[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Setting in Mama Day
A sense continuity pervades Willow Springs, the fictitious Gullah island that Gloria Naylor depicts in her 1988 novel Mama Day. On Willow Springs, the Day family, a community of women, preserve their cultural memory through the repetition of material practices that include cooking and weaving, and through the transmission of personal and communal stories. Naylor privileges the dynamism of the island's living memory over the representations of the past attempted by inhabitants of the Western-oriented mainland. History, ethnography, and other institutionalized discourses prove to be little more than what historian Pierre Nora has called "sifted and sorted historical traces" (285). Naylor's intricate exploration of history and memory coincides with and challenges Nora's work on lieux de memoire in that both authors examine different ways of conceptualizing, articulating, and representing our relationship with the past.
Nora writes, for example, "Our interest in lieux de memoire where memory crystallizes and secretes itself has occurred at a particular historical moment, a turning point where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the sense that memory has been torn--but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists. There are lieux de memoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer mileux de memoire, real environments of memory" (284).( Brondum, Lene. (1999)) Nora considers the power of written, state-sanctioned history to overdetermine understandings of the past, against a background in which, he argues, pre-industrial, traditional societies that have typically produced living memories that counter such authoritative discourses are passing away under the forces of modernity.
Mama Day displays a similar preoccupation, with the crucial difference lying in Naylor's conviction that traditional ways and the communities that maintain them have the resilience to survive and adapt to temporal and social changes..........
