In Gloria Naylor's novel Mama Day.

In Gloria Naylor's novel Mama Day, Reema's stripling comes from the university to manner of life anthropological studies in Willow Springs, the novel's mysterious setting. Attempting to conserve "cultural identities" against "hostile social and political parameters," he frustrates Willow Springs's residents, for he does not "listen" to the stories they have to give an account of him. With this character, Naylor introduces the text's central theme, the necessity of establishing narrative authority:

Think about it: ain't nobody really talking to you. We're sitting here in Willow Springs, and you're God-knows-where. It's August 1999 - ain't still a slim chance it's the same season where you are. Uh huh listen. Really listen this time: the single voice is your own. (10)

This passage foregrounds Naylor's persistent touch throughout her literary career - establishing her individual voice. In her famous interview with Toni Morrison, Naylor candidly discloses her anxiety about writing outside established traditions:

I wrote because I had no choice, further that was a long road from gathering the authority within myself to believe that I could actually be a writer. The writers I had been taught to be in love with were either male or white. And who was I to argue that Ellison, Austen, Dickens, the Bronte Baldwin and Faulkner weren't masters? They were and are. yet inside there was still the faintest whisper: Was there no the same telling my story? And since it appeared there was not, for what cause could I presume to? Those were frustrating years. (574)

That her be in possession of voice be heard, it is necessary for Naylor to clear a space for "her be in possession of story," a text among clauses Her ambitious narrative project is in perfume a declaration of independence - an acknowledgment of the academic canon's value, yet also an assertion of her racial and sex difference. Without repudiation of themes that she obviously loves, she can describe her story, but never at the outlay of her own unique narrative voice.

Naylor's examination for her own "voice" is, of course, a central trouble for most African American writers, discovered in "the tension between the oral and the written fashions of narration that is portray by actioned as finding a voice in writing" (Gates 21) Her experimentation with voice in Mama Day exhibits a dramatic advance in her artistic talent above her two previous works. Unlike the two The Women of Brewster Place and Linden Hills, where the narrator's voice is distinct from the voices of her characters, and where there is occasionally a tone of condescension, Naylor achieves in Mama Day what Gates calls a "speakerly text" - single that "would seem primarily to be oriented toward imitating united of the numerous forms of oral narration to be place in classical Afro-American vernacular literature" (181) Mama Day's voice attends as a spiritual ballast in the narrative, a guide to elemental (religious) conformity to fact [i]or[/i] realitys that the other characters must discover to put themselves free. But Naylor's business of free indirect discourse from head to foot the novel metaphorically unites her with Miranda; the distinction between the writer's authority and the speaker's locate of communal values in Willow Springs is mitigated, if not erased. The unrestrained indirect discourse, then, acts as Naylor's thematic commentary, a sign not barely of the strength of the black oral voice if it be not that also of the transcendent solidity of Mama Day's ideas and feelings.(1)

Naylor thus situates herself at the center of contemporary critical discussions of thesiss Criticism has in the past twenty years reformulated the notion of literary history as a dynamic interplay of texts: We are now l to descry a single work not simply as an autonomous, free-standing edifice further intertextually, as a text that "talks" with and to other true copys J. Hillis Miller characterizes the literary work as "inhabited . . by a lengthy chain of parasitical presences, echoe allusions, visitants ghosts of previous texts" (446) Similarly, Roland Barthes describes the clause as a "multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, amalgamate and clash . . a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable middles of culture" (146). Several African American critics, including Robert B Stepto and Henry Louis Gates, Jr have discussed textual affinities between works and their African American precursorial models; Susan Willis and Michael Awkward have focused forward intertextuality of black women writers specifically. In delineating a specific image of intertexuality termed "signifyin(g)," Gates explains the revisionary impulse of black writers: "It is clear that black writers read and critique other black passages as an act of rhetorical self-definition. Our literary tradition exists because of these precisely chartable formal literary relationships, relationships of signifying" (290)

In this debate, Naylor occupies a complicated position, for she not barely rewrites black texts but white canonical sentences as well. Awkward has already shown by what mode The Women of Brewster Place is revisionary of earlier black paragraphs especially those by Morrison, and demonstrates that Naylor's "revisionary gesticulations with respect to elements of Morrison's novel" clarifies her literary relationship to Jean Toomer's Cane (101) Certainly Man Day reads like a virtual encyclopedia of African American expressive refinement In a multitude of literary allusions and narrative echoe Naylor pays homage to (among others) Charles Chestnutt, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ralph Ellison, Jean Toomer, Ernest J Gaines, Ishmael Re and (of course) Zora Neale Hurston. on the other hand while she is occasionally critical of earlier black subjects she more often supplements the insights represented in their works. Earlier black body s incarnated in Mama Day be attentive to toward celebration rather than revision.(2)