Let My People Live

An African Reading of Exodus

Kenneth N. Ngwa

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780664262594
• eBook ISBN: 9781646982516
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Let My People Live reengages the narrative of Exodus through a critical, life-affirming Africana hermeneutic that seeks to create and sustain a vision of not just the survival but the thriving of Black communities. While the field of biblical studies has habitually divided "objective" interpretations from culturally informed ones, Kenneth Ngwa argues that doing interpretive work through an activist, culturally grounded lens rightly recognizes how communities of readers actively shape the priorities of any biblical interpretation. In the Africana context, communities whose identities were made disposable by the forces of empire and colonialism—both in Africa and in the African diaspora across the globe—likewise suffered the stripping away of the right to interpretation, of both sacred texts and of themselves. Ngwa shows how an Africana approach to the biblical text can intervene in this narrative of breakage, as a mode of resistance. By emphasizing the irreducible life force and resources nurtured in the Africana community, which have always preceded colonial oppression, the Africana hermeneutic is able to stretch from the past into the future to sustain and support generations to come.

Ngwa reimagines the Exodus story through this framework, elaborating the motifs of the narrative as they are shaped by Africana interpretative values and approaches that identify three animating threats in the story: erasure (undermining the community's very existence), alienation (separating from the space of home and from the ecosystem), and singularity (holding up the individual over the collective). He argues that what he calls "badass womanism"—an intergenerational and interregional life force and epistemology of the people embodied in the midwives, Miriam, the Egyptian princess, and other female figures in the story—have challenged these threats. He shows how badass womanist triple consciousness creates, and is informed by, communal approaches to hermeneutics that emphasize survival over erasure, integration over alienation, and multiplicity over singularity. This triple consciousness surfaces throughout the Exodus narrative and informs the narrative portraits of other characters, including Moses and Yahweh. As the Hebrew people navigate the exodus journey, Ngwa investigates how these forces of oppression and resistance shift and take new shapes across the geographies of Egypt, the wilderness, and the mountain area preceding their passage into the promised land. For Africana, these geographies also represent colonial, global, and imperial sites where new subjectivities and epistemologies develop.

1

Tears of Redesign

Birthing Exodus and Badass Womanism

Have mercy! Lord, have mercy on my poor soul! Women gave birth and whispered cries like this in caves and out-of-the-way places that humans didn’t usually use for birthplaces. Moses hadn’t come yet, and these were the years when Israel first made tears.¹

These opening words from Zora Neale Hurston’s now classic novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, represent an enduring hermeneutical entry point into exodus storytelling for endangered and marginalized communities. Hurston’s words represent and interpret exodus as life formed and nurtured through immense tears and grit and anguish, in dark places and darkened modes of being, tethered to a future yet unformed and a past/present mired in trauma. Hurston’s formulations constitute part of a larger project of Africa-related cultural and historical criticisms and interpretations of the Bible that emerged during the interwar period—the period when official colonization and exploitation of the majority world by Europe came under new and renewed critical assault. If the First World War shattered faulty notions of historical objectivity under the control of colonizing and imperial powers and their embodiments of toxic singularity, the interwar period opened up the space for a theoretical alternative: the application of rigorous political critique of colonialism and the emergence of new beginnings to enhance the value and importance of marginalized voices in shaping discourse about the production of global space sharing and meaning making. It was the early stages of anticolonial movements taking official narrative stage and eventually taking over official governing infrastructure. According to Hurston, Moses the liberator had not been born; but there were many cries around the world, and anticolonial movements were gathering real and lasting momentum that would usher in the official demise of colonialism. Discourse about the future—about the postcolonial space and time—was etched into assessments of the impact of unaccountable power on marginalized and minoritized communities. Such analyses unfolded as much in the fields of political theory as in the fields of economic, psychological, cultural, literary, and religious analyses. Examples included Akiki Nyabongo’s The Story of an African Chief, Samir Amin’s Re-reading the Postwar Period, Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, Ferdinand Oyono’s Houseboy, and Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood, to name a few.²

These cultural-historical formulations were developed for the interpretive purposes of probing how meaning takes shape and form in culture broadly and in popular culture in particular, but they were also vital to creating the parameters for the emergence of African biblical hermeneutics from the margins after World War I.³ In responding to the histories and ideologies of colonialism and the anticipated dawn of its official end, such cultural-historical analyses explored notions of beginnings as simultaneous manifestations of novelty and continuity, located at the liquid time-space of transition from death to life, from marginalized to recognized existence, and from isolation/singularity to community. The novelty of historical and interpretive beginnings may be sourced into the past, or in darkened places and historical lacunae of marginalization, but novelty and originality are not permanently lodged in the past; the novelty of beginnings is canonical in the sense that it is able to travel into the future and, in fact, to produce a future that is like the creative past but also—and this is crucial for hermeneutics from the margins—unlike the oppressive past. To invoke and paraphrase a quote attributed, with uncertainty, to Mark Twain: “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.” Well, so does the flow of literature and interpretation. Assessments of the non-repetitive but rhyming character of history and literature are possible and meaningful because memory, or rememory, as Toni Morrison has taught us, is coded not just in textual details and facts of history and literature themselves but also in their flows—in the discordant and convergent material human and cultural bodies that have shaped and been shaped by that history and literature. The interpreting subject cannot meaningfully live without engaging history—its reality and artifacts and flows. And the survivor of a brutal flow of history and interpretation cannot live meaningfully without rememory—the capacity and necessity to interpret history—its erasures, its tears, hopes, whispering, and/or soaring rhetoric—for the purposes of giving creative and transformative structure to current identity and to a healthy future for community.

Like Hurston’s marginalized community, exodus-Exodus begins with the motif-story of the children of Israel journeying into a future that is yet unborn/unformed but that somehow contains the burdens and groans of the past and present. The children are in fact en route to a place where Joseph was already (Exod. 1:5)! It is a journey down a dreaded path already trod. For this moving community, exile is intimate and experienced not simply in terms of geographical displacement but also in terms of anxieties about the infrastructure and the functioning of the nation (or empire) toward which one journeys. Is this journey toward the empire already doomed? It certainly is a journey of trauma-hope, represented by Joseph’s experience portrayed in Genesis—his encounter with, and dreams of, empire and the anxieties and conflicts that such dreams caused him and his brothers; his capture and sale into slavery; his experience of sexual harassment and imprisonment; his skills in mantic and experiential wisdom; his release from prison; his rise to political prominence; and his referential role in the narrative imagination of Exodus and its narrator (Gen. 37–50). Thus framed, the first narrative lacuna, the first release of communal tears, in this storied journey is that the oppressive Pharaoh did not know Joseph (Exod. 1:8). What it is about Joseph that this Pharaoh—only the latest in a succession of pharaohs within the political institution—did not know is unclear and unstated. But Pharaoh’s epistemological amnesia screams for narrative and interpretive attention. His amnesia is corrosive to the communal and interpretive existence of the Hebrews. And it is from that abyss that exodus-motif begins to birth Exodus-story.

EXODUS AND BADASS WOMANISM

Like the writers of Genesis 1 and of Exodus (1–2), Hurston begins her narrative in a watery and mythical geopolitical space-time of the womb and of tears. It is both a probing and a telling of herstory through embodied mythic memory, including memory that is projected into the future (Moses had not been born) because it lives as yet in flowing watery spaces and in the literary imaginations of its incubators and ancestors. The motif thus vocally embodies and represents its muted productions of liberation life, even as it also shifts those beginnings away from anxieties about imperial and patriarchal power of death to possibilities of futures detached from forces of marginalization, erasure, and singularity. The exodus-motif begins to produce an Exodus-story flow of resistance by portraying the Israelites as “fruitful and prolific” (Exod. 1:7) and describing the Hebrew women as “vigorous” (Exod. 1:19). Pharaoh’s amnesia—as consequential as it is—is nevertheless relativized by the antecedent fruitful and prolific work of the Hebrew women and by the subsequent vigorous work of the community.

What kind of life work might one discern at the birthplaces of the story? What I would call badass womanist work! Badass womanism is an epistemological, embodied, and strategic hermeneutical approach that, as I frame here as an iteration of womanism, recognizes, resists, and ultimately overcomes the triple consciousness and experiences of erasure, alienation, and singularity.

Womanism is the theoretical and interpretive gift from Alice Walker and many Black women to all—but especially to women of color. In the preface to her work In Search of Our Mothers, Walker provides a four-part definition of womanist. The first part includes the following: “usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered ‘good’ for one.”⁴ As a self-redeeming and self-asserting posture, ethos and process of restorative and expansive dignity and creativity, womanism represents forms of subjectivity and belonging that examine deep textures of life in the shadow of oppression and the vibrant textures of generative belonging in epistemological, sociocultural, economic, and political production. As Monica Coleman’s edited volume, Ain’t I a Womanist, Too? shows, womanism’s engagement with religious experience, culture, and politics requires as much historical depth as theoretical breadth. The metaphor of “waves” is deployed to sequence and herstoricize the intellectual movements and disciplinary methodologies of inquiry associated with womanism and to explore its layered textures of being and belonging.⁵

Womanism’s impact on biblical interpretation, in general, and the exodus in particular is well established.⁶ Delores Williams’s Sisters in the Wilderness was an important intervention in liberation theological discourse, in general, and in Black liberation theology in particular. The book’s title foregrounds two important voices in exodus discourse: first, womanist formulations about dimensions of oppression that are inherent and routinized in the story, and the epistemology of sisterhood necessary to enhance full liberation; and second, Wilderness that functions less as a transitional space-time in the Exodus and more as the place where Black women’s creativity and subjectivity unfolds beyond nationalistic, patriarchal, and androcentric vectors. To be sisters in the Wilderness, to embody the temporal and spatial location of wilderness as central to Exodus interpretation, is to resist the tendency to engage non-male and non-androcentric readings of the story as either afterthoughts or secondary. What unfolds among these sisters and this sisterhood epistemology is more than an addition of meaning to a story whose parameters are already set and more than a corrective measure to an established trajectory gone awry. What unfolds is a reformulation of the story’s basic structures and goals. From the Wilderness emerges a new and distinct exodus-Exodus, tethered not to national identity to be reclaimed in the future, but to a future that is still unformed, a future still being born and still gathering its promissory character. This womanist exodus community is not completely shackled (though it is burdened) by the routines of established oppressive national and patriarchal practices seeking to stop new births, nor is it interested in reproducing disparities in privilege in national and patriarchal formulations.

Williams’s work did more than expand the interpretive space and vernacular of liberation; she also made a hermeneutical and ethical claim: that Wilderness religious experience, more than Black male experience, is appropriate for describing African American women’s experience in North America. It was an interpretive and theoretical move that distinguished womanism from the concerns of white women and the concerns of Black men; the experience of Black women needed to be studied in its own right. Williams provided six reasons to support her claim: (1) wilderness experience includes female-male-family structures, rather than just male-female formulations, and is more expansive than racial parameters; (2) wilderness experience, more than Black male experience, speaks to human initiative in creating community; (3) wilderness experience signals resistance to binary constructions of religious and secular experience; (4) moving beyond negative portrayals of Black experience of oppression, wilderness offers possibilities for reflecting on Black ingenuity and intelligence for the creation of cultures of resistance; (5) wilderness experience enhances and supports the building of leadership roles for women and mothers; and (6) wilderness experience is the space for engagement and discourse between Black liberation theologians, feminist theologians, and womanist theologians.⁷ All of these points are summed up in a rationale about the significance of the wilderness as critically important “not only because Hagar’s black women’s and black people’s experiences with God gained dimension in the wilderness, but because the biblical wilderness tradition also emphasizes survival, quality of life formation with God’s direction, and the work of building a peoplehood and a community.”⁸

Williams’s pan-African view of womanism is evident in her alignment with the work of African women that was alrea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: When Your Children Ask You
• Introduction: Hermeneutics after Erasure, Alienation, and Singularity
• 1. Tears of Redesign: Birthing Exodus and Badass Womanism
• 2. Triple Consciousness and the Exodus Narrative
• 3. A Postcolonial Africana Reading of Exodus 2
• 4. Afroecology and Exodus
• 5. Miriam: The Water-Woman and Exodus Ecology
• 6. Facing and Backsiding the Mountain
• Conclusion: Let My People Live
• Bibliography
• Index of Scripture
• Index of Subjects