Dear God…
Faith and journaling as resilience in Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple
CW: drug addiction, sexual violence, domestic abuse
At first glance I thought that Transcendent Kingdom and The Color Purple would be comparable books. On the surface they have many similarities; both are written by Black female authors about growing up in the American south, dealing with childhood trauma, and finding reconciliation and happiness in adulthood. Both protagonists lean on their faiths as a coping mechanism, and grapple with religious doubt as their suffering mounts.
Despite these commonalities, the two books offer starkly different journeys. In Transcendent Kingdom, Gifty narrates her present struggles helping her mother through a depressive episode, finishing her PhD research, and building her relationships with colleagues. Her story is punctuated by frequent flashbacks to her childhood, growing up as the daughter of immigrant parents, struggling with poverty, and striving to please God. After years of living increasingly disillusioned with his life in the United States, Gifty’s father leaves her family, and leaves her mother to raise the children alone. After a basketball injury, Gifty’s older brother Nana becomes addicted to opioids. After months of losing him to highs and withdrawals, Gifty loses him finally with an overdose.
The Color Purple also tells a story of loss, but in an entirely different context. Told in a mostly chronological order, Walker uses diary entries and letters between Celie and her sister Nettie to document Celie’s pain and healing. We meet Celie at the age of 14, when she is raped by her father, loses her mother, gives birth twice, and is married off to an older man. Her children were taken away from her by her father, and when she stops hearing from her sister, Celie assumes she has lost Nettie too. Celie raises her husband’s children, nurses his lover back to health, and works the land for him all while enduring endless verbal and physical abuse. Her fortunes begin to turn when she develops loving relationships with her husband’s lover Shug Avery, her son’s wife, and other women who come into her life. She begins to demand respect from others, pursue and foster her own talents, and find happy moments. The book explores race in the Jim Crow south, but also reflects on the contemporaneous imperialism and colonialism between the West and Africa, including the adventures and reflections of a Black couple who serve as missionaries in an indigenous African community.
Gifty and Celie are different in a number of ways. Gifty’s reflective and acutely self-aware narration frames her as an imperfect person who is overcoming her past—slowly learning to trust others and forgive her family for allowing her to feel alone. Celie’s story is much more an exploration of cruelty inflicted on someone in an unfair world, how her community exploits and oppresses her at her intersection of class, race, and gender. In Transcendent Kingdom, the reader is invited to share in Gifty’s numbness and hopelessness. In The Color Purple, readers are witness to the change not only in Celie, but the growth and resilience of other characters and the bonds that shape them.
Though the two novels differ on a wide range of characteristics, both rely on journaling as prayer as a means of establishing intimacy and transparency between the protagonists and the reader, and signaling their hope for the future. The Color Purple can be read almost entirely as a prayer—prayer borne out of fear and shame. Walker begins the book with a threat:
You better not never tell nobody but God. It’d kill your mammy.
Dear God,
Every chapter thereafter begins with “Dear God.” For the first half of the book, it is ambiguous whether the reader is meant to interpret the text as conversations with God, or as letters. There are no dates for the entries, and the AAVE can appear to be spoken rather than written. Walker clarifies the format of the book through one of Celie’s letters. She writes, “I remember one time you said your life made you feel so ashamed you couldn’t even talk about it to God, you had to write it, bad as you thought your writing was” (136). With this sentence, Walker confirms that the reader is reading Celie’s private letters to God. This notion solidifies the shame with which Celie shares her thoughts with the reader, emphasizing how precious the details in the entries are.
Yaa Gyasi demonstrates the importance of religion for Gifty early on in Transcendent Kingdom. Like in The Color Purple, we are introduced to Gifty’s prayers before we know they are a form of diary entry. Even later still comes the explanation behind the written prayers. After failing to pray ceaselessly in her mind, Gifty asks her mother how it might be possible to pray always. Her mother replies with another question: What is prayer? She answers her own question:
“If you are living a godly life, a moral life, then everything you do can be a prayer,” my mother said. “Instead of trying to pray all day, live your life as a prayer.”
I was disappointed by her answer; she could see it in my face. She said, “If you find it difficult to pray, why don’t you try writing to God instead. Remember, everything we do is prayer. God will read what you write, and he will answer your writing like prayers. From your pen to God’s ear.” (52)
In her childhood quest for righteousness, Gifty diligently writes her messages to God. She uses nicknames, like The Black Mamba for her mother and Buzz for her brother. Some days, she writes about what is happening in her life and details playing with Buzz or an interaction with her mother. Other days, she has requests for God, asking for a puppy or for God to bless her family. And every once in a while, she asks questions of God. If God was protecting her, what God looked like, and finally:
Dear God,
Would you show me that you’re real? (101)
Both novels address the power of faith, but at the same time deal with the meaning of doubt. Gifty’s doubt is sparked by her brother’s own skepticism about religion. Gifty remembers Nana’s questioning of the youth group pastor one Sunday, when he asked if, hypothetically, a tiny remote African village, undiscovered by missionaries and oblivious to the Gospel, would be damned to Hell. After making excuses that missionaries would have found the village, the pastor coolly admits, “Hypothetically, dude? Yeah, they’re going to Hell” (98). Gifty recalls her own shock at the revelation, noting how casually the pastor had consigned a helpless village to eternal suffering, without thinking of a way out, an excuse to avoid the question, almost as if he wanted Hell for those villagers.
On that day, Nana and Gifty were exposed to the idea of an exclusionary God. They learned their pastor and his teachings believed God was a “prize,” that he wanted Hell for some people, that they deserved it. But this wasn’t a random exclusion, nor was it one that followed merit and good deeds. Gifty recalls, “And the part that bothered me most was that I couldn’t shake the feeling that the people P.T. believed deserved Hell were people who looked like Nana and me” (99).
This same exclusionary God made his way into Celie’s mind as well. Inextricable from the sense of doubt in Christianity, her unconscious notion of the exclusionary God was revealed to Celie by Shug after Celie explains why she no longer believes in God. Ironically, she recounts this all in her second letter to Nettie, after discovering that Nettie was alive and her letters were hidden from her. She begins the letter:
Dear Nettie,
I don’t write to God no more, I write to you. (199)
While Shug argues that God has given Celie life, good health, and a good woman who loves her, she responds, “Yeah… and he give me a lynched daddy, a crazy mama, a lowdown dog of a step pa and a sister I probably won’t ever see again. Anyhow, the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful and lowdown” (199). She argues that the God she has been praying to never listened to poor colored women, or the world would be a different place (200). When Shug asks her what her God looks like, she describes a big, old, tall man with a gray beard. He has white robes and bare feet. He is white and has blue eyes (201).
For Gifty and Celie, the God they were writing their prayers to was a white god. The God of the white people. Uncaring and deaf to the struggles and dreams of Black people, much less Black women. In each woman’s life, this realization creates doubt and remorse towards a God. It also contributes to the belittling each experiences in her life, knowing that her happiness and wellbeing is trivial to society’s goals.
This moment of betrayal is also a moment of clarity. This understanding that the God they have been taught to worship is too narrow—that this Exclusive God has been crafted by people who do not share their interests or believe in their humanity—allows both Celie and Gifty to expand their understanding of God and of prayer. In Gifty’s case, she gradually revises her spirituality on her own. In college, she admits that she still does not know how she feels. When defending a man handing out bibles on her college campus from her classmates, she admits, “though I hadn’t worked out how I felt about the Christianity of my childhood, I did know how I felt about my mother. Her devotion, her faith, they moved me. I was protective of her right to find comfort in whatever ways she saw fit. Didn’t she deserve at least that much?” (89). In her undergraduate years, while she has not made a decision on her faith, she pushes back against the idea that good people, faithful people, Black people do not deserve comfort, peace, relief, or salvation. She has already decided that there must be more than the limiting God preached by her youth pastor.
After finishing her PhD on the neuroscience behind pleasure-seeking behavior and building a healthy and intimate relationship, she revisits her relationship to Christianity. While she often sits in a church near her lab, she claims,
I’m no longer interested in other world or spiritual planes. I’ve seen enough in a mouse to understand transcendence, holiness, redemption. In people, I’ve seen even more… I never pray, never wait to hear God’s voice, I just look. I sit in blessed silence, and I remember. I try to make order, make sense, make meaning of the jumble of it all. (264)
Celie begins to shift her understanding of God in a much more precise moment, in that same conversation where she denounces God’s importance to her life. Pained that Celie does not feel the joys and wonders of God, Shug Avery shares with Celie her own faith:
Here’s the thing, the thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don’t know what you looking for… Yeah, It. God ain’t a he or a she, but a It… I believe God is everything that is or ever was or ever will be…
My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. (202-203)
Shug’s revelatory new perspective shocks Celie, causing her to rethink what it is that God wants if God is everything, everyone. She questions Shug what prayer is, then, to this God that is everyone. Shug expresses her belief that God wants us to enjoy the world It made, to worship It by loving others, appreciating Creation. Celie recognizes her eyes are opening, but acknowledges that this shift in faith is difficult to internalize and accept. She admits that she is trying to run that old white man out of her mind (204). Shug understands how difficult this is, and offers her wisdom:
Man corrupt everything… He on your box of grits, in your head, and all over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. But he ain’t. Whenever you trying to pray, and man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to git lost… Conjure up flowers, wind, water, a big rock. (204)
Celie reflects on Shug’s words:
This hard work, let me tell you. He been there so long, he don’t want to budge. He threaten lightening, floods and earthquakes. Us fight. I hardly pray at all. Every time I conjure up a rock, I throw it.
Amen. (204)
Celie’s new faith is a struggle. It is an intentional rethinking of her oppressors had taught and preached. If God is a rock, then throwing the rock, an act of rebellion, is her faith. This new and all-encompassing faith that both Gifty and Celie discover subverts the traditional teachings of the Christian doctrine. This new spirituality gives them hope, power, and peace from their traumatic pasts. This is made evident by Celie’s final journal entry in which she writes,
Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything. Dear God. (292)
All the journal entries between her discussion with Shug and this last entry were addressed to Nettie. Finally, she addresses God once again while demonstrating her acceptance of a new kind of God. Rather than the old white man she had been worshipping all her life, she writes to her new God: one who is stars, trees, sky, and people. Everything.
Gifty may not frame her new faith as a rebellion, but Yaa Gyasi makes this clear through the naming of the novel. When describing her research on mice brains, Gifty recalls something her high school biology teacher used to say: “Homo Sapiens, the most complex animal, the only animal who believed he had transcended his Kingdom” (21). Gifty then goes on to say she believes the transcendence can be found within the tiny mouse organ itself, however, the title implies that it is the entire Kingdom that transcends.
In their novels, Yaa Gyasi and Alice Walker explore a wide range of human experiences, many of which are left out in this work and many of which make the novels seem unrelated. Their protagonists use of journaling, however, leads them to an expansive and inclusive understanding of God. This new understanding does not come easy. They each struggle to internalize a spirituality that encompasses them fully. Their new faith is a rebellion against their culture, but with it comes strength. This is evidenced by their ability to live new lives and let go of much of the pain and guilt that was burdening them. This new spiritual understanding gives them the opportunity to revise their methods of prayer. Ultimately, both move beyond written letters to a new lifestyle where they find joy and gratitude.