Gloria Naylor's Early Novels (review)

Gloria Naylor's Early Novels, ed. Margot Anne Kelley. Gainseville: UP of Florida, 1999. xxiv + 168 pp. ISBN 0-8130-1649-5 cloth.

Gloria Naylor's fourth novel, Bailey's Café (1992), preceded chronologically by The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Linden Hills (1985) and Mama Day (1989), reveals all these texts to be part of a "quartet." This "quartet," now minus The Men of Brewster Place (1998) and a work-in-progress on Mama Day's "Great Mother," is the focus of Margot Kelley's Gloria Naylor's Early Novels.

Unfortunately, it is high canonicity in the culture of US imperialism that is the truer subject of this collection. Naylor is by and large the occasion. A notable exception is the stand-out piece by Dorothy Perry Thompson, "Africana Womanist Revision in Gloria Naylor's Mama Day and Bailey's Café." She first elaborates upon the original Clenora Hudson Weems idea to further illustrate how "Africana womanism" moves "around, away from, and finally, upward" from Alice Walker's more North American articulation (91), and of course well beyond "Western Feminism." Then Thompson argues, quite convincingly, that Naylor's "last two novels encapsulate the primary signposts" of this thought "even more fully than the works of Morrison and Walker" (92), two more commercially profiled black women writers of today. Thompson could have compared Naylor and Walker's construction of "clitoridectomy" in this light.

Most contributors here do not seem to know very much about that which is termed "race," and its "intersections," or black culture, either experientially or historically or theoretically. Kelly's introduction describes "Thompson's model" as not only "multiculturalist" but "Africanist" as well (xxii). No doubt, the African, Africana, or African Diasporic cannot be equated with this latter enterprise; and Thompson provides strong criticism of multiculturalist containment on US terms. But Kelly, who also essays on "agency," upholds "mutuality" (xiii) while unmindful of coloniality or colonial power. Hence, the inordinate emphasis on Chaucer, Dante, and Shakespeare in many of these texts along with their lining up behind European critical divides: Philip Page for Derrida; Jennifer Brantley for Cixous and Kristeva; Karen Schneider for "poststructuralism" at large. Schneider's "Caliban" complex even sees Naylor's narrative as a model for the West, or "an 'unfinished, dynamic story requiring constant revision'" (15). This outlook is shared by Kimberly Costino. Her piece on "compulsory heterosexuality" uses Naylor to enshrine, even in reform, John D'Emilio and Adrienne Rich. No reference to the likes of Audre Lorde or Gloria Wekker. Nonetheless, besides Thompson, there is Maxine Lavon Montgomery's "Good Housekeeping." She explores how "women's work takes on spiritual dimensions" in Naylor's fiction (64) and how a womanist politics of ritual radically transforms "domestic space." The exposition is a little less persuasive than her idea, however, and it is not clear why the concept of domesticity need be retained.

Lastly, there is Amy Levin's "Metaphor and Maternity in Mama Day" that views Sande society in "Sierra Leone, the Ivory Coast, and contiguous regions" (74) to systematically plot diverse African female traditions in Naylor's novel. The serious utility of Levin's analysis is undercut by its anthropological cast and, more problematically, her desire to be the "first" to "discover" such connections in literature as opposed to social science (71-72), an absurd claim quickly contradicted by her citation of articles by Barbara Christian and Carolyn Cooper! This negation of black women's criticism, in the study of black women authors itself, persists throughout much of Gloria Naylor's Early Novels.

Fittingly, Carole Boyce Davies's Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (New York: Routledge, 1994) includes a chapter called "From 'Post-Coloniality' to Uprising Textualities: Black Women Writing the Critique of Empire." That intervention is reincarnated in the creative and critical perspectives of her two-volume collection Moving Beyond Boundaries: International Dimensions of Black Women's Writings, edited with 'Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, and Black Women...