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Signifyin’ on The Tempest in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day

JAMES R.ANDREAS, SR.

In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison examines “how inextricable Africanism is or ought to be from the deliberations of literary criticism and the wanton, elaborate strategies undertaken to erase its presence from view” (1992:9). Nowhere has the struggle to eradicate the presence in and influence of Africa and Africans on European literature been fought so violently as in the canonical battle over the body of the Bard. Yet Shakespeare wrote no fewer than five plays that feature Africans in prominent, often titular roles, and African American writers and actors have been reacting to, redacting, and “re-visioning” —to borrow a term from Adrienne Rich (1979) —those plays for more than a hundred years. Michael Bristol (1990) has made it abundantly clear that the Bard was fully Americanized by the early years of the Republic. Less understood and appreciated is that Shakespeare has been persistently African Americanized over the last century as well. The most illustrious of African American writers—Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, John Wideman, Ishmael Reed, and, as the present essay is intent on demonstrating, Gloria Naylor—have been busily interpreting, emulating, appropriating, and adapting Shakespeare’s African plays and characters throughout the twentieth century.

Mama Day, Gloria Naylor’s third novel, first published in 1988 to generally laudatory reviews, is set on a barrier island named Willow

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