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Page 115 the “white written text.”4 Although Naylor’s novel begins with the traditional visual and print icons of Western power—a map indicating ownership of the island by the female progeny of Sapphira Wade, a genealogy tracing the line of Sapphira, and a bill of sale for Sapphira—the novel speaks in many voices, as a drama does. It is clearly what Gates calls a “talking book,” a speakerly text. In interview and lecture, Naylor insists that this book would simply not write itself in third-person narrative style, the way her earlier novels had. The form of Mama Day is overtly dialogical (that is, double-voiced) in the sense meant by Mikhail Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination (1981). In The Tempest, all characters are voiced, situations controlled, reconciliations rigged, and outcomes maneuvered by Prospero on what Gonzalo calls ‘‘the plantation of this isle” (2.1.143). Naylor displaces the monologic (single-voiced) voice of Prospero with multi-vocality and polyphony (or competing voices). A theme is announced in the map, genealogy, bill of sale, and synoptic introduction in the text. Then, as if in a jazz piece, the theme is voiced, re-voiced, controverted, and parodied by the three main characters. George and Cocoa converse through independent first-person narratives about their courtship, wedding, squabbles, and plans to visit Willow Springs. Mama Day’s voice is introduced early in the novel—again, in her own narrative segments—and takes center-stage in the second part, but never assumes the dictatorial tone we detect in, say, Prospero’s catechism of Miranda in the second scene of The Tempest. The icon for dialogism (awareness of competing meanings and of the fact that meaning is relative rather than authoritative) or even polyphony (multiple, sometimes competing voices) in Mama Day is what Miranda explicates as the “chicken coop” analogy. We live, she muses toward the end of the novel, “in a world where there ain’t no right or wrong to be found. My side. He [George] don’t listen to my side. She [Ophelia] don’t listen to my side. Just like that chicken coop, everything got four sides: his side, her side, an outside, and an inside. All of it is the truth.” (Naylor 1989:230) Miranda’s analogy between communication and the chicken coop suggests that there is always another side, another perspective, another voice that needs to be heard. Sycorax, absent in the Shakespearean text, is given presence and posterity in the matriarchal figure of Sapphira Wade. Ophelia, never given a real voice in |
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