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Page 113 deposed by and revenges himself on his brother Antonio, Mama Day has no quarrel with her sister, Abigail. They squabble from time to time over domestic chores but clearly love each other and are able to coexist on the island. Abigail also offers no challenge to Mama Day’s magical powers or influence over her own granddaughter, Ophelia, who is only a grand-niece to Miranda. Sisters, Naylor seems to be suggesting, do not resort to the fratricidal struggles of “brothers and others” that W.H.Auden (1948) and various critics have identified as the disruptive energy that drives so many Shakespearean plays. On Naylor’s island, family dynamics, like Mama Day’s magic, are benign. The island itself is an African American revision of Shakespearean geography. Willow Springs has preserved African cultural traditions and dialects, such as the Gullah speech and folk pastime so lovingly represented in Julie Dash’s film, Daughters of the Dust, which was released in 1990, just a year after the publication of Mama Day. Dash’s film is introduced with an ethnographic caption that Naylor herself might have written: At the turn of the century, Sea Island Gullahs, descendants of African captives, remained isolated from the mainland of South Carolina and Georgia. As a result of their isolation, the Gullah created and maintained a distinct, imaginative, and original African American culture. (Dash 1992:27) Similarly, Naylor’s mythical island has not yet been invaded and occupied by the likes of Prospero. Willow Springs, sketched in a map prefacing the novel, is located somewhere between South Carolina and Georgia, and so legally exists “nowhere,” much as the island of The Tempest is situated by Shakespeare somewhere between the Old World (between Tunis and Milan) and the New (‘‘the still-vexed Bermudas” 1.2.230). It therefore becomes the property of the African American inhabitants: “So who it belong to? It belongs to us—clean and simple” (Naylor 1989:5). Although Willow Springs has been and is periodically invaded and claimed by real estate interests, the African American Natives own it, “thanks to the conjuring of Sapphira Wade,” who had enchanted her master and lover, Bascombe Wade, to pass the island down “to our daddies, and our daddies before them, and them, too” (5). As Caliban had declared 400 years before, “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother” (The Tempest 1.2.334). |
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