The politics of magical realism in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day

In Gloria Naylor's novel Mama Day, Reema's boy comes from university to conduct anthropological studies in Willow Springs, novel's mysterious setting. Attempting to preserve cultural identities against hostile social and political parameters, he frustrates Willow Springs's residents, for he does not to stories they have to tell him. With this character, Naylor introduces text's central theme, necessity of establishing narrative authority: Think about it: ain't nobody really talking to you. We're sitting here in Willow Springs, and you're God-knows-where. It's August 1999 - ain't but a slim chance it's same season where you are. Uh, huh, listen. Really listen this time: only is your own. (10) This passage foregrounds Naylor's persistent concern throughout literary career - establishing individual voice. In famous interview with Toni Morrison, Naylor candidly discloses anxiety about outside established traditions: I wrote because I had no choice, but that was a long road from gathering authority within myself to believe that I could actually be a writer. The writers I had been taught to love were either male or white. And who was I to argue that Ellison, Austen, Dickens, Brontes, Baldwin and Faulkner weren't masters? They were and are. But inside there was still faintest whisper: Was there no one telling my story? And since it appeared there was not, how could I presume to? Those were frustrating years. (574) That own be heard, it is necessary for Naylor to clear a space for her own a among texts. Her ambitious narrative project is in essence a declaration of independence - an acknowledgment of academic canon's value, but also an assertion of racial and gender difference. Without repudiation of that she obviously loves, she can tell story, but never at expense of own unique narrative voice. Naylor's quest for own voice is, of course, a central concern for most African American writers, discovered in the tension between oral and written modes of narration that is represented as finding a in writing (Gates 21). Her experimentation with in Mama Day represents a dramatic advance in artistic talent over two previous works. Unlike both The Women of Brewster Place and Linden Hills, where narrator's is distinct from voices of characters, and where there is occasionally a tone of condescension, Naylor achieves in Mama Day what Gates calls a speakerly text - one that would seem primarily to be oriented toward imitating one of numerous forms of oral narration to be found in classical Afro-American vernacular literature (181). Mama Day's serves as a spiritual ballast in narrative, a guide to elemental (religious) truths that other characters must discover to set themselves free. But Naylor's employment of free indirect discourse throughout novel metaphorically unites with Miranda; distinction between writer's authority and speaker's set of communal values in Willow Springs is mitigated, if not erased. The free indirect discourse, then, acts as Naylor's thematic commentary, a sign not only of strength of black oral but also of transcendent solidity of Mama Day's thoughts and feelings.(1) Naylor thus situates herself at center of contemporary critical discussions of texts. Criticism has in past twenty years reformulated notion of literary history as a dynamic interplay of texts: We are now led to see a single work not simply as an autonomous, free-standing edifice but intertextually, as a that talks with and to other texts. J. Hillis Miller characterizes literary work as inhabited . . . by a long chain of parasitical presences, echoes, allusions, guests, ghosts of previous texts (446). Similarly, Roland Barthes describes as a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash . …

Reviewed by: The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South Lisa Hinrichsen (bio) Harris, Trudier. The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2009. Resonating with W. E. B. Du Bois’s prediction in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) that the problem of the twentieth century would be the color line, Trudier Harris’s The Scary Mason- Dixon Line assesses the landscape of African American consciousness one hundred years later, arguing that the afterlife of slavery and subjugation on southern soil continues to disturb and inspire African American literary production. For Harris, the lingering anxiety and fear surrounding the South as a historic site of white privilege and black degradation initiates what she terms a “confrontation” in the work of all African American writers, whereby they must negotiate a fundamental ambivalence about membership in a society that calls their belonging into question. In setting up the South as ground zero for African American literary consciousness, Harris contends that all African American writers, even those not born below the Mason-Dixon line, feel “compelled to confront the American South” (1). As her emphasis on the word “compelled” makes clear, Harris argues that the charged relationship between writer and region is part of a rite of passage into African American belonging: “African American writers cannot escape the call of the South upon them . . . Not one of them considers himself or herself truly an African American writer without having confronted the South in some way” (2). Thus, all African American authors are, as the provocative title of her first chapter indicates, “Southern Black Writers No Matter Where They Are Born.” Through negotiating a polarity of repulsion and attraction inherent to a history both traumatic and triumphant, African American writers seek the space to enable “creativity operating under the influence of history” (1). Over the course of ten brief chapters, Harris explores the fraught intersection between the South and African American literary imagination, reading native-born black Southerners such as Ernest J. Gaines, Yusef Komunyakaa, Randall Kenan, Phyllis Alesia Perry, [End Page 1384] Tayari Jones, Edward P. Jones, and Raymond Andrews, alongside non-Southern writers James Baldwin, Octavia E. Butler, and Sherley Anne Williams. The Scary Mason-Dixon Line focuses on contemporary African American fiction (1964–2003), but the scope of the work that Harris examines deliberately stretches across genres, genders, themes, and storylines to support her sweeping claims. The range of her text thus functions to interject into and expand conversations about the relationship between geography and identity formation, African American identity and creativity, intersections between African American and European American writers, and Southern literature and culture. Her introductory chapter explores the way the South comes to represent a “cultured hell” (3) for African American writers, a phrase she borrows from Claude McKay’s poem “America.” “The South” is, for Harris, a slippery nexus of meanings, and her argument shifts, at times problematically, between the South as an idea, a geographical place, and a historical experience. While her text consistently foregrounds how regionalism remains a relevant marker of social, cultural, and individual identity, Harris needs to be more explicit in detailing how both the South and the color line have been reconfigured in the late twentieth century through cultural and political changes such as the struggle for civil rights and the Black Power movement, which fundamentally altered the terms of this historical confrontation and raised key questions about cultural and individual self-determination. Subsequent chapters explore the psychosexual dimensions of this confrontation in James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie (1964); the struggle to claim black masculinity in Ernest J. Gaines’s “Three Men” (1968); the rewriting of African American agency under slavery in three neo-slave narratives: Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979), Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986), and Edward P. Jones’s The Known World (2003); the spatial and temporal portability of racial fear in Yusef Komunyakaa’s Vietnam poetry (1988); heteronormativity and queer masculinity in Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits (1989); the relationship between folk communities and fear in Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata (1998); Tayari Jones’s efforts to domesticate fear in her...

The past exerts a distinct and powerful influence in most of southern fiction. This is less true in works of contemporary women writers who are southern themselves or whose works fall in realm of southern fiction. In hands of Lee Smith and Gloria Naylor, past becomes a multi-dimensional, prismatic entity that shapes familial, community, and cultural history. In Oral History by Lee Smith and in Mama Day by Gloria Naylor, concern is not so much with preserving past, but with examining, deconstructing, and ultimately redefining past. These novels represent two diverse aspects of southern culture and experiences of past. Oral History focuses on white Appalachian culture, while Mama Day focuses on rural black island culture. Despite differences of race and culture, these two novels share remarkable similarities in their treatment of past and in importance of individual voices in revealing past. Smith and Naylor use similar narrative techniques to relate familial and cultural histories. Taken together their novels yield a portrait of past that is prismatic and yet, at same time, strangely unified. To complicate matters, worlds and voices that Smith and Naylor each creates in rendering past stand as metaphors for Other Indeed, characters from Oral History and Mama Day (as well as authors themselves) are gender and racial representations of non-canonical which stand in opposition to white male Western literature. Place also figures significantly into this: Smith's Hoot Owl Holier and Naylor's Willow Springs are isolated communities that serve as repositories of memories and experiences of Other. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. states that race (and, by extrapolation, gender) has been an invisible quantity, a persistent yet implicit presence in study of literature (2). In defiance of this, Oral History and Mama Day come together in their presentation of Other as a vital and explicit element infusing each work. In both novels Other is manifested in several ways and is central to mystery at center of past. Women's voices and racial and cultural histories inherent in each work constitute force of Other. The reliance on orality in conveying past further enhances Other's presence. However, this emphasis on orality rather than on more traditional written word makes past far more difficult to comprehend. In trying to decipher past in Smith or Naylor's novel, one is like the inquiring anthropologist, who must learn language, listen and report, with all implicit risks of distortion involved in child's game of telephone (Miller 286). In this process of revealing past through multiple narrators, Smith herself emphasizes that no matter who's telling story, it is always teller's tale, and you never finally know exactly way it was (qtd. in Arnold 246). While distortion may be inevitable and truth about past never fully known, all of this is part of a complex process that reveals rich and prismatic quality of past in both Smith and Naylor's works. In Oral History past is presented as a family and cultural history which is in sore conflict with present. Through narratives of different characters, rich Appalachian past of novel is conveyed in recitation of stories, folklore, and legends as they pertain to Hoot Owl Holler and Cantrell family. In this process, Smith incorporates perspectives of such characters as Mrs. Ludie Davenport, Jink Cantrell, Ora Mae, and Little Luther Wade. In all, Smith utilizes nine voices, including what appears to be a community voice, to reveal Hoot Owl Holler's history and Cantrell family saga. These various narrators share same community history and participate in same collective memory. However, each character has a different perspective and experience of these things. …

This paper attempts to apply a theoretical concept of heterotopia to the literary texts written by two contemporary African-American female novelists, Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor. For this purpose, I comb through space theory first, focusing on the political economy of space which views the history of space in sync with a cycle of the formation, establishment, decline, and dissolution of a community that populates it. I am particularly concerned in this process with the cultural ramification of a space, which I see as the birth of heterotopia. What makes a black community in the circum-Atlantic world a durable heterotopia is some agents` will to culture in their border-crossing diaspora. Dealing with the inseparability of the politics of location and the politics of identity, Morrison`s and Naylor`s complex characterization of such agents defies the reader who is tempted to dismiss African-American literary discourse as an essentialized one of the cultural nationalism. Both Morrison`s Tar Baby and Naylor`s Mama Day are situated in an imagined island outside the national borders or interests of the United States: the former is set in a fictional island named Isle des Chevaliers, which can be located somewhere around Dominica in the Caribbean, and the latter is set in a fictitious island called Willow Springs, which may be located in the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. Against these uncanny backdrops, Morrison and Naylor reveal the various ways in which people recognize, unrecognize, or misrecognize the meaning of space. To concern myself with the relationship between the heterotopic places and the diasporic agents is at once to dredge up the deep history of the black diaspora in the transatlantic world and to offer a solution to the unfinished question of U.S. race relations. This paper`s call for the recognition of the diasporic heterotopia in Tar Baby and Mama Day ultimately engages with the due attention to the subjectivity of marginalized people who are forgotten at ever accelerating speed in the age of globalization.

Journal Article Beyond Sacrifice: Gloria Naylor Rewrites the Passion Get access Adriane L. Ivey Adriane L. Ivey Oxford College of Emory University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MELUS, Volume 30, Issue 1, March 2005, Pages 85–108, https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/30.1.85 Published: 01 March 2005

This project examines contemporary African American women’s literature and the legacy established by literary foremother, Zora Neale Hurston. The discussion is positioned at the cross-section of three on-going conversations: 1) current discourses on Conjure in African American women’s literature, 2) analyses of Africanisms in black culture, and 3) previous scholarship on recurring topics in African American women’s writing. Here these frames are unified under one thematic: Christio-Conjure—a rubric borne of the trans-Atlantic slave trade that designates the fusing of Christian and West African religious tradition in African American culture. Thus, this project establishes a new literary matrix for analyzing twentieth-century black women’s writing. Each chapter features a novel viewed through the critical lens of Christio-Conjure. Zora Neale Hurston’s and Luisah Teish’s research offers a framework for the elements of Christio-Conjure integrated throughout the novels. Chapter two, “Christio-Conjure as Historical Fiction,” analyzes Jewel Parker Rhodes’s Voodoo Dreams: A Novel of Marie Laveau (1993), a work that provides a compelling image of the black woman as a Christio-Conjure priestess. Chapter three, “Christio-Conjure and the Ghost Story,” examines how Tina McElroy Ansa’s Baby of the Family (1988) incorporates the Christio-Conjure tenet of matrilineage with the cultural transmission of mother wit as African American folk wisdom. Chapter four, “Revolutionary Christio-Conjure,” addresses the revolutionary aspects of Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters (1980), highlighting African American communal transformation and afrofemcentric female bonding. Chapter five, “Christio-Conjure Activism,” examines Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982) with the title characters as proverbial soul sistahs who employ Christio-Conjure in self-actualization and communal healing. Chapter six, “Christio-Conjure Romance and Magic,” discusses the love story of Cocoa and George against the backdrop of Gloria Naylor’s revision of the holy trinity in Mama Day (1989). As liberation tales, these novels depict characters that appropriate Christio-Conjure as a source of empowerment. In addition, the authors themselves employ Christio-Conjure in their writing as a reaffirmation of their cultural and literary heritage. As a focal point, then, Christio-Conjure functions as a centering mechanism in contemporary twentieth-century black women’s writing, a body of literature historically marginalized.

As scholars increasingly reconsider the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Courtney Thorsson's Women's Work stands at the cutting edge of scholarship that assesses the legacy of that movement for black women writers. Thorsson theorizes a strand of contemporary African American women's novels that “reclaim and revise cultural nationalism” (1) as a literary discourse and everyday practice. Through meticulous, original readings of Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters (1980), Ntozake Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo (1982), Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow (1983), Gloria Naylor's Mama Day (1988), and Toni Morrison's Paradise (1997), Thorsson argues that these “novels of the cultural nationalist revision” (4, 12) theorize a cultural nationalism that depends upon “shared longing and radical imagining” (12) as performed through practices of organizing, cooking, dancing, mapping, and inscribing. “Women's work” names the fictional activities through which characters imagine a “sovereign homeland in spaces as local as the kitchen and as broad as the planet” (24) as well as the writers' own “textual-social struggle to envision alternative communities” (1). These works dismantle divisions between the theory and practice of nation to offer an expansive vision of post–Black Power collectivity.The black women writers Thorsson examines sustain “the black arts tenet that literature should do work in the world,” but they also “expand the genre, gender, and geography of [the Black Arts Movement] and break with its realist bent” (173). That is, whereas the Black Arts Movement “privileged poetry and drama,” these writers choose the novel (5). Their fiction re-centers “the public and private work of ordinary women” often marginalized by Black Arts (3). And they expand Black Arts geography by defining nation as practiced through “daily, local labor informed by many routes of identification” (10). Scholars such as James Smethurst and Margo Crawford are expanding our sense of the “limited geography” (8) and “realist bent” (173) of Black Arts, thus revealing more of the “startling variety” that Thorsson states is “a less noted legacy of the black arts movement” (19). But whether we wish to distinguish black women novelists' imaginative and expansive works from those of Black Arts writers or we do not, Thorsson beautifully illuminates the work that her writers use the novel to do. Exploiting the novel's traditional role in nation formation but unmooring it from the nation-state (6, 115), these novelists practice nation as Brent Edwards's writers practice diaspora (28): by imagining portable, mutable, diverse black communities bound more by what Ralph Ellison called “an identity of passions” than by a shared place (qtd. in Thorsson 12).Thorsson uses the term nation to describe these imagined communities because her writers themselves do so (3)—as when Paule Marshall states, “Black people in this country [the United States] really do constitute a nation apart” (90). Thorsson uses the term cultural nationalism “to both articulate an African American nation that is distinct from the nation-state and to place these authors in a . . . tradition” of African American letters stretching from Phillis Wheatley to Black Arts writers (3). The cultural nation envisioned here is not without dissent or tension, but it is cohesive. Hence contemporary black women writers “perform just the complicated negotiation of identity that [Paul] Gilroy imagines, but do so through identification with the cultural nation that he would discard” (176). Their work “demand[s] that scholars address the continued relevance of nation in post-black arts writing” (1).Thorsson's study extends the work of Madhu Dubey and Houston Baker in addition to that of Gilroy and Edwards. Whereas Dubey concludes Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic (1994) by invoking the “tense dialogue between black nationalist discourse and black women's fiction in the 1970s” and its legacy for “black women's fiction in the 1980s” (qtd. in Thorsson 15), Thorsson picks up the thread by showing how black women writers “incorporate the multivalent and thick subjectivity of 1970s women's novels” into their vision of cultural nationhood in the 1980s and 1990s (16). Whereas Baker's Workings of the Spirit (1991) seems to “celebrat[e] a vague ‘Afro-American women's expressive production’ rooted in romanticized southern folkways,” Thorsson insists that women novelists are not “transmitting vague, gendered wisdom” but rather performing the “specific, embodied, detailed practice of an African American cultural nation” (30–31). Even the links between nation and “spiritual knowledge” that are so important to all of these novels manifest as practices (28). Indeed, Thorsson's use of the term practice is in part designed “to suggest the connotative meaning of practice as conjure or second sight” (ibid.).Women's Work begins with Bambara's 1970 anthology The Black Woman. This text is a key precursor to novels of the cultural nationalist revision not only because it offers a feminist revision of Black Arts but also because Bambara's “preface frames the volume as defined ‘by practice’” (19) and makes “the black woman . . . a multivalent, shifting, complex term” (20). Thorsson links Bambara's editorial organization of that anthology to the narrative organization of her prismatic novel The Salt Eaters in chapter 1. Here Thorsson shows that Bambara organizes the fragmented narrative around the healing of activist Velma Henry to create “a chorus of voices, coalitions, and modes of knowledge that come to function as a complex, multifocal healing system” (51)—a nation defined by “generative dissonance” (59).Thorsson's following chapter on Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo highlights the practice of cooking, showing how “recipes in particular celebrate women's bodies, invite participation, pass on personal and familial history, and make imagined travel possible” (65). Chapter 3 examines scenes of dance in Praisesong for the Widow. Following protagonist Avey Johnson from a Brooklyn living room to the South Carolina sea island of Tatem to the Caribbean island of Carriacou, Thorsson shows how the character “sifts through her individual and collective past” and ultimately dances as a performance of a complex “diasporic consciousness” (110). She analyzes Naylor's Mama Day in chapter 4, arguing that Naylor does not figure the South as “a site of nostalgia or literal return” but rather as “a portable homeland” “defined more by culture (foods, ‘codes of behavior,’ speech, and upbringing) than by geography” (121).Thorsson's readings refuse to idealize the nation as a harmonious sisterhood; she notes the homophobia (14) and class privilege (127) that threaten coalitions. But neither does she romanticize “diversity within unity,” a fragile calculus in which the former might always undo the latter. She writes, “As the twentieth century draws to a close . . . , diversity and dissent threaten to dismantle collectivity . . . ” (138–39). The generative counterpoint Thorsson locates in The Black Woman becomes cacophonous division in her rather surprising final chapter on Morrison's Paradise.Paradise is set in 1976, a year when “anxious affirmations of Americanness at a moment of deep disillusion among African Americans [mark a deep] disconnect between the nation-state and its African American residents” (144). As Morrison states in a 1986 interview, “Suppose everything turns out just fine? And in five years or ten years, boom, integration, whatever this moment was about happened and we all lived happily ever after? I said nobody's gonna get away with that; they're not gonna tell me it was that easy . . . Like, it was not easy being a black girl in 1940. . . . Before you erase this, wait” (qtd. in Thorsson 144). According to Thorsson, Morrison writes these “forgotten” histories into Paradise in the form of barely legible inscriptions (ibid.). Although it is not entirely clear whether inscription is meant to “restore multiplicity” to community (170) or fragment it by “refus[ing] the reader and characters any safe home” (163), the archive that Thorsson unearths here is remarkable. Her archival research itself refuses to “erase” the Toni Morrison who once spoke so forthrightly—and not only about the fact that “it was not easy being a black girl in 1940” but also about the fact that it was not easy being a black woman in 1970. As she recalls in the same interview, “There was a lot of macho stuff in that [Black Power] movement. . . . There was a heavy weight of men with dicks. . . . The earnest desperation for proof of maleness, proof of manhood for black men, was at the heart of that movement” (151). Such moments offer a crucial glimpse of the candor that Morrison's stylization as the stately queen of American letters would soon suppress.Thorsson seldom calls attention to such brilliant critical moves, often deferring to her novelists as “serious literary scholars” in their own right (4). She rightly notes that most of her authors “hold graduate degrees” and write literary criticism and give interviews through which they theorize their own work (4, 30). However, the unique literary critical work Thorsson herself does warrants attention. First, one of her major contributions is to identify this strand of African American literary production as such. At this moment, she writes, “there is room to identify specific strands and trends within contemporary African American literature,” far beyond noting “books that are contemporary narratives of slavery and books that are not” (178). Her aesthetic history of this particular strand offers a model for subsequent literary critical studies—as does her refreshing commitment to the literary despite the move toward interdisciplinarity and her sustained attention (following her writers) to the nation amid “the current move toward global, diasporic, and transnational perspectives in the humanities” (175).Above all, Women's Work is among the best demonstrations I know of the idea that literature can “do work in the world.” We understand this—or kind of understand it, when we are not questioning the social efficacy of studying literature—but the way Thorsson makes this case is powerful. On one level, she follows in the footsteps of black feminist literary critics such as Valerie Smith and Deborah McDowell who dismantle divides between fiction and theory (188); she does so not only by arguing that novels produce theory but also by granting Ellison's and Morrison's commentaries about the novel as much weight as Franco Moretti's. But Thorsson also destabilizes boundaries between art and life; she does this through her own subtle practice of what I would term “critical conjure.”She explicitly and inventively reads “the work of writing novels in conversation with the fictional women's work in the novels” (9). For instance, The Salt Eaters ends with an evocation of a new future in which “another script could play itself out.” Thorsson writes, “It is up to the novelists writing in the wake of this healing to inhabit this space [at the end of the novel] to write ‘another script’ for an African American cultural nation. Bambara prepares this ground” (63). Shange's Indigo embodies “the many modes of knowledge Bambara calls for in The Salt Eaters” and “is the nationalist culture worker [Bambara's protagonist] plans to be” (79). Thorsson's formulations give characters a life of their own: Avey Johnson “gets a book-length praisesong because she does the work of traveling . . . toward African American collectivity” (25). Refusing the disenchantment and skepticism betrayed by critical keywords like “problematic,” Thorsson's rhetorical conjure brilliantly bears out Bambara's claim that writing is “a perfectly legitimate way to participate in struggle” (4). We need not imagine the work of nation to be out there somewhere else: the work of creating and responding to these fictional worlds is the work.

This article explores the narrative representations of traveling, crossing, and identity formation in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day and Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People. Informed by Henry Louis Gates’ analysis of the trickster archetype, the article casts a closer look at the role played by this symbolic figure in the two novels. Significant rites of passage require significant places, such as the “other place” in Mama Day or the “chosen place” in The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, which are the realm of the trickster. Deeply anchored in their island communities, these characters easily move between the supernatural and the mundane and facilitate access to cultural memory and personal identity. By juxtaposing these two works, the article argues that rites of passage, performed by bridge-like characters in culturally significant places, are essential for validating the characters’ inner and spatial journeys, ultimately assisting them in finding a sense of collective belonging and personal identity.

Gloria Naylor is a novelist, editor, screenwriter, teacher, and essayist who was born on January 25, 1950, in New York City. Her parents, Roosevelt Naylor, a transit worker, and Alberta McAlpin Naylor, a telephone operator, moved to New York shortly before Naylor's birth to ensure that their child would not endure the hardships of southern (black) life, namely cotton sharecropping and Jim Crow segregation, as they had in their hometown of Robinsonville, Mississippi. Naylor graduated from high school in 1968 and joined the Jehovah's Witness faith that same year. Over the next few years, she would continue to work as a missionary for the Jehovah's Witnesses, eventually traveling throughout the southeast as a fulltime minister. But, in 1975, Naylor left the sect because she no longer wished to take part in organized religion. In search of her life's purpose, Naylor returned to New York and enrolled in Medgar Evers College to study nursing. She soon realized that she had a stronger love of literature (a passion her mother encouraged through her own love for reading) and transferred to Brooklyn College to major in English. While at Brooklyn College, she read Toni Morrison's inaugural novel The Bluest Eye, an experience that both introduced her to the world of African American literature and provided possibilities for her own writing. Inspired now to develop her own artistic talent, Naylor completed her formal education and began her career as a writer. She graduated from Brooklyn College with a BA in English in 1981; she earned an MA in African American Studies from Yale University in 1983; the prior year, she had also published her first novel The Women of Brewster Place (1982). Quickly becoming a prolific fiction-writer, Naylor has authored five other novels to date: Linden Hills (1985), Mama Day (1988), Bailey's Cafe (1992), The Men of Brewster Place (1998), and 1996 (2004). She is currently at work on a seventh novel, Sapphira Wade, a prequel to Mama Day. All of her novels use time, space, and place to capture various African American experiences. Included among her numerous professional and artistic accolades are the American Book Award for first fiction for The Women of Brewster Place in 1983 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988. Naylor reveals in this interview the issues that matter most to her: slavery, history, the current plight of the black community, politics and art, healing, literary criticism, human creativity and resilience, the power of truth-telling, self help, and spirituality. It is the last topic, spirituality, that has interested me the most over the years as an avid Naylor scholar. As this interview demonstrates, I am fascinated by the way in which Naylor has organized two of her novels, Mama Day and Bailey's Cafe, around tropes of spiritual power and Biblical revision. I believe that her thematic overtures in these texts (themes that are also found in most of her other works) provide strategies for addressing certain social ills and even posit ways in which societies can be re-organized to better benefit their citizens. But, as Naylor points out, works of imagination cannot enact change. Such change really requires that we use more overarching and systematic means to alter policies. Still, her works reflect her general concerns for society and offer viable ideological starting points. This conversation occurred as apart of Naylor's visit to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Black Cultural Center in March of 1999. Tomeiko Ashford: Black women writers in the last few decades have offered mechanisms of spiritual healing through their texts. Do you feel that there's a need for healing among your black audience specifically? Gloria Naylor: Definitely. I think we're still struggling under the scars of slavery, and I think that the Civil Rights Movement did not work. The country is almost as divided as it was before. Okay, there are a few things that have changed and certain blacks have gained ascendancy. …

Black liberation struggle must be re-visioned so that it is no longer equated with maleness. (bell hooks, yearning) Since joining the burgeoning canon of contemporary Black women's fiction, Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills (1985) has generated much critical discussion not only for its associations with Dante [1] but also its damning depiction of the Black bourgeoisie. [2] However, while scholars have read the novel along these and other lines, and also identified its heroine Willa Prescott-Nedeed as playing various narrative roles, from being a feminist critic [3] and historian [4] to serving as a triumphant heroine, [5] they have virtually overlooked the novel's concern with theology, particularly its advancing of a gendered version of millennialism/messianism in the context of Black liberation experience. Relatedly, the suggestion that Willa's death is self-destruction (Goddu 225) and, more specifically, a quick (Homans 396, 398) raises a problematic that complicates the critical lapse. Deemphasizing the novel's biblical undercurrent, this very suggestion seems to question and indirectly condemn the kind of communit y and Black-female subjectivity which Naylor, herself a feminist, proffers in the text. Naylor's artistic interest in both the rescue of a transgressed (Black) world, Linden Hills, from Luther's satanic dispensation designed to last a millennium, and the need for a new (fictive) world order, created and symbolized in Mama Day, her next novel, magnifies the salvific functionality of Willa's character. It also locates Linden Hills' controversial resolution in the floor plan of Naylor's oeuvre. Naylor's handling of millennialism/messianism encases and also extends the treatment of theodicy in African American (women's) writings. Black womanist/feminist theologians such as Renita Weems, Kelley Brown Douglas, and Jacquelyn Grant [6] have, for instance, engaged the place of scripture relative to Black women's experience of race, sex, and class oppression. Also, on a creative level, ntozake shange's for colored girls and, especially, Alice Walker's The Color Purple address not merely the issue of God or of an otherworldly confidant in relation to Black/women's lives, but more so the idea of women rallying and intervening as radical messiahs to save other women, and men as well. Viewing Linden Hills through the lens of this tradition, the question arises as to whether Willa's death, which occurs during her consequential battle against Luther, is indeed suicidal/self-destructive. This question is far more than a linguistic squabble, for although Naylor's narrator does not classify Willa's death as a coroner might, it does matter how scholarship checks her death certificate. Black-female suicides may be infrequent statistically, but they do occur in Black women's fiction (Laurel Dumont, for example, kills herself in Naylor's novel). The question matters because the strong connotations of either descriptor, suicide or self-destruction, have interpretive ramifications both for the text's feminist thought and for the larger, religious/messianic meanings of Willa's death. Speaking broadly, what is really at stake here is the issue of how society in general, and the discourse on Black liberation struggle, specifically, (mis)represents Black women's lives, forcing us, sometimes, to dig up the dead--critically. Two fundamental and inextricable goals guide this critical autopsy. One, I attempt to address and amend what I perceive to be problematic readings of Willa, specifically the suggestion that her death is both negative and futile. Two, building on that revision, I consider the novel's ignored engagement of theology and thereby suggest a different look at both Willa and the narrative. Drawing on the novel's religious overtones, and reading Linden Hills as a text which harnesses and signifies [7] upon the Messianic themes of coming social liberation and redemption grounded in Black culture (Howard-Pitney 12), I read Willa as an irregular messiah--as a gendered reification of both Moses and Christ. …

CLA JOURNAL 63 A Delineation of Black Feminine Consciousness and Divine Power: Self-Acceptance and Empowerment in Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo J.K. Surrency Though not as popular or recognized as Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982) encompasses similar subject matter, one common to many of her works: the marginalization of Black women. Set primarily in Charleston, South Carolina, the novel is written within the framework of the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movements, which exulted Black men but oftentimes negated Black women while doing so. Located at the intersection of such movements, the novel’s call for Black feminine consciousness remains just as relevant today, over four decades later, in a world where the need for social movements, such as #SayHerName and #MeToo, remain. Weaving together the lives of the three sisters—after whom the novel is named—and their mother, Hilda Effania, Shange challenges the negation of Black women by intertwining their selffulfillment and spirituality. The southern setting of Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo fosters that interweaving and mirrors a literary technique shared by Shange’s compeers, including Gloria Naylor (Mama Day 1988) and Paule Marshall (Praisesong for the Widow 1983), among others, in their collective dialogue and canon concerning Black women’s search for space and self-actualization in the South. As Mary Hughes Brookhart points out in “Spiritual Daughters of the Black American South,” for many Black women writers “the South is more than a physical location; it is a psychological space where those who have been made anemic by their exile can come in contact with mystical powers and be rejuvenated” (125). Brookhart further opines, “as in the African tradition, which is their ultimate source, those powers may come from ancestors still effecting action from special people in tune with supernatural forces” (125). As the opening lines of Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo articulates,“where there is a woman there is magic” but for this magic to be realized, the woman must be “a consort of the spirits” (3). For Shange, as well as her contemporaries, “the region to get in touch with such powers is not Africa but the southern United States— the region of their characters’ internalized history” (Brookhart 125-126). In this respect, Shange situates Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo in a southern locale to position her characters in proximity to the source of their power and cultural heritage. This article proposes, then, that Shange incorporates aspects of the Gullah/Geechee culture and African spirituality as a directive to empowerment and self-acceptance, 64 CLA JOURNAL Jeneen K. Surrency thereby arguing that Black women may truly reach their heightened feminine consciousness and divine power when they embrace their spiritual and ancestral past. A compilation of narrative, letters, poems, recipes, and potions, Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo tells each sister’s story both cyclically and separately, beginning and ending with Indigo, who, even as a young girl, has a “moon in her mouth… [that] kept her laughing” (Shange 3). Although all three sisters search for a sense of self, this article focuses predominately on Indigo, whose journey is the most knowingly grounded in her ancestors. Despite Indigo—the youngest sister and a preteen when introduced—is present only in the novel’s opening and resolution, she is the sister with the most pronounced connection to the South and awareness of her forebearers’ power. Shange stresses this fact by having variations of Indigo’s mother’s explanation of Indigo’s behavior and actions—that Indigo’s “got too much South in her” (4)—reiterated throughout the novel’s sections devoted to the character. For Hilda, that “too much South” equates to the overly abundant influence of the region’s African history and ancestors and not enough of the social norms of the dominant class.As Teresa N.Washington points out,“Indigo’s destiny is to facilitate the unification of various peoples, ages, places, spirits, and ancestors in her attempt to solidify and sanctify a safe place for African Americans” (146). Hilda and her daughters are artists and crafts workers; and, Indigo’s initial artistry, doll making, is her preliminary conduit for this union. Indigo...

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

Reviewed by: Water and African American Memory: An Ecocritical Perspective by Anissa Janine Wardi Tayana L. Hardin (bio) Wardi, Anissa Janine. Water and African American Memory: An Ecocritical Perspective. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2011. Author Anissa Janine Wardi’s Water and African American Memory: An Ecocritical Perspective is an ambitious and well-researched study that investigates the confluence of water, cultural memory, and African American historical experience. Wardi undertakes this investigation through an examination of several twentieth-century cultural texts by writers Ntozake Shange, Toni Morrison, Henry Dumas, and Richard Wright; filmmakers Julie Dash and Kasi Lemmons; and blues singers Muddy Waters and Bessie Smith. Despite differences in genre and style, these texts variously depict encounters between human bodies, living and dead, and the water bodies that sustain and entomb them—encounters that, by Wardi’s account, reveal the aqueous frontier between the natural, human, and ancestral worlds. The association of the natural world with ancestral and diasporic memory is not new to critics of African American literature and cultural production, and has been the topic of conversation in academic journals, edited collections, book manuscripts, and university classrooms. Collectively, these conversations disclose an abiding interest in the way African American writers, musicians, and visual artists rely upon the natural world to structure their texts and even critique the injustices of the human world. In the three chapters and conclusion that follow the introduction, Wardi both draws from and hones the conversation by privileging water as a site of inquiry, even asserting that scholars “must return to watercourses to gain insight into African American cultural history” (10). Wardi executes this return to watercourses through engagement with what she calls “African American Ecocriticism,” a method of interpretation that builds upon ecocriticism, variously known as ecological literary criticism, green criticism, or literary-environmental studies. Wardi argues that ecocriticism, which took root as a field of critical literary study within the past two decades, has largely been limited and applied to the nature writing of Anglo writers (10). However, she posits, the premise of ecocriticism—that the human and nonhuman worlds are interconnected and mutually informed and sustained—”finds an earlier analogue in the work of African American writers, who have persistently attended to their physical environments” (11). Citing the writing of former slaves, Wardi explains how the natural world marked the boundaries between enslavement and freedom, and, furthermore, how such engagement with place and environment continues to characterize the African American literary and cultural tradition. Wardi thus conceptualizes African American Ecocriticism as a means to fulfill two different but related objectives: first, to uncover how the interdependence of the natural, human, and ancestral worlds in African American literature meaningfully expands the ecocritical canon (15); and second, to address how African American writers “evoke a transatlantic history in which language, and by extension their literary works, are given life force through water” (10). To support her mission, Wardi calls forth critical insights by writers, natural scientists, historians, and cultural critics. She then augments this theoretical discussion with close readings of Langston Hughes’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921) and August Wilson’s play Gem of the Ocean (2006). Hughes’s and Wilson’s texts befit Wardi’s theoretical discussion, given that each revolves around the very idea that structures this project—namely, the interrelationship between water, ancestral, and human bodies. Wardi further nuances this idea by demonstrating how characters’ [End Page 457] encounters with water sometimes trigger traumatic memory of the Middle Passage, or, conversely, serve as sites of healing and restoration. Additionally, she demonstrates how disparate waterways—such as Hughes’s rivers and Wilson’s ocean—are each carriers of memory that are perpetually channelled into and out of one another, and, consequently, always already bear the imprint of the Middle Passage. Wardi’s close reading of Hughes and Wilson leads her to a simple albeit powerful conclusion: water manifests history (29). She expounds upon this idea in subsequent chapters, which are organized around distinct water bodies. By organizing the book in this way, Wardi calls attention to the material composition of water bodies and, equally important, to the ways this materiality informs symbolism, narrative composition, and critical interpretation. Wardi’s...

The relationship between humans and their gods has always been a primary theme in literature. Until recently, however, books in the American literary canon have rarely been concerned with any supernatural beings other than the Judeo-Christian god. In this book Bonnie Winsbro moves beyond that narrow focus to examine the power of the supernatural in the works of six ethnic writers: Lee Smith's Oral History, Louise Erdrich's Tracks, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, Gloria Naylor's Mama Day, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. By selecting these authors, Winsbro provides a multicultural perspective - Appalachian, Native American, African American, and Chinese American - on the internal turmoil experienced by ethnic individuals when their belief systems clash with those of family, community, or dominant culture. Although their responses to such conflicts differ, Winsbro argues, all six authors believe that personal power is acquired through self-definition, the process by which one constructs one's own reality as a foundation for living in one's own center rather than on another's margins. By analyzing works that treat seriously a belief in such supernatural figures as witches, healers, and ghosts, Winsbro seeks to show that the contemporary world is not defined by one reality - a rationalistic, scientific reality, for example, or a Judeo-Christian reality - but by many realities. Indeed, acknowledging the coexistence, collision, and coalescence of multiple realities is one of the distinguishing features of postmodern life.

CLA JOURNAL 245 Book Reviews Lewis,SharonA.andAma S.Wattley,eds. Gloria Naylor’s Fiction: Contemporary Explorations of Class and Capitalism. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017. 142pp. ISBN-13: 978-1-4438-9591-0 $59.86 Hardcover. Gloria Naylor lived only 66 years, but she left a valuable literary legacy. She gave the keynote address for the College Language Association banquet at the 2006 convention hosted by the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Naylor’s prose is celebrated for its poetic quality, its powerful imagery, and its memorable characters. Her debut novel, The Women of Brewster Place, won the National Book Award and was adapted into both a musical and a 1989 television mini-series starring Oprah Winfrey. Her work has been the subject of several book-length studies, many interviews, and dozens of essays. This collection of six essays and the editors’ introduction adds an important perspective to the existing body of critical work discussing five of Gloria Naylor’s six novels. (Her 2005 novel/ fictionalized memoir entitled 1996 is not the subject of anyof theessaysinthiscollectionandisnotmentionedintheeditors’introduction.) The specific focus on class and capitalism distinguishes these essays from other critical sources about Naylor’s works. In their introduction to this volume, editors Sharon A. Lewis and Ama S. Wattley carefully distinguish social class from social status. Concentration on socioeconomic conditions and attitudes within the Black community guides a specifically focused examination of these novels. The primary interpretive tool for this collection is Marxist literary criticism with an additional lens of womanist/feminist theory. The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Mama Day (1988), Bailey’s Café (1992), and The Men of Brewster Place (1998) are all the central focus of one essay apiece in this collection. Given the socioeconomic theme of the volume, it is quite appropriate that Linden Hills (1985)—which dwells upon the upper class—is analyzed in two of the essays. Anita August brings her experience as a novelist and scholar of visual culture to bear in her essay, “I Need a Prince to Watch Over Me. Really?! Re-Visioning ‘Happily Ever After’ in Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place.” Her focus on paternalism as it impacts women’s financial success brings a gendered lens to the economic analysis. Given the discussions of class, Kiswana Browne and her naïve interactions with Cora Lee illustrate the distinctions in values and priorities, since Kiswana is “the only resident to choose Brewster Place,” as August notes (31). Naylor’s emphasis on woman-centered support rather than the fairy tale Prince is emphasized. The homoerotic relationship between Mattie Michael and Etta Mae Johnson is discussed and is contrasted to the “taboo lesbian relationship” between Lorraine and Theresa, or “The Two,” as their chapter in Naylor’s novel is entitled 246 CLA JOURNAL Book Reviews (39). In every instance, August details the ways that the “happily ever after” of traditional fairy tales falls short with the women in Naylor’s first novel. ShamikaAnn Mitchell contributes“KeepYour Check: Commodity,Capitalism and Commerce in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day.” Gentrification and predatory development in the novel’s fictional Willow Springs are compared to similar situations in the real-life Sea Islands. Ownership of ancestral lands and a mutual respect and collective responsibility for what happens on those lands become the focus of Mitchell’s essay. Maxine Lavon Montgomery is the editor of Conversations with Gloria Naylor (2004) and author of The Fiction of Gloria Naylor: Houses and Spaces of Resistance (2010) and numerous other essays on Naylor. For this volume, she wrote “Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Café: Selling Sex in the Cultural Marketplace.” She identifies Bailey’s Café as “the last text in a tetralogy” and asserts that it “represents the culmination of a narrative mediation on constructions of the sexual self within the context of a hierarchal socio-economic system” (62). Indeed, Montgomery claims that “capitalism, along with the commodity status ascribed to the female body, persists as a fundamental issue”(62). Her essay also makes excellent use of Trimiko Melancon’s CLA Book Award winning Unbought and Unbossed: Transgressive Black Women, Sexuality and Representation. One of the most arresting essays for admirers of popular culture comes from Terrence Tucker...