‘Being Played’: A Study on the Playfulness of the Dark Skinned Shulamite
I am dark and beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem,
As the tents of Kebar, as the curtains of Solomon.
This passage invites us to play, be a part of the play of the Song of Songs, the biblical book in which a woman known as the Shulamite plays a leading role. She welcomes us to play her role, to be playfully played by this play, and so as readers to join in as participants in her play. Hans-Georg Gadamer reminds us that the word “play” can indicate something that is not serious, or is the alternative to work, but also something that is a creative work of art, as in a Broadway play. As for him, “the mode of being of the work of art itself”[1] invites us to lose ourselves in the play, to behave playfully, and in playing it, to be changed by it—to be transformed. The Song of Songs is structured as a play. But it does not stand alone in this regard in the Bible. The Jewish and Christian Scriptures as a whole form a collection of literary treatises that tells a story of salvation that is carried out on the stage of history and that, while signaling to something beyond itself, never loses sight that it is being played out in history.
Playfully, the biblical stories give way to improvisation within permanence, re-creation within mimesis, and contemporaneity within representation. This means that a textual representation already present in the Scriptures can take on multiple personifications, even as it seeks to stay true to a role. Via repetition, the text itself engenders a contiguously disrupted narrative from past to present that also draws in the future. And so particularly the character of the Shulamite, as intended by the biblical writer or not, confronts the readers, disturbs worlds perhaps understood to be settled, when placed within contemporary contexts imbued with the “not yet.” As in the passage cited above, specifically the dark beauty of the Shulamite discomforts us, gluing our sights to the color of her skin, and calling our attention to the immense weightiness that it holds when placed in relation to concepts like the imago Dei and how dark skins are judged today, but also how the two in tandem can play a positive role in the story of liberation.
The Song of Songs can easily be counted among the most improvised stories in Christian tradition. Its enticing narrative made the Shulamite a leading protagonist among Christian thinkers. In early Christian tradition, particularly as found in commentaries on the Song of Songs, some symbols were used to theologize about her, and several female characters were conflated to play her part. These symbols and characters also played key roles in defining the imago Dei via allegorical and tropological senses. The Shulamite as the betrothed of Solomon (resembling the Queen of Sheba, 1 Kgs 10:1–13) represents at times the soul, and at other times, the Church. Moreover, she represents a third character who like Zipporah, the Midianite wife of Moses, symbolizes “a foreign land” (Ex. 2:21–22), or even Miriam, the mother of Jesus, as a fourth character. She can even represent a fifth one, Eve, who remains unidentified in the background, but who enshrouds the entire discourse and splits it into two stages: dark skins as representing the fall, and fair skins representing the resurrected and sanctified life.
Early Christian interpretations of the Song of Songs, particularly the passage in which the Shulamite says, “I am dark and beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem,” was taken as a cornerstone of these metaphorical expressions. In his usual allegorical method, Origen, for example, presents the Shulamite as the dark skinned bride of Solomon, who inherited no illustrious lineage in the eyes of the people of Israel. She collectively represents the Gentiles grafted into the salvific role of the people of Israel.[2] Here, the disruptiveness of her character begins to emerge, for the Shulamite is transplanted from her role as an outsider of the clan, perhaps a stranger (an other), into a leading role in the history of salvation.
In the text itself, as it appears, the dark skin of the Shulamite interrupts the narrative. These early Christian thinkers captured that much. Her ancestry must have being troublesome for the maidens of the Song, Origen argues, for she pleads for her beauty to be acknowledged, for her skin, as “the tents of Kebar, as the curtains of Solomon,” to be viewed as beautiful.[3] In her supplication, she points to the curtains of the tabernacle, for while being black, they are also glorious. The curtains that, as she does, adorn the king’s chambers.
Yet in spite of this play’s implicit affirmation of her, the disruptive darkness of her skin, when put in relation to the beauty of imago Dei, posited some problems for many of these early thinkers. In order to explain it away, the beauty of the bride had to lie beyond corporeal and temporal dimensions of reality. For Gregory of Nyssa, the Bride must not have been truly black for she was shaped by the radiant hands of God. She rather became black, “stained all over with some dark and gloomy color.”[4] When formed, she was “a copy of the true light, far removed from the marks of darkness and resplendent in its likeness to the beauty of its archetype.” At this juncture, the Shulamite seemingly takes on the persona of Eve, in her state prior to the fall as fair skinned, and after it as a dark skinned woman. The clothing of sanctification she first received, that is, her original state prior to her fall, is depicted as being far fairer than the complexion of her skin.
Her soul, that which is made after the image of God, thus according to the radiant light, can be recovered by her drawing closer to God. The move from dark skin to fair is understood as this dark skinned beauty seeking to regain her divine image by undergoing a process of purification that leads her away from disobedience and unbelief[5], and ultimately from her own embodied self and identity. For instance, William of St. Thiery argued that Solomon’s dark-skinned bride would not receive her kiss, and will be denied the gift proper to betrothal “until she has put away her Egyptian blackness and stripped herself of the customs of a barbarous nation.”[6]
From what they say, one can conclude that the Sitz im lebem of these early thinkers reframed the backdrop of the play to make the darkness of her black skin a symbol of evil and the antithesis of the good. As Gay L. Byron points out, early textual interpretations inherited a particular “rhetorical, polemical, and symbolic significance of ethnic groups, geographical locations, and color difference” that placed the people south of the Mediterranean as “symbolic tropes that generated and reflected an ideology of difference.”[7] By borrowing the language concerning color difference from the Greco-Roman ethno-political rhetoric that represented the “barbarians” as those who posed a threat to the Empire, early allegorical and tropological use translated these biases into sins and vices, demons and evil, heresies, and sexual threats, thus into an aesthetic sensibility that rejected this color difference.
These views can cause much eeriness for they resonate with something strangely familiar—the taxonomy of skin colors that since the time of Enlightenment and Europe’s encounter with the native others has served to colonize dark bodies. This system that places humans whose ancestry is from the southern hemisphere of the globe, which sadly remains very much alive and well today in Christian orthodoxy, causes one to pause and reflect. It compels questions. Gustavo Gutierrez asks how to hold in tension the impossibility of talking about the mystery of God with our task to proclaim a gospel that tells “the ‘non-persons’ that they are sons and daughters of God?,"[8] to which I would add, “representations of God here on earth? Theological questions can serve as means of denunciation of oppressive language and structures, and annunciation of the “not yet,” as Ada María Isasi-Díaz argues.[9] One response could be that of modernity’s impulse to purify the religious discourse by removing the identity, race, and culture of the biblical characters, as a way to universalize its message (perhaps already an early impulse as exemplified above). While another could entail their affirmation to establish a vinculum with the divine mystery and the historical subjectivity already implied in the text as a means to liberate a concept like the imago Dei from prevalent prejudices.
I opt for the latter. By emphasizing and even celebrating the unique role that the Shulamite plays as a dark skinned beauty, refusing to silence or purify the text, creates space in the Song for what Victor Turner calls liminality. According to Turner, symbols though stemming from familiar social and cultural contexts, can become factors of social action and change when they are appropriated and used in creative and innovative ways by means of comparison. In comparing symbols, like “dark skins” with the imago Dei, but in a manner that embraces her flesh, an in-between space called liminality creates a threshold, the place of leaving one meaning and taking another that for Turner is “capable of influencing the behavior of those who are in mainstream social and political roles.”[10]
The character of the Shulamite functions in this liminal manner, as an erupting agent from within the text, bursting with newness of meaning that remains yet to be fully enclosed in the present, always capable of shattering oppressive icons erected in the contemporary scenes. For instance, in casting someone like Celie in the role of the Shulamite, one of the main character’s of Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple, to subvert the view of the image of God as “big and old and tall and graybearded and white,”[11] the Shulamite can serve to press against the stereotypes of a racism characteristic of the segregated south of pre-World War II still prevalent today. By taking the representation of the Shulamite in a similar direction, by employing her role in the text to create a space of anti-structure or of disorder of structures to defamiliarize the familiar, she can disrupt the overuse of the symbolism of “fair skins” in our representations of the sanctity and mystery of the imago Dei.
The role of the Shulamite begs to be played in a manner that leads to transformation today. In wanting to be played once again, she assumes a “flesh and blood reader,”[12] one who could potentially become an “historical subject,”[13] and so hold a leading role in the global story of salvation. In doing this, the Shulamite puts the reader (or hearer) of the text—meaning us—in a vulnerable place. In subversively playing her role, we as “players” participate in the woundedness of the hurting as we allow other representations of the divine to interrupt our world, so that we in turn collaborate in the creation of wholesome structures. Included here are also other issues women of color around the world face, as Daisy Machado’s story of a Salvadorian woman named Elena serves to show. Elena, having been raped several times by guerilla men, forced to watch the execution of her husband once he was captured, and disfigured by having her nose cut off, disturbs us in that as we enter into her world, she represents us. As Machado argues, Elena is us, because like us she is “created in the image of God.”[14] Thus the play becomes an expression of an ugly beauty that participates in ugliness in order to see beauty shine forth as the good sought for the whole of humanity.
Keeping this practice of play in mind can enrich the role of the preacher. Eunjoo Mary Kim explains it in terms of playing the role of the interpreter as one who engages in a hermeneutics of performance by creating “new meaning contextually,”[15] making the text relevant to its listeners, and by moving the hearers from who they are to what they are called to be, “the responsibility for humanness of life in this world.”[16] Likewise, I welcome the reader to playfully perform the Scriptures in similar liberative ways, the Shulamite as a dark skinned beauty.[17] Her leading role as a female persona representing the divine sphere frees up traditional ways of imaging the sacred. Early Christian gifted preachers like Origen freely danced with the text in this manner. By playing the Scriptures, the Song of Songs, or a single text in our contemporary scene, we are also being played, hence transformed in being able to “play” these roles in ways that can lead to liberation.[18] It even invites us to the playful performance of preaching and teaching that not only entails a careful exegesis and contextualization of the passage under study, and perhaps a certain flair, with lovely and varied intonation of phrases in its deliverance, as needed as this is, but also to draw its listeners into the sermon to iconoclastically become characters in it.
Notes
1 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed. (New York and London: Continuum, 2003), 101. Throughout the essay, I borrow from his concepts of play as expressed in pp. 101–170.
2 See Origen, The Song of Songs, Commentary, and Homilies, in Ancient Christian Writers, trans. and ed. R. P. Lawson (Mahwah, NJ: Newman Press, 1956), 91–113. See also, Richard A. Norris Jr., trans. and ed., The Song of Songs: Interpreted by Early Christian and Medieval Commentators, in The Church’s Bible series, ed. Robert Louis Wilken (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003), pp. 38–39.
3 See Origen, in Norris, The Song of Songs, 39.
4 See Gregory of Nyssa, in Norris, The Song of Songs, 44.
5 Origen, The Song of Songs, 109.
6 William of St. Thiery, in Norris, The Song of Songs, 12.
7 Gay L. Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 1.
8 Gustavo Gutierrez, “The Task and Content of Theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Liberation Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 27.
9 Ada María Isasi-Díaz, En la Lucha/In the Struggle: A Hispanic Women’s Liberation Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 36.
10 Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York City: Performing Arts Journal of Publications, 1982), 33.
11 Alice Walker, The Color Purple (New York: Pocket, 1982), 201.
12 Leticia A. Guardiola-Sáenz, “Reading from Ourselves: Identity and Hermeneutics among Mexican-American Feminists,” in A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology, edited by Maria Pilar Aquino, Daisy L. Machado, and Jeaneatte Rodriguez, pp. 80–97 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 81.
13 Isasi-Díaz, En la Lucha.
14 Machado, “The Unnamed Woman: Justice, Feminists, and the Undocumented Woman,” 162.
15 Eunjoo Mary Kim, “Hermeneutics and Asian American Preaching,” Semeia 90–91 (2002), 272.
16 Ibid., 278.
17 The Shulamite’s leading role as a female persona representing the divine sphere frees up traditional ways of imaging the sacred, paving the way for not casting God exclusively in male roles. Here lies one possibility for another social, political and religious praxis to take root. With the transformation of the overmasculinization of language, the oppression and idolatry residing in “sexist language” receives a heavy blow, as Elizabeth Johnson would argue. See Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: A Cross Herder Publishing, Crossroad Publishing Company, 2001), 17–60. And perceiving black beauty as intrinsically part of the image of God gives theological substance to challenging the identification of whiteness with beauty and blackness with ugliness. As Michelle González describes it, the enslaved of the Americas including those who are a part of Caribbean humanity and history, are in the imago Dei. See Michelle González, “What About Mulatez? An Afro-Cuban Contribution,” in Futuring Our Past: Explorations in the Theology of Tradition, edited by Orlando O. Espín and Gary Macy, 180–203 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2006), 188.
18 Women of the global south specifically may become co-creators of language on God. See Merci Amba Oduyoye, Daughters of Anowa: African Women and Patriarchy (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1995), 19–78.
