By Isabelle Gunning

It’s been four years since Juneteenth was declared a federal holiday. And even though we can be sure that the forces behind renaming military bases for Confederate traitors would like to nullify it, the day reminds us how far we’ve come and how far we have to go.

There are never-ending efforts to erode legislative rights, and the efforts at psychological destruction of Black people remain a constant theme in sociological and psychological work as well as in literature. A recent reading of a beautiful coming-of-age novel highlighted for me the themes of spiritual and physical hunger that only an end to racial capitalism and misogyny can satisfy.

Big Girl, by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, follows Malaya Clondon, a young African American girl, from the time she is eight years old until her teenage years on the verge of womanhood in 1990s Harlem. The novel’s focus is on Malaya’s weight and eating habits as she navigates a world where being “big” is despised.

Sullivan’s novel makes clear that Malaya’s weight, the heaviness in her body and its impact on her life, is more than a personal or physical matter. 

“Malaya felt several women’s stories spread over her. She could see it—her grandmother’s shame spilling heavy onto her mother, her mother’s shame poured into her. For them and for all the nameless women breathing in the shadows of the family line, having the right body meant freedom. But it was a freedom none of them ever seemed to attain.”

This shame and false freedom reflect the racism and misogyny of the larger society in which Malaya, her mother, Nyela, and her grandmother, Mamere, live their lives. The weight of the trauma of these twin evils warps but does not eliminate the love that they have for themselves and each other. This psychological and spiritual trauma weighs and shapes the very bodies of the women in this story.

This is not a Christian or spiritual book. Yet it is the kind of well-written story that centers the experiences of Black women and girls that Womanist theologians use to explore and expand Christian and other religious values otherwise corrupted by racism, colonization, and patriarchy.  As the Womanist theologian Melanie Jones Quarles states in her book Up Against a Crooked Gospel, “Black women’s bodies bear the weight of multidimensional assaults that hold deep historical memory and tell the story of a vicious religious and western social order.”

Malaya’s excessive eating is part of her attempt to fill the psychological and spiritual hole that has been excavated by racial capitalism, devouring her as an individual Black woman as it has eaten away at generations of Black women and at the entire Black community. Indeed, the larger society has been consumed by racial capitalism as all are commodified and have had their sense of beauty, self, and purpose demeaned and twisted in the pursuit of profits.

But the book is also about the human spirit. Malaya may get beaten, but she is not broken. She can see her mother’s genius, brilliance, and power as a Black woman academic in a prestigious ( read white) university—even when her mother cannot. And that “right seeing” is a vision that Malaya can begin to turn onto herself. It is a choice. I was reminded of Romans 12:2—as I read it with a Womanist’s eye:  “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—Her good, pleasing and perfect will.”

Even as racism, misogyny and capitalism warp the pattern of her world, Malaya has to choose. She can choose to not conform, little by little, and then to  see a different vision of herself. She can begin to see her beauty and her right to be. She can remember that she, too, is made in the image and likeness of God. She can remember the truth, “The hugeness of living was not just for the rich or wispy or butter-colored. It was not just for the thin, white women or the men who made the rules. The spark, the speed, the bigness of living was for Malaya too. Her as much as anyone.”

The book is difficult and sad in some places but also provides the reader with insight into this young Black woman’s awakening. And in the process it reminds us all that, however difficult our path is at this moment, we too can choose to challenge the pattern of the world and triumph through our understanding of our own power and worth and the power and worth of our communities.

Isabelle Gunning is a law professor in Los Angeles, California. She is licensed as a practitioner/spiritual counselor by her home church, the Agape International Spiritual Center. She is a member of DSA-LA.