Study Questions on Gloria Naylor's Mama Day

For Monday the 26th and Wednesday the 28th:

1.  Who is the narrator of pp. 3-10?  What do you learn from that narrator about how to read the novel?

2.  Who are the narrators of Chapter 1?  What is the effect of the alternating points of view?

3.  How does racial identity factor into the love relationship between George and Cocoa?

4.  How is love connected to or affected by literature in the novel?  How is it connected to or affected by folk culture?  Are literature and folk culture in tension with one another in the novel?

5.  What is the effect of death on love in Mama Day?

6.  How do Cocoa and George compare with Romeo and Juliet?  See especially George's use of the term "Star-crossed" (p. 129).

Additional study questions for Monday and Wednesday, May 3 and 5:

1.  The novel combines elements of myth, romance, tragedy, and comedy; how does the mixture of genres affect your response as a reader?

2.  What is the relationship between love and magic in this novel?

3.  What is the role of the hurricane?  Consider its place in the plot; its contribution to the characterization of Mama Day, George, and others; and its thematic significance.

4.  How does one's family history affect one's experience of love as Naylor sees it in this novel?  Consider both George's family and Cocoa's.

5.  What is your response to the review reproduced below?

Chicago Tribune, January 31, 1988
HEADLINE: NAYLOR'S FANTASY ISLAND STRANGER THAN PARADISE
By John Blades.

Based on the extravagance of her vision, Gloria Naylor must rank among the most ambitious and upwardly mobile of American writers.  She started small.  Her first novel, "The Women of Brewster Place," which won her an American Book Award, was relatively modest and direct, revolving around the unhappy domestic lives of seven black women in an urban ghetto.  From there, Naylor moved onward and upward to "Linden Hills," a novel that was set in a middle-class black suburban ghetto near Brewster Place. But Naylor's concerns were not merely     socioeconomic or racial, they were transcendental.  As she conceived it, Linden Hills became a Dantesque sideshow, with each of the community's concentric streets representing a circle of Hell.

In her latest novel, "Mama Day" (Ticknor & Fields, $18.95), Naylor's trajectory carries her even farther and higher, from a suburban hell to an unearthly paradise.  Whereas "Linden Hills" was Dantesque, "Mama Day" is Shakespearean, with allusions, however oblique and tangential, to "Hamlet," "King Lear" and, especially, "The  Tempest. " Like Shakespeare's fantasy, Naylor's book takes place on an enchanted island.  A former plantation, "spit from the mouth of God," Willow Springs lies just off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, isolated from the white world and impervious to all attempts to turn it into a resort.  Naylor reinforces her Shakespearean connection by naming her heroine Miranda.  Her Miranda is no spritely teenager but a 90ish matriarch, who even though unmarried and childless is called "Mama Day."

Black magician and healer as well as earth mother, Mama Day has her work cut out for her on Willow Springs, mostly because the snarled and twisted family roots put down by its earliest settlers have left the island such a troubled paradise.  Like most of the other islanders, Mama Day is a descendant of the legendary African slave, Sapphira, and the white plantation owner, Bascombe Wade, whose fatally miscegenetic union produced seven sons, seven grandsons and three great-granddaughters, including Mama Day.  Though the heart and soul of this novel belong to Mama Day, the focus shifts to follow the wayward path of her great niece Ophelia (also known as Cocoa because of her light skin) from Willow Springs to New York. There she marries George, an orphaned, rootless engineer, whom she takes home to meet the surviving members of her family-not just great aunt Mama Day but her grandmother, Abigail. The trip ends disastrously, however, when Willow Springs is struck by a "tempest, " a hurricane that leads to the death of a principal character.

Oh, what a tangled web Naylor weaves.  Because she's obviously under the  spell not only of Shakespeare but William Faulkner,  Toni Morrison  and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "Mama Day" is forced to carry a heavy burden of symbolism, myth, superstition, magic realism and, as one islander puts it, "mumbo jumbo." In some passages, Naylor's folksy prose is as thick as gumbo, and the storytelling has a Gothic spin with two of the narrators speaking from their graves.  Mama Day's roots may not be deep but they're so far-reaching that the novel requires a geneological chart to keep her ancestors straight. Yet buried beneath all the metaphorical underbrush is a relatively simple fairy tale about two lovers whoseparadise is lost when the past tragically impacts on the present.

While it's easy to admire Naylor's talent and ambition, the audacity of her vision, "Mama Day" is still more bewildering than bewitching.  At times, Willow Springs does have the steamy, luxuriant atmosphere of magic realism; at others, it reads like the libretto for a folk operetta, a combination of Catfish Row and Shangri-la, as when Naylor's ghostly narrator rhapsodizes, "Drumfish and mullets ain't waiting to be hooked, they're jumping into the boats.  Crawdaddies and  oysters are a dime a hundred. . . ." Naylor has populated her magic kingdom with some appealingly offbeat characters, Mama Day foremost among them.  But she's failed to give them anything very original or interesting to do.