Abstract
Jarena Lee’s The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, was first published in 1836. Later Lee published a more expanded account of her spiritual journey and ministerial travels in an 1849 edition. As the earliest known spiritual autobiography written by an African American woman, Lee’s narrative serves as an important source for developing an understanding of African American female mysticism.1 In this endeavor, Jarena Lee may serve as a paradigmatic figure for black female mystical activism. She is an archetypal persona parallel to the Orisha, lwa, or the ancestors who inhabit individuals via possession or revisit the living by being “re-born” through descendants during Yoruba or Vodou rituals. It is within this liminal space that these personas inform and commune with the gathered community. For the purposes of this study, Lee’s text provides this incarnational, self-reflective, emancipatory mystical space in which the archetypal patterns of African American womanhood can inform our understanding of black female mysticism.
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Notes
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Quoted in Diana L. Hayes, Forged in the Fiery Furnace: African American Spirituality (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2012), 161.
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© 2013 Joy R. Bostic
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Bostic, J.R. (2013). Standing upon the Precipice: Community, Evil, and Black Female Subjectivity. In: African American Female Mysticism. Black Religion / Womanist Thought / Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375056_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375056_3
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