Mama Day Research Articles

Taking the measure of The Tempest: The Diviners and Mama Day

Taking the measure of The Tempest: The Diviners and Mama Day

American Stories of Cultural Haunting: Tales of Heirs and Ethnographers

s I sat in the darkened theater of the Yale Rep, watching the 1987 opening performance of August Wilson's new work, The Piano Lesson, it occurred to me that new spectres were haunting America-specifically, that ghosts were populating African-American literature in growing numbers. The play's action turns on the ghost of a murdered white slave-owner who haunts the descendants of his slaves. The spectre's power must ultimately be exorcised through the invocation of the black family's own ancestral ghosts. Toni Morrison's Beloved, which dared to make a ghost a central, fully bodied character, made its stunning appearance in the same year. I recalled, too, Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow (1983), in which the emotional development of the protagonist is propelled by a series of encounters with family ghosts. Why, I wondered, this curious proliferation of ghosts? Wilson's play went on from its New Haven tryout to Broadway, capturing a Pulitzer Prize in 1990. Meanwhile, another African-American ghost story began to draw notice: Gloria Naylor's Mama Day (1988). In this novel, the spectral appearance of an enslaved African ancestor begins the process of unraveling the title character's family curse. As in Morrison's and Wilson's works, the familiar trappings of the Gothic-the haunted house, the family secrets, endangered inheritances, imprisonment and escape, the encounter with the unspeakable, and indeed, ghosts themselves-were all generously present. Yet these conventional elements play a vastly different literary role than they do in traditional Gothic novels. The Gothic generally explores personal, psychic encounters with the taboo. At the most basic level, its ghosts function as plot device-providing crucial information, setting in motion the machinery of revenge or atonement

"The Only Voice is Your Own": Gloria Naylor's Revision of The Tempest

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 . …

The Prismatic Past in Oral History and Mama Day

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. …

Hearing Is Believing: Southern Racial Communities and Strategies of Story-Listening in Gloria Naylor and Lee Smith

In Southern communities compelling need talk, to tell(1) can inspire numerous -- if not untold -- types of oral performances. As with almost any folk community, Southern stories can range from trickster tales to personal experience narratives to exogamous accounts.(2) From among these various oral genres available performance, Gloria Naylor in Mama Day and Lee Smith in Oral History have strategically manipulated personal narrative -- an oral which recounts an individual's life experiences in voice of first person -- in order to problematize story-listening in racially separate Southern communities.(3) In her model of Cocoa Day as story-listener, Naylor evokes Southern African American traditions of storytelling, compelling us to and believe personal narratives of a dead man. Lee Smith also invites her readers into distinctive racial and cultural territory, manipulating us -- through effacement of Jennifer Bingham as listener -- into hearing singular narratives of White ethnic ghosts from Appalachia. Naylor and Smith ultimately reveal their distrust of the American reader, whose historical reluctance to stories of difference compels authors' use of narrative ploys. Storytellers, faced with threat of having their personal narratives either dismissed or appropriated, recount their experiences in order to secure ownership of events that to them. Indeed, as folklorist Sandra Dolby Stahl has said, personal narratives `belong' to tellers because they are ones responsible recognizing in their own experiences something that is `story worthy' (Personal 268-69). But while personal-experience narratives belong to individual tellers and substantiate is story worthy in their lives, tellers are not lone agents in storytelling enterprise: Oral performances of personal narratives command real, warm-blooded listeners to enthusiastically receive, value, and confirm experiences of teller. In this recurring cycle of telling and listening, speaking subject tends to be venerated as one who asserts an identity. The position, however, of this somebody else -- this listener in Southern culture -- invites our closer attention. One African (San) storyteller has said of his story-listening habits, simply listen, watching a that I want to hear (qtd. in Scheub 2). Clearly, listeners will vary in enthusiasm, occasionally choosing to watch for a more satisfying than one being told. Moreover, degrees of competence can differ among listeners, perhaps forcing a desperate storyteller to survive a telling event with a wooden, unreceptive listener. For a felicitous moment in storytelling, however, listener must deliberately collaborate with teller, jointly shaping production of story.4 In fact, proficiency telling personal narratives emerges from having habitually and actively listened to experiences of others. The American South endures as a culture that empowers such practices of listening and telling. While celebration of personal narratives is, of course, not exclusive province of Southerners, storytelling and listening events nonetheless thrive in South because of self-conscious privileging of orality, community, and in region: through storytelling, members of a Southern vigorously reaffirm their connection to each other. This desire to connect has motivated Alice Walker to write that what Black Southern writer inherits as a natural right is a sense of community (1). Indeed, a Southern identity -- Black or White -- very much depends on gaining competence to personal-experience narratives of others in order to willfully cultivate in a community, as is clear in works of Naylor and Smith. Stahl recognizes that the knowledge one gains as a listener when personal narratives are told brings with it sensation of intimacy (Literary x). …

Authority, Multivocality, and the New World Order in Gloria Naylor's Bailey's Cafe

B ailey's Cafe, Gloria Naylor's latest and most ambitious novel to date, is a hauntingly lyrical text steeped in biblical allusion. With this fourth novel, which completes a series including The Women of Brewster Place, Linden Hills, and Mama Day, Naylor acquired the self-confidence necessary to define herself as a writer. Bailey's Cafe took me through the final step, Naylor remarked during a recent book tour stop. I had envisioned four novels that would lay the foundation for a career. This one finishes that up (qtd. in Due F2). In what is part of her ongoing search for an authorial voice with which to tell-or, rather, retell-the experiences of women of color, Naylor chooses to locate her fourth novel within a specifically cultured and gendered context where voice and all of its associations are directed toward subverting the myriad forms of authority patriarchy legitimizes and constructing a new world order among partially dispossessed women world-wide. The novel itself is comprised of a series of loosely connected storieseach one from a different woman's point of view-and it culminates with a magically real, communal celebration of the birth of Mariam's son George during the Christmas season. For the first time not only is there oneness among a culturally diverse group whose traditions and customs span the globe, but the voices of women also unify in the ritualization of George's arrival. George's long-awaited birth, like that of the Messiah, could signal either an end or, hopefully, new beginnings for the pluralistic group present. But in this climactic scene, after conjuring an image of global harmony, Naylor denies the reader/audience the privilege of knowing the fate of the young mother and son: Does Mariam find acceptance among an American Jewish community? What is to become of George, now en route to Wallace P. Andrews Boys' Home? The novel's unresolved closure serves to encourage a participatory involvement from the reader/audience and is a strategy

Supernatural forces: belief, difference, and power in contemporary works by ethnic women

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.

Toward a New Order: Shakespeare, Morrison, and Gloria Naylor's Mama Day

Journal Article Toward a New Order: Shakespeare, Morrison, and Gloria Naylor's Mama Day Get access Missy Dehn Kubitschek Missy Dehn Kubitschek Indiana University, Indianapolis Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MELUS, Volume 19, Issue 3, September 1994, Pages 75–90, https://doi.org/10.2307/467873 Published: 01 September 1994

Recovering the Conjure Woman: Texts and Contexts in Gloria Naylor's Mama Day

Recovering the Conjure Woman: Texts and Contexts in Gloria Naylor's Mama Day

Healers in Gloria Naylor's Fiction

manifesting itself in care of others, been better presented than in the novels of Gloria Naylor. Less familiar than the triumvirate of Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou, Naylor won a National Book Award in 1983 for best first novel and has published three others. Her works-The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Linden Hills (1985), Mama Day (1988), and Bailey's Cafe (1992)-feature themes of ancestry, generational conflict, economic exploitation, and lost dreams. In particular, Naylor has celebrated the power of love as a force that heals, bringing peace and wholeness. Her characters share their wealth: some through literal doctoring, others through psychic healing, still others through inspirational documents that they have left behind, and finally some through providing a haven for the needy. Although Naylor's healers sometimes resort to AMA- and APA-approved methods of restoring health, they transcend merely prescribing aspirin and engaging in talk therapy. Rather, they use holistic methods, archetypal practices, and even voodoo, linking themselves to atavistic practices of Africa. They heal heart and soul as well as body. As one of the major, though somewhat overlooked, African-American authors of the past two decades, Naylor herself has become what Marjorie Pryse terms a metaphorical conjure woman, a medium who, like Morrison, Walker, and others, make[s] it possible for . . . readers . . . to recognize their common literary ancestors (gardeners, quilt makers, grandmothers, root workers, and women who write autobiographies) and to name each other as a community of inheritors. Like her contemporaries, Pryse notes, Naylor highlights connection rather than separation, transforming silence into speech

"The Whole Picture" in Gloria Naylor's Mama Day

"The Whole Picture" in Gloria Naylor's Mama Day