I Bring the Voices of My People: A Womanist Vision for Racial Reconciliation (Prophetic Christianity)

by Chanequa Walker-Barnes

For Celie, truth-telling begins with God. There is some safety in confessing her truths to God, even with her conflicting God-images: the loving, caring God who might intervene on her behalf, and the White male deity who is indifferent to her. But there is risk as well. Celie’s letters are a form of lament, a record of the “cries and prayers [that] . . . erupt from the human heart and voice in the grip of a painful experience.”8 She writes letters to God in order to voice truths that are too horrific to be expressed even in prayer. Consistent with the biblical form of lament, her letters are “at one and the same time the voice of pain and the voice of prayer.”9 As Miller states, “To recover the voice of lament is to recover the voice of prayer as it has defined the human reality before God. The lament is utterly human and profoundly theological. It arises out of the reality of human existence; it assumes there is something beyond that reality that can transform existence without destroying it. The laments of Scripture make clear what is present in every human cry for help, the assumption that God is there, God can be present, and God can help. As such, the voice of lament, the cry for help we call lament, is always our prayer.”