Women's Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women's Novels

4 / Mapping and Moving Nation: Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day

4 / Mapping and Moving Nation: Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day For Gloria Naylor, cultural nationalism is not Avey Johnson’s diasporic travel in Praisesong for the Widow, nor is it a political movement among black male poets and playwrights in the urban North of the 1960s and 1970s or the Afrocentrism of the 1980s. Naylor’s nationalism is, rather, an ongoing effort to build a distinct African American community in disparate geographical spaces. Defining cultural nationalism as daily practice, she says, “I have often said that I am a cultural nationalist. That means that I am very militant about who and what I am as an African American. I believe that you should celebrate voraciously that which is yours. That begins with something as basic as our skin color or our peculiar past. And we do have in this country as black Americans a peculiar past that springs from that peculiar institution of slavery. . . . So that’s what cultural nationalism means to me. To be militant about your being” (Bellinelli 107). This vision of nationalism depends on vocal and visible allegiance to African American history and culture. Naylor imagines collectivity based on skin color and history. Her statement demands that members of a distinctly African American nation “celebrate voraciously ” the “I” and the “we.” Naylor’s 1988 novel Mama Day defines mapping as a practice of this mode of cultural nationalism. Mama Day deploys the South as a practiced space that invites the participation of those who have not actually lived on southern soil. For Naylor, one advantage of a cultural South is portability. Because it is neither nostalgic for segregation nor primarily invested in a static culture, the fictional island Willow Springs becomes mapping and moving nation / 113 a mutable and mobile alternative homeland. The portable homeland pushes beyond the United States, freeing the African American nation from land-based borders. Rather than follow readers who interpret Willow Springs as a nostalgic portrait of segregated space or as primarily an argument for African American autonomy, I investigate the way this island redefines spaces beyond its geographical boundaries, constructing home as a portable concept that replaces the nation-state as a route of identification. Maps of Home: Sea Islands, the South, and the Nation Mama Day marks geography in terms of both topographic and cultural territory. Naylor, like Marshall, uses the Sea Islands off the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina to write a space of power that is not on conventional maps and thus lies partly outside the power structures of the United States. Stretching against the borders of the United States toward the shores of Africa, Willow Springs “ain’t in no state” (Mama Day 5) and cannot be claimed fully by either continent. Naylor refuses a problematic portrayal of Africa as a monolithic, romanticized site of alternative identity. Instead she chooses the Sea Islands, which are rich with African inheritances, suggestive of the Caribbean, and the part of the United States geographically closest to Africa. Willow Springs serves as a near, unmapped, portable southern homeland for people of African descent. The Sea Islands, both connected to and apart from the mainland, engage the logic of nation without being fully incorporated into the nation-state. Following Naylor’s practiced cultural nationalism, Willow Springs relies on the logic of nationhood; Naylor calls it “a microcosm for building a nation” (E. M. Smith 1435). The site of Naylor’s nation is aligned with and resistant to the United States; Willow Springs is geographically located in the rural South but migrates culturally to the urban North. Naylor writes the island as “the ideal black community” defined by the fact that it is “separated from the mainland” but with a bridge that allows residents to “go back and forth” (Ashford 77). “A redemptive place” (77) both apart and connected to the United States, Willow Springs is the starting point for the African American nation in Mama Day. Unmapped and bound to no nation-state, Naylor’s southern homeland is liberated from the drive to gain legal rights to land.1 African Americans have been struggling for ownership of southern soil at least since David Walker’s Appeal claimed in 1829 that the blood and sweat of those who labored there were as good as a deed to the land of the U.S. 114 / WOMEN’S WORK South. Instead of engaging in this battle for literal parcels of land, Naylor...