Page 118
While ideologically Mama Day may be separatist and utopian, signifying as a literary methodology holds real hope for the canonical reconfiguration of race and class that any truly “new world’’ will demand in the twenty-first century. Signifying is all about words, about rearranging words and verbal patterns to configure new meanings and identities. As Jacques Derrida writes, “there’s no racism without a language” (1986:331, my italics). The point is not that acts of racial violence are only words, but rather that they have to have a word; racism “institutes, declares, writes, inscribes, prescribes” (331). For this reason, ethnic categories may and perhaps must be scrutinized, critiqued, and radically revised only through language and its cultural vehicles, such as the novel and the theater. In Mama Day, Gloria Naylor has clearly trumped Shakespeare’s racist, colonial paradigm in The Tempest and has in the process sparked renewed interest in that dazzlingly inventive play.
Notes
1
|
I am not the first to make this comparison. Peter Erickson, in “Shakespeare’s Changing Status in the Novels of Gloria Naylor,” argues that “the effect of Mama Day’s exploration of Shakespearean heritage is critically to revise and decenter it” (1991:139).
|
2
|
Coleridge writes: “Can we suppose [Shakespeare] so utterly ignorant as to make a barbarous negro plead royal birth? Were negroes then known but as slaves… No doubt Desdemona saw Othello’s visage in his [Othello’s] mind; yet, as we are constituted, and most surely as an English audience was disposed in the beginning of the seventeenth century, it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro. It would argue a disproportionateness, a want of balance in Desdemona, which Shakespeare does not appear to have in the least contemplated” (cited by Barnet 1986:273–74).
|
3
|
For the argument about Othello’s race and ethnicity, both as a character and an actor playing an African character, see Mythili Kaul (1996) and Virginia Mason Vaughan (1994).
|
4
|
As Gates writes: “[T]he curious tension between the black vernacular and the literate white text, between the spoken and the written word, between the oral and the printed forms of literary discourse, has been represented and thematized in black letters at least since slaves and ex-slaves met the challenge of the Enlightenment to their humanity by literally writing themselves into being through carefully crafted representations in language of the black self” (1988:131).
|
|