Gloria Naylor's Mama Day: Magical Realism as the Site of Black Female Agency and Empowerment

Abstract

Magical realism has been commonly identified as a subversive and discursive narrative technique widely used by ethnic-identified and postcolonial authors around the world. Although the origins of magical realist literature are largely associated with Latin America, such tendencies to territorialize this narrative mode have proved to be inadequate due to its wide use across geographical and cultural boundaries This study aims to demonstrate how African-American author Gloria Naylor aptly employs magical realist narrative technique in her novel Mama Day (1989) to affect black female agency and empowerment with which black women can give voice to the silences and gaps in official history writing. The co-existence of two distant narrative discourses in the novel's very structure, one magical and mythical, the other rational, deconstructs Western systems of knowledge and representation, replacing them with a matrilineal, mythical/magical system of signification, with which black women can rehistoricize and articulate their communal histories by drawing upon myths, legends, orality, folklore, and other non-Western practices.