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• W49274555 abstract "There are just too many sides to whole story, Cocoa tells George near conclusion of Gloria Naylor's 1988 novel Mama Day (311). The truth of this remark is reinforced by structure of novel itself--by fact that Cocoa's words are spoken in a time which has not arrived (1999) and addressed to a person who has been many years dead. Indeed, this very speakerly novel has gathered together many voices, past and present, living and dead, individual and collective; and while oral quality of this work may not trouble readers and critics, certainly brand of realism that had come to define Naylor's work in The Women of Brewster Place and Linden Hills had suddenly, it seemed, become contaminated with ingredients of magic and fantasy. One reviewer complained that the reader is never sure is imagined and is authentic, is to be believed and is unbelievable ('Magical' Powers C3), and another objected that what is meant to be mystical too often ends up mystifying (Mama Day a Victim G8). What may be source of such negative commentary is not so much Naylor's ambivalence about whether she is writing a realistic novel or a fantasy so much as it is subject matter which, because of its reliance on African magico-religious views of world, asks for a different narrative mode as well as a different kind of response from readers. For example, collective voice, which introduces reader to community of Willow Springs, concludes with a critique of ethnography and its methodologies. The failure of ethnographer is due to his inability to hear and to ask right questions, a failing that, voice seems to warn us, may be our own: ... he coulda listened to them, voice explains, the way you been listening to us right now. Think about it: ain't nobody really talking to you(10). The reader, feeling as if she has been caught eavesdropping, may find herself affronted by this kind of trickery, or she may accept truth of narrator's words and take discourses on their own terms, problematic as they may be. The problem, of course, has to do with fact that Mama Day is a novel chock full of conjurers--Ruby, Dr. Buzzard, maternal ancestor Sapphira Wade--in addition to Mama Day herself, and reader may be at a loss about how to treat subject, since conjurer, and especially conjure woman, has existed mostly on margins of folklore and ethnography and is therefore barely credible. Clearly Naylor is taking some risks with subject, yet I want to argue that conjure addresses undervaluation of African medicinal practices and belief systems, even as it comments on subject of power--not only in relation to medicine, but also to ancestry, religion, and finally to language and signifying practices. Not surprisingly perhaps, stories about conjuration have found their most congenial home within parameters of folktale, where conjure woman, whether she is represented as comic or demonic, remains difficult to see. Nowhere is this situation better illustrated than in 1899 book by Charles W. Chesnutt that bears her name. Chesnutt saw himself and The Conjure Woman as marking beginning of African American fiction, and fact that he was writing at a time when post-Reconstruction South was becoming increasingly repressive, and blacks increasingly disenfranchised, suggests that his subject matter may have been, at least in part, dictated by political as well as aesthetic reasons. Rather like wily grandfather of Ellison's invisible man, Chesnutt, in a journal entry dated 1880, envisions racism as a garrison that cannot be stormed and taken by assault, but whose position must be mined instead (qtd. in Helen Chesnutt 21). One way of mining enemy territory was through writing of a literature that would attempt to teach whites about racism in ways subtle enough to escape notice. Thus it appears that Chesnutt found female figure of conjure woman useful for her trickster capacities. …" @default.
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• W49274555 date "1994-06-22" @default.
• W49274555 modified "2023-09-28" @default.
• W49274555 title "Recovering the Conjure Woman: Texts and Contexts in Gloria Naylor's 'Mama Day.' (Black Women's Culture Issue)" @default.
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