Gloria Naylor's Mama Day: bridging roots and routes

African American Review, Spring-Summer, 2005 by Daphne Lamothe

I. Introduction

A sense continuity pervades Willow Springs, the fictitious Gullah island that Gloria Naylor depicts in her 1988 novel Mama Day. On Willow Springs, the Day family, a community of women, preserve their cultural memory through the repetition of material practices that include cooking and weaving, and through the transmission of personal and communal stories. Naylor privileges the dynamism of the island's living memory over the representations of the past attempted by inhabitants of the Western-oriented mainland. History, ethnography, and other institutionalized discourses prove to be little more than what historian Pierre Nora has called "sifted and sorted historical traces" (285). Naylor's intricate exploration of history and memory coincides with and challenges Nora's work on lieux de memoire in that both authors examine different ways of conceptualizing, articulating, and representing our relationship with the past. Nora writes, for example, "Our interest in lieux de memoire where memory crystallizes and secretes itself has occurred at a particular historical moment, a turning point where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the sense that memory has been torn--but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists. There are lieux de memoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer mileux de memoire, real environments of memory" (284). Nora considers the power of written, state-sanctioned history to overdetermine understandings of the past, against a background in which, he argues, pre-industrial, traditional societies that have typically produced living memories that counter such authoritative discourses are passing away under the forces of modernity. Mama Day displays a similar preoccupation, with the crucial difference lying in Naylor's conviction that traditional ways and the communities that maintain them have the resilience to survive and adapt to temporal and social changes. Naylor's complex portrayal of Willow Springs, its inhabitants, and its visitors suggests that it is both a site and an environment of memory, which challenges Nora's assumption that the latter must be eradicated before the need for the former arises.

According to Nora, lieux de memoires emerge out of a sense that "we must deliberately create archives, maintain anniversaries, organize celebrations, pronounce eulogies, and notarize bills because such activities no longer occur naturally" (289). One could argue that Willow Springs functions as a site of memory in the contested and problematic way that Nora proposes for the novel's two urbanites, George and Cocoa (nee Ophelia). Naylor constructs Cocoa's and George's understanding of the island as symbolizing home in order to query the effects of modernization, historical rupture, and social fragmentation on African Americans. Her work posits a sense of home as resistant to the destruction of memory, striving to remain an environment of memory and indifferent to the archival and ethnographic pigeonholes into which both outsiders and their own errant children store them. Naylor does not explicitly foreground the Gullah island as a site of resistance to colonial domination by alluding to the myth of Africans/Ibos who reject their enslavement by flying or walking back to Africa. Rather, the locus of resistance in Naylor's text lies in the island inhabitants' retention and transmission of African-derived traditions and values, such as orally conveyed folklore, quilting, and herb and rootwork, in the face of cultural forces that would efface them. These are the very attributes that Cocoa and George admire, at the same time that each hesitates to engage.

Their reasons for hesitating will form the basis for my reading of the novel, because they illuminate two sets of dynamics that prove central to Naylor's examination of cultural memory in African American communities. The first dynamic, symbolized by George's skepticism of the validity of the islanders' "country" ways, comprises a hierarchical and oppositional relationship between whites and blacks, Western and African-derived cultures, cosmopolitan urbanites and isolated country folk. In such an environment representatives of the "mainland," most often men, and the values they hold pose a threat to the validity and continuation of Willow Springs' cultural memory. The importance of the island women in the transmission of such memories illuminates the second dynamic, which is symbolized by Cocoa's refusal to return home or to its more conservative ways. Her reluctance to be the kind of tradition-bound woman symbolized primarily by her friend Bernice, but also by many other of the women on Willow Springs, suggests that the traditions embraced by Willow Springs, or at the very least, the manner in which they are expected to be retained, are implicitly patriarchal and therefore problematic. Hence, while the island is "feminized" in relation to the mainland, we find the reinscription of normative gender roles within the island.