The Fiction of Gloria Naylor: Houses and Spaces of Resistance

Conclusion

Conclusion If there is a canonical story evolving out of Naylor’s first four novels, that narrative involves the quest for autonomy, in both a literary and racial sense—one that is encoded in the vernacular and bound with figurations of an idealized home. For Naylor, home is a fluid space embedded in cultural memory and rooted in a past that harks back to her parents’ Robinsonville, Mississippi, roots and ultimately ancient Africa. In keeping with the subversive acts on the part of an assortment of black subjects throughout the transatlantic world, Naylor’s reinscription of home is a symbolic gesture of resistance directed toward the colonialist imperative responsible for the persistent condition of homelessness experienced by the border figure. Naylor rewrites home, but she does so from what I label a neo–briar patch, the unique vantage point afforded by the interplay between a multitude of diverse, often contesting positionings owing to the complexities of race, class, and gender. It is not surprising that she attributes her development as an African American woman writer to the ritual events taking place within a specifically maternal domestic space where storytelling figured as prominently as cooking and cleaning.1 Her fictional characters often emerge from the recesses of home as speaking subjects, ready to rejoin the realm of language and adult experience. Naylor’s search for an authoritative voice with which to tell or, rather, retell the stories of black women is therefore not only one that owes much of its inspiration to the everyday moments of domestic life—cooking, cleaning, sewing , and mothering—but also is paradigmatic in nature, suggesting a link or discursive bridge between her writing and that of black women across the Diaspora. Mae Gwendolyn Henderson and Carol Boyce Davies are among a growing number of scholars advocating an intellectual border crossing in dismantling boundaries between theoretical and critical writing or between the geographic borders 76 Conclusion posing an artificial distinction between black women writers in the transatlantic world.2 Davies’s observations regarding the reinscription of home on the part of the Afro-Caribbean/American creative writer are apropos in an interrogation of Naylor’s fictional engagement with places of origin: For the writing of home exists narratively—in conversation, letters to family, telephone conversations, stories passed on to children as family history or to friends as reminiscences. Thus, the rewriting of home becomes a critical link in the articulation of identity. It is a play of resistance to domination which identifies where we come from, but also locates home in its many transgressive and disjunctive experiences. (115) Naylor’s evolving authorial voice is a multifaceted one that disruptsestablishedinscriptionsofidentityandplace .Thelargelyfemale domestic space that she scripts in her first novel is at once both rural and urban, embedded in an agrarian history and part of a changing metropolitan landscape. Brewster Place serves as the medial space where southern migrants are allowed to redefine themselves in ways thatchallengethestricturesofapostwarurbanbureaucracy.Through the ritual practices emanating from a pastoral setting, an otherwise fragmented community transforms its squalid environment into a nurturing site of belonging and becoming. Brewster persists long after its condemnation at the hands of the rich and powerful, and the community’s expanding boundaries serve as a locus for the critique of inscribed conceptions of regional origins. In Linden Hills, Naylor draws upon feminist ideology in writing back to the masculinist empire responsible for the subjugation of the Nedeed wives. Home still exists for African Americans in suburbia , but only in cultural memory, and it is bound with an agrarian ideal that is far removed from the aristocratic neighborhood. Willa is faced with the daunting task of dismantling the Nedeed Empire 77 Conclusion along with its insistence upon male domination. Even though her awakening and subsequent ascent from the basement occasion her own death as well as that of Luther, her revolutionary gesture places her in a long line of radical, proactive women who refuse to acquiesce in the face of male power. Willie, Willa’s masculine counterpart , is the medium through which Naylor inscribes a gendered history of black female resistance—one that points to a destabilization of a strictly masculinist historiographic record. If Linden Hills prefigures an apocalyptic end to the home under male domination, Mama Day offers a glimpse of an emergent social order involving a reification of the feminine. Ritual practices such as folk healing, midwifery, and conjure allow once-marginalized women to reclaim...