All of these writers, along with Kingston , chant new descent lines that translate memories and traditions to create a continuity between past and present, even while they use the new resources of the present to redeem the past.

In many ways I hope that this image of the spider web is an apt metaphor for the method I have tried to follow in this book. The connections between the authors are various and pragmatic, having the logic of the spider web rather than the architectonic logic of the skyscraper. The differences in their literature and their religions will not allow them to be reduced to a single foundation that we might call "Religion" or even "Ethnicity." Neither can they be treated dis­cretely as belonging to separate ethnic or literary traditions. Like the points of connection in a web, they share too much. Similarly, their work suggests that the important connections between the disciplines of literary studies, religion, history and gender studies cannot be ignored. While any single one of these fields provide useful points of entry into the work, without the contact with other fields a point of strength and understanding will be lost.

The image of the spider web, of course, suggests all the strengths and precariousness of the project at hand, both in this work and in the work of the authors I have examined. Nothing is easier than brushing aside a spider web. As I have suggested, the possibilities envisioned here remain hopeful rather than triumphalist. Ozick's audience remains forgetful. It is unclear that Walker 's Celie can find a way to translate her domestic utopia to the everyday realities of working women in the twenty-first century. Like Kingston 's Aunt, Moon Orchid, some women really do go crazy under the pressure of ethnic and gendered expectations, this despite the most fervently chanted descent lines. Religion no doubt sometimes still seems like a pointless enterprise given the evil that Silko envisions in a book like Almanac of the Dead. Nevertheless, if the cultural memories sus­tained by religion sometimes seem ephemeral and easily destroyed, they remain annoyingly persistent and difficult to forget. Memories and traditions change and stumble, but they go on, providing points of resistance to those who would forget cultural difference. Like spi­der webs, they come out at night. They are there in the morning.

A Woman of Salt by Mary Potter Engel (Counterpoint) When Ruth VanderZicht receives the news that her mother, a fierce Dutch Calvinist with a hardscrabble, Florida childhood, from whom she has been alienated for years, is dying and has asked to see her, she can’t decide whether to go. The dilemma ignites a turmoil of memory and struggle in which she veers between love and anger, sense and insanity, herself and her mother, the world and God. What ensues is a form of dialogue where each story about Ruth and her past is stitched together by a midrash, a narrative exploration of a biblical text that Ruth writes herself and that becomes a commentary on the events of her life. Alternating between mother and daughter, the author confronts the dangers of introspection and the healing power of the imagination. Why did Lot ’s wife look back, thereby allowing herself to be turned into a pillar of salt?

Looking back: that’s the theme of Mary Potter Engel’s provocative book, A Woman of Salt, which blends the biblical story of Lot ’s wife with the modern-day tale of protago­nist Ruth VanderZicht. . . . It’s an intriguing format for a novel, and Engel, a clear, evoca­tive writer with a background as a theology professor, pulls it off. . . . In the end, the reader is left to ponder the fascinating questions raised by this novel. – The Washington Post Book World

Written by Mary Potter Engel, a Ph.D. in Christian theology from the University of Chicago Divinity School and a tenured professor of theology for years, A Woman of Salt is a beautiful story about one woman’s longing for rest. It is a brave and fascinating novel, leaving one with much to think about.

Headline 3

insert content here

WT Main | About WT | Review Links | Contact | Review Sources | Search