Soul Talk: The New Spirituality of African American Women
272
Soul Talk: The New Spirituality of African American Women
272Paperback(Original)
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Overview
• Features illuminating insights from Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Lucille Clifton, Dolores Kendrick, Sonia Sanchez, Michele Gibbs, Geraldine McIntosh, Masani Alexis DeVeaux and Namonyah Soipan.
• By a widely published scholar, poet, and activist who has been interviewed by the press, television, and National Public Radio's All Things Considered
From the last part of the twentieth century through today, African-American women have experienced a revival of spirituality and creative force, fashioning a uniquely African-American way to connect with the divine. In Soul Talk, Akasha Gloria Hull examines this multifaceted spirituality that has both fostered personal healing and functioned as a formidable weapon against racism and social injustice.
Through fascinating and heartfelt conversations with some of today's most creative and powerful women—women whose spirituality encompasses, among others, traditional Christianity, Tibetan Buddhism, Native American teachings, meditation, the I Ching, and African-derived ancestral reverence—the author explores how this new spiritual consciousness is manifested, how it affects the women who practice it, and how its effects can be carried to others.
Using a unique and readable blend of interviews, storytelling, literary critique, and practical suggestions of ways readers can incorporate similar renewal into their daily lives, Soul Talk shows how personal and social change are possible through reconnection with the spirit.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780892819430 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Inner Traditions/Bear & Company |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2001 |
| Edition description: | Original |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
THE THIRD REVOLUTION:
A New Spirituality Arises
Viewed from an inner, spiritual perspective, the late 1970s through the 1980s was a time of burgeoning transformation for humankind. On the external front, however, social and political conditions were dreadful. During the years that Ronald Reagan was president (1980-1988) domestic programs such as Medicare, federally funded student loans, summer youth employment, federally funded daycare, and welfare were drastically cut; taxes were minimally reduced for the poor and radically slashed for corporations and the wealthy; the federal government slackened its oversight of the banking industry, the natural gas industry, environmental protection, and voting and civil rights; military spending rose and the national debt soared; regressive communist scare tactics were employed to justify armed U.S. intervention in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Grenada; the Ku Klux Klan began calling upon "white anger" as a response to busing and affirmative action. It was the period of the Savings and Loan crisis, the Iran-Contra affair, ketchup as a school lunch vegetable, and Reagan's own vilification of black mothers on Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) as "welfare queens." Seen from the outside, the picture was rather bleak.
Spiritual vision, however, mandates seeing from within as well as without, and from this viewpoint another scene emerges to balance all that was disheartening. In personal relations, science, work, education, religion, and medicine, people were evolving entirely new ways of being andseeing that sought to foster not just ameliorative measures but foundational change. Though they were discipline- and content-specific, these ways entailed leaps from accepted old material paradigms into expansive and spiritually based possibilities. Thus were born the multiplicity of discoveries, activities, and attitudes that were popularly and collectively tagged "New Age"—ranging from research in quantum physics that sought to prove mysterious, interpenetrating energies of the universe, to the employment by ordinary individuals of visualization for enhanced health, wealth, and success. On the surface, this New Age activity looked like a movement without much specific racial or gender content (since the "norm" of whiteness goes unremarked) and black women, in particular, were not very visible in it. But this was far from the reality.
Around 1980 an outburst of spirituality concomitantly erupted among African American women, just when the civil rights movement and the early ferment of the feminist movement were subsiding. This upsurge of spirituality continued from the wave of these two political movements and rippled forward as an extension of them. At the time, many concerned individuals were wondering what had happened to the energy needed to propel social change. We can now see that this transformative energy was moving to encompass spirituality in a deeper, explicit way, as preparation for grappling with social issues on a more profound level.
Black women embraced practices associated with the New Age, such as crystal work, Eastern religions, and metaphysics, and laid them alongside more traditional, culturally derived religious and spiritual foundations. The results could be seen in dramatic changes of lifestyle and life direction for many, and—even more visibly—in the remarkable outpouring of creative writing by authors such as Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, and Alice Walker, authors whose writing captured unprecedented public attention because of its blend of racial-feminist-political realism and spiritual-supernatural awareness. What African American women were creating added political dimension to the generally apolitical spiritual movement and contributed immensely to a higher collective spiritual consciousness.
Clearing Out, Moving (With)In
In my case, the shift toward spirituality around 1980 involved a physical move from one place to another. After seven years of teaching literature as my first real job at the University of Delaware and carving out a specialization in African American writing, I decided to spend the 1979-1980 year on sabbatical leave in the exciting city of Washington, D.C. (as compared to Newark, Delaware, college town), conducting scholarly research and having a good time. I had participated in the black power movement as a young graduate student, wife, and mother wholly supportive of the cause in academic and personal ways but not directly active. As a black feminist, I had been more central—generating theory and articles and working as a member of the Combahee River Collective Retreat Group, an association of fifteen to twenty African American women committed to consciousness-raising and organizing.
After I moved to Washington, D.C., the territory my own consciousness covered vastly expanded. At once, I connected with Konda, a dreadlocked sister from the west coast who was managing up-and-coming women's musical groups and fashioning for herself an alternative, black-culture-based style of living. I vividly remember walking down Columbia Road with her on a mid-August afternoon. It was hot and muggy, as Washington, D.C., can be, but I was internally fanned and exhilarated by the sounds, the energy, the international medley of dark, familiar faces.
When we stepped inside a store for something cool to drink, she bought a small bottle of apple juice. I came out with a grape "Icee," one of those sugar-water, artificial-color confections in a plastic sleeve with absolutely no redeeming nutritional value. As I happily slurped it up, Konda turned smiling and serious to me and said—out of the clear blue nowhere, "If you stop eating sugar and junk like that and stuff from cans, I bet you your skin will clear up." The right force of what she said and how she said it somehow kept me from being either shocked or offended. Thus, easy and simple as that, I began a train of changes leading to the eventual clearing up of much more than my acned skin, which had continued its distressing eruptions long past the years when first one dermatologist and then another had promised me it would smooth.
I did, indeed, "go off" sugar, processed foods, meat, and caffeine, the latter being difficult enough to teach me the little that I know about substance addiction and withdrawal. I gave up even the respectability of my short Afro and began growing dreadlocks—in those days when they were not socially acceptable, not available "bottled" in hip beauty shops, not twisted into instant glamour by limber-fingered technicians who "do" locks. I traveled to the black Caribbean. All these were external indications of deep internal change that pushed me to ask with increasing urgency to be shown my true work in this world. What was I put here for? What was I supposed to do? What was the way, the calling, the cause that would make me feel, as Aretha Franklin put it, "justified"? This questioning arose, I see now, from a profound urge toward spiritual identity and meaning.
My religious life and my spiritual self were not subjects I had been thinking about. The childhood years I spent walking up the Norma Street hill to attend the Zion Baptist Church in Shreveport, Louisiana, had fizzled into coerced appearances as a young adult at the mandatory Sunday chapel of my undergraduate alma mater, Southern University, and had finally petered out altogether amidst the alien atmosphere of northern, white, academic institutions, where any possible "down-home" black churches or black people had to be painstakingly sought beyond hallowed, ivy walls. In the process of wresting from this unfamiliar system its sheepskins of validation, I shed a way of being spiritual in the world that I had always inhabited. However, both the former habitation and the shedding had taken place without considered thought or conscious choice. In 1979 my most overtly spiritual practices included saying grace at communal meals and holding hands with other women in feminist full moon circles. Maybe I prayed during desperate hours, maybe currents of language-less, thought-less faith coursed through me—but, for all intents and purposes, I had no active, deeply accessed spiritual life.
I began avidly reading popularly focused metaphysical books and articles. Many of these were current New Age titles, and quite a few were feminist-oriented. What comes most readily to mind are Jane Roberts's The Education of Oversoul Seven; Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters; an early twentieth-century "prosperity" author whose name I cannot remember; Migene G. Whippler's Santeria; Diane Mariechild's Mother Wit; Ann Farraday and Jungian-Senoi texts about dreams; and pamphlets and articles that turned me on to mind-body-spirit truisms and material about auras, Kirlian photography, the Tarot, astrology, Zen thinking, supernatural phenomena, the "secret life of plants," crystals, and synchronicity.
Because I was at the core a spiritually receptive, even hungry, individual, the avenues to transpersonal meaning and interconnection represented by all this reading strongly appealed to my intellect and emotions. The multiple, overlapping realities of Roberts's fable about a time-and-space-hopping supersoul intuitively struck me as accurate, and yes, it made sense that real need coupled with focused attention would make money appear, and that, in general, the universe was a wondrously mysterious but ordered and purposeful organism that could be read and entered into through any number of systems and means.
Except for Whippler's work on the African-Catholic syncretism that is Santeria, none of us would think to call any of this material "black." In fact, all of the authors are white, and the material itself is apparently raceless, that is, devoid of racial reference or implications. And it is raceless—in that the energy that is the universe, that takes form in us and in everything that exists cannot itself be regarded as raced (or sexed, or gendered, or, for that matter, anything else that happens when it reaches the dense physical plane of everyday life). And, yes, this New Age material is raceless in that every kind of people dreams, suffers, and rejoices under the same progression of planets and stars, and each and every person benefits from maintaining a peaceful and present mind. Yet, it is significant that in Washington, D.C., in 1980, a group of diverse black women including myself were passing around among ourselves Jane Roberts's Oversoul Seven, and that our friend Crystal was invoking some sorely needed, concrete prosperity to pay the rent and buy food for her child. This adds race—as it should be—to the picture of the emerging New Age. Spiritual wisdom and timeless principles, when run through African American women, tend to emerge with a different slant
Toni Cade Bambara's novel The Salt Eaters provides the perfect means to illustrate this point An altogether unprecedented and original act of creativity, this book is simultaneously New Age, female, and black. Published in 1980, the novel brought blazingly into focus the momentous happenings taking place in the consciousness of black women. The Salt Eaters tells the story of Velma Henry, an incredibly committed political activist in her forties who has attempted suicide and is undergoing a laying-on-of-hands healing by "the good woman" Ransom as a roomful of people look on. Velma has marched until her feet and womb bled for civil rights. She has struggled with other progressive sisters in her community to make "showboating" male leaders less sexist and more truly responsive to the people's needs. She has traveled with a troupe of Third World feminists staging educational dramas. She has put her life on the line for a healthy environment and a pacifist world. Finally, though, overtaken by negativity and despair, she slashes her wrists and sticks her head in the gas of her kitchen oven. During the difficult healing, readers experience Velma spinning through muggy memories and multiple lifetimes.
The Salt Eaters firmly contextualizes Velma within her family and community, but Toni's familiarity with both science and the supernatural takes her story into worlds every bit as vast and mind-boggling as Jane Roberts's metaphysical fable. Here, in this book, in 1980, was all the spirituality I was learning—and then some—made into a literary work that was impeccable in its daunting breadth of knowledge, difficult but dazzling style, and unimpeachable racial and feminist politics. The healing of Velma through the laying-on-of-hands is, in itself, not new or particularly startling. Nor is the circle of hard-praying church people or even, perhaps, the healer's down-to-earth spirit guide. Though these might not be staples of black spirituality, neither would they be considered unusual ingredients.
What is different in this book is the profound and wholly respectful attention accorded to these more traditional racial aspects, as well as to astrology, past lives and reincarnation, Tarot cards, the metaphysical extensions of quantum physics, chakras and energy, Sufi tales, psychic telepathy, numerology, ancient black Egyptian wisdom traditions, Eastern philosophies of cosmic connectedness, and so forth—in short, an array of alternative knowledge systems founded on the belief that this visible "phenomenal" world is the external reflection of an underlying "noumenal" reality that can—and indeed, should—be tapped for the full and optimum functioning of life in material form. In other words, The Salt Eaters validated largely unknown or discredited (by black people and whites), non-rational ways of knowing—and promoted the idea that we will function more effectively if we use the unseen energy that surrounds us.
Even more radical in the novel is the fact that all of these spiritual modalities are rooted in African and African American traditions and characters, and are geared toward the elimination of racism and other forms of social injustice and abuse. The thrust of Toni's work has always been the healing of the (black) "nation"—in this case symbolized by the repair of Velma's fractured self and psyche. Only when that internal and external work has been accomplished is health possible on larger scales. Ultimately, not only will Velma be made whole, but so too must her community, nation, the world, and the universe. As Toni outlines it, spiritual wisdom is first and foremost a force for transforming social and political ills—and those ills wear the very specific faces of racism, poverty, gender inequality, rampant capitalism, ignorance, and so forth. This is what I mean when I say that spirituality run through black women comes out with a different slant. Unlike the other New Age reading I was doing, this novel addressed issues that defined my identity-reality and lay close to my heart
Thrilled, challenged, and totally impressed (and also slightly overwhelmed) by both the politics and the spirituality of The Salt Eaters, I became determined to write about this book, a desire inspired by my need to respond to it and the urge to help others understand the work. While I felt my experience and vocabulary would enable me to discuss its politics, I was not as proficient in the wide-ranging spiritual-metaphysical ideas and practices so casually incorporated throughout the text. I knew enough to scratch the surface, enough to identify the critical places at which to dig. But the novel's holistic spiritual command forced me to consult even more ancient and esoteric documents, pushing me into such areas as cosmic symbolism, grimoires, medieval magical texts, and the writing of Mme. Blavatsky, the famous theosophist and author of The Secret Doctrine.
Because it was within the context of late twentieth-century New Age culture that I discovered the spiritual truths underlying The Salt Eaters, that context was my immediate point of reference. Not so for Toni. She has always said that everything necessary for African American well-being exists within the black community—and this includes spiritual knowledge of any sort. Even the most esoteric learning she finds stored in the aunts and uncles, grandmothers and fathers who live in the neighborhood.
Years later as I spoke with Toni about this most challenging of her literary creations, I questioned her about where she, as the narrator, and the characters learned their spiritual knowledge—in particular, the genius Campbell (who I believe is Toni's alter ego or psychic double), a character in The Salt Eaters who can synthesize in one breathy sweep "voodoo, thermodynamics, I Ching, astrology, numerology, alchemy, metaphysics, everybody's ancient myths." What, I wanted to know, would she counsel an uninitiated person to do who desired to become as wise?
In response, she rattled out a string of resources and individuals including workshops with the black actress Barbara O., who played Yellow Mary in Julie Dash's film Daughters of the Dust; a black female university dean who can levitate; black "healing and light" temples, homeopathic clinics, and bookstores "in your neighborhood"; Luisah Teish's Jambalaya; three weeks of study in New Orleans with a practitioner "in the business" or the voodoo festival in Galveston or Alabama during the summer solstice; Odunde ceremonies in Philadelphia and New York City for our African ancestors; all the other "stuff" that goes on at the periphery of community observances such as Juneteenth or the Garvey Day parade. Incredulous, I said these would not enable anybody to know all that Campbell knows and that he had to have been reading New Age physics. Toni disagreed. She argued that Campbell "might have had an uncle who talks that talk," who might "lay out" the wisdom on top of his nephew's high school physics. Even though a lot of what was in the book came to her through reading, she was adamantly clear that "reading ain't going to get it."
This conversation left me feeling outside the kind of black community that Toni insisted existed. The closest thing I had to Campbell's uncle was a half-brother old enough to be my father, who mumbled drunken crypticisms about his Scottish Rite (mind you, not black Prince Hall) Masonic affiliation when I asked him relevant questions. And, although I stood with other displaced African sisters and brothers on the piers and prayed and tossed my offerings in the water, my presence at Odunde had not led me into any esoteric depths. Clearly, for Toni, growing up in Harlem in the late 1930s and 1940s had been an unparalleled, rich, Afrocentric cradling—especially given who she was and given her mother's revolutionary black nationalist politics—that would forever enable her to access the "black" at the heart of things.
I wondered if that world and others similar to it still flourished. I knew they did not for me or for many other African Americans of my generation and upbringing. I also acknowledged that reading alone did not "do it," but knew that for many of us it functioned as a huge resource. I wondered whether Toni was romanticizing. I never asked her this question outright I knew she may have been doing in life what she does in her fiction, that is, sometimes painting black larger than life so that we will become visible in all our glory to ourselves and to the blind, negating white world. But she simply enlarges and highlights, never lies—so her basic premises still had to be taken as factual truths.
If I did not know exactly where to go with these matters years later, I certainly did not have the insight to even divine the issues in this way in 1980. Then, I held on to my copies of Idries Shah's tales of the mullah Nasrudin, pored through dictionaries of occult symbolism, read all the poorly printed pamphlets about healing the body that slumped on the back-aisle racks in dedicated health food stores, as well as Viktoras Kulvinskas's 1975 planetary healers manual, Survival into the Twenty-first Century (which my copy tells me I acquired in Washington, D.C., in 1979).
An indispensable resource in this enterprise was my them-partner Martha T. Zingo, who freely shared her rich occult library and her own extensive learning. Eternally my friend, this white, Italian-Irish-American working-class woman has always kept me spiritually and politically honest, never letting me forget that, even as I tended toward constructing seamlessly interlocked black-on-black narratives, she and other white women—some teachers, some important friends and lovers—have helped, like Toni's "muse" Khufu, to "pick the rocks up" out of my own and other black women's paths. With assistance from sources both here (acknowledged) and beyond (mostly unrecognized), I completed The Salt Eaters essay in an affirmed and solitary glow in 1981, sitting on the living room floor of our Northwest apartment It is clear to me now that my heady foray into understanding Toni's work became the originating point for this present book. What I felt then was a strange, unnameable sense of having tapped into something bigger than myself that, through my expression, I had somehow helped to further.
Black Women Changing
Many other black women tell different yet similar stories of shifts and breakthroughs occurring around 1980. Michele Gibbs, a writer-artist-activist, recollects:
Interesting—the period that you started noticing this shift in our [black women's] expression—because 1980 was a very pivotal year for me specifically. It marked the end objectively and also subjectively of long years of commitment to a certain way of inducing change, which is to say as a traditional community organizer with a very materially based approach to reaching people. And also in connection with that, I had finally concluded that not only was that particular method lacking, but that the context that I was living in was not very healthy for me, that context being the United States. That was the year I moved to Grenada.
From the day Michele set foot on the island, one extraordinary experience after another bore out her initial feeling that "this is the place I always dreamed I was from." Her father had died on March 13, 1961, the date of the Grenadian revolution. She traveled to the country to participate in Maurice Bishop's New Jewel socialist movement, not thinking of any other specific connections she might have to the place. From meeting a cab driver, however, who recognized her as a Gibbs because she "looked like all the rest of them around here," Michele discovered a family she had not known existed from the second leg of the triangular slave trade.
Events such as this, Michele says, "opened up a new way of seeing and being that I had buried within myself for many years, because as children, of course, we're open to all these things." Her father, a black American, and her mother, a white Jewish American, were both avowed and active Marxists. Growing up as the daughter of an interracial communist couple in Chicago during the early 1950s, she had lived in the few places that would rent to the family—in storefronts where "the only other people as bad off were gypsies, who very often lived next door." Although they were communists, her parents were "very clear that the best lesson they could teach me was not which line to follow, but how to think for myself." Adhering to their lead, she tried to expose herself to everything. Her family did not attend church, but she pursued her inner "mystical direction" through reading Lao-tse (whom she discovered by sneaking into the adult section of the library) and through her attraction to the beauty of the gypsies and their palm reading. Yet that "strain" of "intuition" got buried the same way that her artwork did when she turned fourteen. That was the year her father died, after having just left the Communist Party for its "final-racist-straw" failure to recognize the Algerian situation as a war of national liberation. As Michele recalls,
I felt at that moment responsible for taking up where he had left off, and so I put down my paintbrush and picked up my picket sign, and I put down my piano and picked up the guitar, and devoted myself to social activism and being "socially responsible."
That path—which coincided with the 1960s "rising tide of everything positive and new and renewing that we could imagine then"—continued until her decision in 1980 to radically alter her life. Everybody in Detroit, where she had worked and organized, accused her of "deserting the ship," to which she replied: "Not necessarily. It's a ship that's about to sink anyway, and I'm going to get off of it. Remember J. J. Jones's injunction that 'It's not the size of the ship that makes the wave; it's the motion of the ocean.'" When she and her husband moved to Grenada, she vaguely imagined the possibility of combining picket sign and paintbrush, guitar and piano, rather than having to give up one in preference for the other.
This binary opposition is, of course, the way that politics and spirituality have been conceptualized; they have been viewed as diametric extremes, locked in conflict one with the other. Michele admits that she fell prey to this straitjacketing way of thinking because, in her words, "that was the reality I inherited." It is also the legacy that unravels Velma in The Salt Eaters. She breaks down as a result of being solely political and relentlessly logical, and gets well when she comes into conscious possession of her spiritual being. This political-versus-spiritual problem is, in fact, what motivated Toni to write the novel:
There is a split between the spiritual, psychic, and political forces in my community.... It is a wasteful and dangerous split. The novel grew out of my attempt to fuse the seemingly separate frames of reference of the camps; it grew out of an interest in identifying bridges; it grew out of a compulsion to understand how the energies of this period will manifest themselves in the next decade.
For Michele, the combination of "spiritual consciousness in the people" combined with the "environment of social transformation" in Grenada in 1980 boded well for deconstructing this classic schizophrenia on both personal and community levels:
Almost every encounter with somebody was a "significant encounter" where you are talking on many levels at once. You'd say, or somebody would say something like, "Nothing is known," and someone else would say, "Everything is known, it's just a question of who knows it." And so the environment itself pressed me to break through some frontiers that I might not have had courage to pursue on my own.
This "incredibly intense" melding of the spiritual and political was shattered by Grenada's internal coup and the United States' 1983 invasion of the island. Devastated and "forced back on spiritual resources," Michele fled to Lesbos, another warm, pretty island, and a place "which had a both mythical and real history as a power place for women":
It was someplace where I knew the energy would be totally different, spiritual in its own way, but would give me the emotional space I needed to become centered again. And that took about two and a half years. It took me a year and a half just to stop being more in Grenada than where I actually physically was. I mean, like every night you close your eyes and you're back there again, you're really back there. You're not only back there the way it was, but you're back there in the present with what was happening. And, you close your eyes, you're on the bus on the same road, and you see what the U.S. presence has put in the place of what you remember. And you're there, you're just there.
This out-of-body existence was, to say the least, very hard on her, but after the two and a half years of healing on Lesbos, Michele re-emerged, ready to engage again with the Caribbean and the world.
* * *
Coming from quite different directions, Namonyah Soipan, a somewhat younger psychotherapist and global traveler, arrived at 1980 when she similarly experienced a marked solidification of gradually emergent changes. Namonyah had spent the first years of her life as an extremely sensitive young girl living in New Jersey. After having a traumatic childhood near-death experience, she became obsessed with the idea of death and fervently embraced a fire-and-brimstone fundamentalist Christianity. She adamantly maintained her faith despite confusion about how to love a god that she was supposed to fear, and was also puzzled about why the coming of the Holy Ghost—taught to be a blessing—triggered a scene filled with "punishment, screaming, shouting, people getting hurt and moving out of the way." After she became not just a baptized but a saved Christian at sixteen, she began "to preach and go into churches and proselytize to kids at school," still feeling afraid but thinking that, now that she was saved and doing some missionary work, her "back was covered" and she need not worry about God's wrath or retribution. The disturbing emotional dissonance within her became a cacophony when she was told that she could no longer dance (this was prohibited by many fundamentalist churches)—or even ski:
Now this is when I began to understand the difference between being a spiritual being and being a religious being, because skiing was a spiritual experience for me. So I said to them, "Wait a minute." When I'm up on that mountain, I mean thousands of feet because I was a serious skier—I wanted to be in the Olympics, but my parents would not support that because they didn't want me to be a ski bum, so I was into slalom racing—so I would be up at the very top, up to the clouds, and when I was up there I'm talking about being enraptured. When I was skiing I was so tuned in to everything. This is before I even got into spiritual. I would tell people that it was better than an orgasm. Skiing for me was that divine, that brilliant, that magnificent, that I couldn't compare it to anything, but it was spiritual. I wasn't using that word at the time, I just knew that it was incredible and I felt close to God. When they told me that I had to stop skiing, that's when I said, "Wait a minute, something's wrong here." Because when I'm up on that mountain, I'm praying. I do prayers up there to help me down safely and never take anything for granted, but not only to help me get down the slope safely but to thank God for all this beauty. So skiing to me was not just recreational. They tried to take that away from me and that's when I started questioning and realizing these are man's rules. Religion is about following the rules, but it's about following man-made rules, and I said, "I got to get out of this, because I'm not stopping skiing."
Whereupon, Namonyah let go of the fundamentalist church but not its teaching. She continued attending the family Baptist church and went off to Boston University the next year—still proselytizing, still talking about Jesus Christ and cajoling her
(Continues...)
Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction
1. The Third Revolution
2. Talking to Ancestral Light
3. Race, Racism, and Spirituality
4. Bringing Beauty from Above
5. Working to Redeem the Planet
6. Spiritual, Black, and Female
7. Closing the Circle
Afterword
References
About the Author
What People are Saying About This
"In this intelligent work of the heart and spirit, Hull reveals the exquisite and reflective interiors of African-American women."
"Soul Talk is a worthy tribute to Toni Cade Bambara and to the lives and work of African American women writers."
"Hull has given us new revelations. I have seen many of my sisters embracing a new light in their lives—African American women giving birth to brightness and walking along the river of grace and redemption. This book talks to me. Soul to soul."
"Akasha Hull's Soul Talk offers us a cartography of New Age Spirituality from the perspective of African American women. Embracing Spirit as a world view infused with political aspirations and creative impulses, she visions a new trinity of renewal and redemption, grounded in suffering, survival, and resistance."
"A beautiful testament and tribute to the power of black women. Here, the one-dimensional New Age paradigm shifts to a "True Age" model for integrating spirituality, politics, and creativity. This book will help men understand why women are, and must be, in the forefront of a spiritual culture that could save us all. Ache O."
"This is a powerful and immensely uplifting work for women of all ethnic backgrounds. The new spiritual consciousness, as revealed by the women who practice it, serves as a light by which we can envision a better world for all beings."
