< previous page page_117 next page >

Page 117

John Edgar Wideman writes that

race signifies something quite precise about power, how one group seizes and sustains an unbeatable edge over others. When the race wild card is played, beware, the fix is in…[race] in its function as wild card is both a sign and an enabler of these shady transactions in a game only one player, the inventor of race, can win.

(1994:xvi)

During the exploration of the New World, Shakespeare—however much he may have interrogated the norms of his own culture—was busy helping the West to invent alternative concepts of gender, territoriality, and race in The Tempest and kindred plays that deal with the “alien,” in order to justify the systematic rape and exploitation of one race by another in the development of a “new” continent.

Gloria Naylor is busy in her turn signifying on these venerable colonial paradigms in Mama Day, as her contribution to a postcolonial, multicultural, multi-colored world. European Americans are all but invisible in the novel, perhaps because Naylor, like the playwright August Wilson, is interested in pursuing a program of cultural separatism and a return of African Americans to the rural South. Males are subordinated to females on the island, too, which restores a matriarchy that is nostalgically projected back into a distant African past as the dominant system of cultural control. There is, however, a strange, artificial isolation imposed on Naylor’s mythical island community of Willow Springs, a cultural separatism that none of the islands off of the coast of South Carolina has enjoyed for decades, certainly not, for instance, the island where Naylor herself now lives half of the year, when she is not in New York. One suspects that Willow Springs enjoys the same rarefied atmosphere of science fiction that The Tempest has inspired in novels such as Robinson Crusoe and Brave New World, and in films and television series such as Forbidden Planet, Lost in Space, and Star Trek. What Daniel Defoe manages to show in his novel, however, is the European Crusoe’s desperate but reluctant dependence on his Native man, Friday, a dependence that the South has never acknowledged with respect to African Americans during or subsequent to the period of slavery. While Mama Day sets the colonial record straight for African Americans, one suspects that European cultural hegemony, fictitious as it was from its roots in the slave trade, may be displaced by another, equally fictitious myth about racial independence and autonomy in the United States.

< previous page page_117 next page >