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Introduction Revising the Legacy of Kinlessness Through Elders and Ancestors Elders have traditionally played an important role within African and African American communities. Elders preserve cultural memory and help younger generations navigate the world. However, sometimes the younger generation becomes distant from traditional beliefs and elders must remind them of the importance of tradition and cultural roots. This reliance on elders as guides is particularly evident in matrilineal relationships between mothers and daughters, but also in the bonds shared with grandmothers, aunts, and othermothers. In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins discusses the importance of othermothers and woman-centered networks. She asserts, “African and AfricanAmerican communities have . . . recognized that vesting one person with full responsibility for mothering a child may not be wise or possible . As a result, othermothers—women who assist bloodmothers by sharing mothering responsibilities—traditionally have been central to the institution of Black motherhood” (119). Several scholars, such as Nancy Tanner, Carol Stack, and Niara Sudarkasa, have noted that “[t]he centrality of women in African-American extended families reflects both a continuation of West African cultural values and functional adaptations to race and gender oppression” (119). However, Hill Collins admonishes that “[t]his centrality is not characterized by the absence of husbands and fathers. Men may be physically present and/or have well-defined and culturally significant roles in the extended family and the kin unit may be woman-centered” (119). Therefore, we are not talking about matriarchal families in which mothers head the household, but rather matrifocal societies that emphasize the mother–child bond. According to Deborah Gray White, in matrifocal societies, females “in their role 1 2 The Grasp that Reaches Beyond the Grave as mothers are the focus of familial relationships” (256). Thus texts by black women often emphasize mother–child relationships or other woman-centered bonds because of the significant roles women play in family relations. This is the case for the texts under discussion here—men are very present in the roles of father, husband, lover, and community leader— however, the protagonists of Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters (1980), Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (1984), Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata (1998) and A Sunday in June (2004), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and Julie Dash’s film, Daughters of the Dust1 (1991) are very much a part of woman-centered networks of mothers and daughters and elders and ancestors serving as othermothers. However, these womancentered networks still have not received sufficient scholarly attention. In the foreword to their book, The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature, Cathy N. Davidson and E. M. Broner note, “We have already heard the story of fathers and sons, of mothers and sons, even of fathers and daughters. But who has sung the song of mothers and daughters ?” (xi). Since the 1980 publication of their essay collection much has changed. In 1983, Alice Walker found her mother’s garden—ten years after finding her literary foremother, Zora Neale Hurston. In her essay collection, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, Walker observes, “these grandmothers and mothers of ours were not Saints, but Artists; driven to a numb and bleeding madness by the springs of creativity in them for which there was no release” (233). Since these early discussions of mothers, much attention has been paid to maternity and matrilineal relations . Within the African Diaspora, mothers, motherlands, and mother tongues have tremendous symbolic force. In her 1991 essay collection, Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia, Sushelia Nasta asserts, “The whole question of ‘motherhood’ is also a major concern universally in contemporary women’s literature and has obvious reverberations in terms of feminist criticism—the relation between mothers and daughters, mothers mirroring and affirming identity or notions of the birth of female identity through transference to text and symbol . . .” (xix). The aim of this book is to investigate not only relationships between literal mothers and daughters, but to explore the extended woman-centered networks of mothers, daughters, and othermothers in the form of elders and ancestors. One might ask why I chose this emphasis on mothers and daughters and matri-lineal networks. There are of course male elders and patri-lineal networks; however, my interest in African American women writers’ use of elders and ancestors in their work is rooted in the womb. In my book, Women in Chains: The Legacy of Slavery in Black Women’s Fiction, I assert that “often black women writers’ articulations of gen...

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