Abstract
Caroline A. Brown explores the strategic deployment of the trickster/conjurer figure in the work of New World, Afro-diasporic fiction. According to Brown, in each of the works treated—by the Afro-Jamaican Brodber (1980), the Jamaican-Canadian Hopkinson (1998), and the African-American Naylor (1988)—culturally alienated protagonists are driven to the brink of madness by social circumstances and their own emotional ambivalence; they are then directed onto psycho-spiritual quests by creolized healer figures. Yet these healers are symbolic tricksters, individuals who cannot easily fit within a Western paradigm based on moral precision or ethical clarity. Who then guides the reader? How does he or she effectively solve the literary puzzle, the enigma of the text, to attain what Gay Wilentz deems “cultural healing”? According to Brown, the reader—thrown into the increasingly disordered chronicle unwinding as mystery, myth, and ritual—must partake of that journey and, in so doing, actively decipher and define what is madness and what is sanity, in the process untangling the web of the novel as a cultural riddle.
The image of…conjuring up imaginary worlds that “the black people needed” confirms [Houston] Baker’s description of conjure as “a revered site of culturally specific interests and values.” Baker affirms the “definable African antecedents” of conjuring in an effort to establish its racial specificity. In a parallel gesture, critics writing on Mama Day…emphasize the African origins of conjuring…For example, Lindsey Tucker argues that Naylor’s novel draws on African “magico-religious” views of the world….The use of magic in novels such as Mama Day….is motivated by the desire to recover an “African” epistemology and to uncover “the probable realms of impossibility beyond the limits of scientific certainty.” As a form of “discredited knowledge,” in Toni Morrison’s phase, conjuring exposes the limitations of modern rationality and reinstates suprarational ways of knowing suppressed by the Enlightenment legacy.
—Madhu Dubey, Signs and Cities (167)
The black tradition has inscribed within it the very principles by which it can be read. Ours is an extraordinarily self-reflexive tradition, a tradition exceptionally conscious of its history and of the simultaneity of its canonical texts, which tend to be taken as verbal models of the Afro-American social condition, to be revised. Because of the experience of diaspora, the fragments that contain the traces of a coherent system of order must be reassembled. These fragments embody aspects of a theory of critical principles around which the discrete texts of the tradition configure, in the critic’s reading of the textual past. To reassemble fragments, of course, is to engage in an act of speculation, to attempt to weave a fiction of origins and subjugation. It is to render the implicit as explicit, and at times to imagine the whole from the part.
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr ., The Signifying Monkey (xxiii–xxiv).
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Bibliography
Anatol, Giselle Liza. “A Feminist Reading of Soucouyants in Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring and Skin Folk.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 37.3 (September 2004): 33–50.
Brodber, Erna. Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home. London and Port of Spain: New Beacon Books, 1980.
Brown, Karen McCarthy. “Afro-Caribbean Spirituality: A Haitian Case Study.” In Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture, eds. Claudine Michel and Patrick Bellegarde-Smith. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 1–26.
———. Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. Original copyright in 1991.
Coleman, Monica A. “Serving the Spirits: The Pan-Caribbean African-Derived Religion in Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring.” Journal of Caribbean Literatures 6.1 (Spring 2009): 1–13.
———. “‘The Work of Your Own Hands’: Doing Black Women’s Hair as Religious Language in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 85.1–2 (Spring/Summer 2002). 121–139.
Collier, Gordon. “Spaceship Creole: Nalo Hopkinson, Canadian-Caribbean Fabulist Fiction, and Linguistic/Cultural Syncretism.” In A Pepper-Pot of Cultures: Aspects of Creolization in the Caribbean, eds. Gordon Collier and Ulrich Fleischmann. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2003.
Dubey, Madhu. Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Erickson, Peter. “‘Shakespeare’s Black?’: The Role of Shakespeare In Naylor’s Novels.” In Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. A. Appiah. New York: Amistad, 1993. 231–248.
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Books, 1988.
Holloway, Karla FC. Moorings and Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Women’s Literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992.
Hopkinson, Nalo. Brown Girl in the Ring. New York and Boston: Aspect, 1998.
Michel, Claudine and Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, Patrick, eds. Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture: Invisible Powers. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
———. “Vodou in Haiti: Way of Life and Mode of Survival.” In Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture: Invisible Powers, eds. Claudine Michel and Patrick Bellegarde-Smith. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 27–37.
Naylor, Gloria. Mama Day. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1988.
Roberts, John. From Trickster to Badman: `The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990.
Robinson, Beverly J. “Africanisms and the Study of Folklore.” In Africanisms in American Culture, ed. Joseph E. Holloway. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005. Original copyright, 1990. 356–371.
Smith, Jean Rosier. Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997.
Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Vintage Books, 1983.
Wilentz, Gay Alden. Healing Narratives: Women Writers Curing Cultural Disease. Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, 2000.
Williams, Selase W. “The African Character of the African American Language: Insights from the Creole Connection.” In Africanisms in American Culture, ed. Joseph E. Holloway. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005. Original copyright, 1990. 397–426.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Brown, C.A. (2017). Magic, Madness, and the Ruses of the Trickster: Healing Rituals and Alternative Spiritualities in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, Erna Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, and Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring . In: Brown, C., Garvey, J. (eds) Madness in Black Women’s Diasporic Fictions. Gender and Cultural Studies in Africa and the Diaspora. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58127-9_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58127-9_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-58126-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-58127-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)