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During an interview with Virginia Fowler in Gloria Naylor: In Search of Sanctuary (Fowler 1996), Naylor attributes her inspiration by Shakespeare to Joe Papp’s free performances of “Shakespeare in the Park.” She saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream—to which she alludes repeatedly in The Women of Brewster Place—Macbeth, and other plays featured in the New York Shakespeare Festival. Naylor “loved tragedies,” a fact relevant to the tragic end cooked up for George at the end of Mama Day, but most of all there was “something about the way in which Shakespeare used language [that] resonated within me” (Fowler 1996:149). Naylor’s use of the word “resonance” is pertinent, suggesting perhaps that Shakespeare inspired a free range of overtones in her own novels, or that his language elicited a response beyond emulation and performance—the need to interrogate and signify on his plays. Peter Erickson discusses a brief but important allusion to Shakespeare in Linden Hills, Naylor’s second novel (1985), which was written just before Mama Day. The struggling poet, Willie, asks his friend Lester, “why black folks ain’t produced a Shakespeare.… You’d think of all the places in the world, this neighborhood had a chance of giving us at least one black Shakespeare.’’ Lester responds, “But Linden Hills ain’t about that, Willie. You should know that by now” (cited in Erickson 1993:236). In Mama Day, however, Naylor does indeed play the “black Shakespeare,” engaging canonical views of The Tempest and challenging, inverting, and controverting the blatant colonial assumptions of the play.

What interests me most about Mama Day as an important illustration of Africanist Shakespeare are:

1  

the novel’s sustained commentary on the plays of Shakespeare from a feminist and African American perspective;

2  

the author’s flat denial in lecture and interview that The Tempest was an influence on her, although characterization and structure in the novel clearly derive from that play;

3  

Mama Day’s systematic feminization, “negrification,” and fairly systematic inversion of The Tempest’s contrapuntal plots;

4  

Naylor’s concerted attempt to broaden the focus and especially the perspective of the play by introducing multiple speakers and thus dialogizing the single voice of Prospero; and,

5  

the novel’s articulate embodiment of the trope of signifying— that creative, spontaneous, playful mode of improvisation and adaptation that Gates ranks as the major figure of African American literature.

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