Reimagining Hagar: blackness and Bible

Abstract

prayers. One example is “Benediction for Stepping out into the Empire” [57] with the deploying of “the light, the salt, the hand, the water”. How about being light that liberates, salt that savours, hands that carry, water that washes. Grammar, empire’s tool, is not neutral. In this regard I would have loved to see more prayers in local “tongues in order to ‘mash-up’ empire’s White English grammar”! A “betraying of tradition” has to be pushed to greater lengths. For instance, the able-bodiedness of some of the imagery is striking whether eyes, hands, head, hearts, feet, etc. Then there is an internalising deployment of “light” over darkness [light-bearers, 63] which is troubling. There are some excellent materials around baptism and eucharist, though we seem to be stuck to the inherited sequences of the rituals. I wonder what a full “break-out” from the liturgical empire would look like.