The Cartography of Memory: An Ecocritical Reading of Ntozake Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo

Abstract

As reader, I have traveled with Toni Morrison. I have gone to Shalimar, Virginia, to Lorain, Ohio, to Ruby, Oklahoma to Danville, Pennsylvania. I have journeyed to City, Bottom, Sweet Home, Isle des Chevaliers, Solomon's Leap, and Up Beach. I have visited 124 Bluestone Road, One Monarch Street, Not Doctor Street, Lenox Avenue, Convent, L'Arbe de la Croix. And in summer of 2008, I went with Toni Morrison and The Toni Morrison Society to Sullivan's Island. We journeyed to Low Country to place commemorative bench on shore where nearly half of all those who survived middle passage first set foot on American soil. The Society's by Project was sparked by Morrison's contention that nation is bereft of African American monuments: There is no suitable memorial, or plaque, or wreath, or wall, or park, or skyscraper lobby. There's no 300-foot tower, there's no small bench by road (A Bench by Road 4). That Society chose Sullivan's Island as first inscription of that vision--the bench facing Atlantic with Africa behind it--elucidates coastal Sea Islands as an where place, water, and memory converge. In ceremony where libations were poured and wreaths offered to Charleston harbor, Morrison claimed: It's never too late to honor dead. Responding to Morrison's call by creating an outdoor memorial, Society implicitly recognized natural world as repository of African American cultural and literary history, an important gesture insofar as ecocriticism defined broadly as study of relationship between literature and physical environment (Glotfelty vxiii)--has routinely excluded African American history and texts. Ecocriticism was initially confined to Romantic poetry, wilderness narrative and nature by British and American authors (Garrard 4). As Deming and Savoy aver, [b]oth scientific and literary writing about nature, as traditionally defined, have not emphasized cultural difference as tool for seeing nature, place, and environment (5), and thus ecocritical analysis has largely been circumscribed to work of Anglo writers. By contrast, African American literary tradition situates place as politically charged topography, recognizing interwoven fabric of nature and culture (Deming and Savoy 14). (1) Including African American texts in canon of environmental literature expands contours of nature writing by reflecting natural world in culturally specific ways: Contemporary nature writing has moved beyond narratives of solitary encounter in wild to explore how people and cultures have been shaped by and have shaped (Deming and Savoy 6). This current trend finds an earlier analogue in work of African American writers, who persistently attended to their physical environments; indeed, slave narratives are deeply situated in place, for geography was definitive factor in determining free and slave status. In this way, navigation of environment--woods, swamps, and rivers constitutes major narrative event. Thus, encounters with nature--whether in form of rivers marking Mason-Dixon line, cosmos guiding way to freer landscapes, migrating birds flying north in summer, or moss growing on north side of tree trunks--underscore complex interweaving of freedom and slavery, as mapped onto social and physical topographies in slave narratives. Ntozake Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo is illustrative of contemporary African American ecocritical narrative insofar as memory, in novel, is written on water, humans, and land. In this way, representation of nature in novel is not as a pristine external scene but marriage of place with lives that have lived in it (Deming and Savoy 4). Specifically, Shange turns to environment--the Atlantic Ocean, Sea Islands, plants, and herbs--in her characterization of Indigo, central character in novel who is repeatedly elided with Southern coastal climate: she is sapling who is embraced by weeping willows; the land and salt-winds moved her through Charleston streets, and she has tough winding branches growing from her braids, deep green leaves rustling by her ears (4). …