Magic, Madness, and the Ruses of the Trickster: Healing Rituals and Alternative Spiritualities in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, Erna Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, and Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring

Abstract

Caroline A. Brown explores the strategic deployment of the trickster/conjurer figure in the work of New World, Afro-diasporic fiction. According to Brown, in each of the works treated—by the Afro-Jamaican Brodber (1980), the Jamaican-Canadian Hopkinson (1998), and the African-American Naylor (1988)—culturally alienated protagonists are driven to the brink of madness by social circumstances and their own emotional ambivalence; they are then directed onto psycho-spiritual quests by creolized healer figures. Yet these healers are symbolic tricksters, individuals who cannot easily fit within a Western paradigm based on moral precision or ethical clarity. Who then guides the reader? How does he or she effectively solve the literary puzzle, the enigma of the text, to attain what Gay Wilentz deems “cultural healing”? According to Brown, the reader—thrown into the increasingly disordered chronicle unwinding as mystery, myth, and ritual—must partake of that journey and, in so doing, actively decipher and define what is madness and what is sanity, in the process untangling the web of the novel as a cultural riddle.

The image of…conjuring up imaginary worlds that “the black people needed” confirms [Houston] Baker’s description of conjure as “a revered site of culturally specific interests and values.” Baker affirms the “definable African antecedents” of conjuring in an effort to establish its racial specificity. In a parallel gesture, critics writing on Mama Day…emphasize the African origins of conjuring…For example, Lindsey Tucker argues that Naylor’s novel draws on African “magico-religious” views of the world….The use of magic in novels such as Mama Day….is motivated by the desire to recover an “African” epistemology and to uncover “the probable realms of impossibility beyond the limits of scientific certainty.” As a form of “discredited knowledge,” in Toni Morrison’s phase, conjuring exposes the limitations of modern rationality and reinstates suprarational ways of knowing suppressed by the Enlightenment legacy.

—Madhu Dubey, Signs and Cities (167)

The black tradition has inscribed within it the very principles by which it can be read. Ours is an extraordinarily self-reflexive tradition, a tradition exceptionally conscious of its history and of the simultaneity of its canonical texts, which tend to be taken as verbal models of the Afro-American social condition, to be revised. Because of the experience of diaspora, the fragments that contain the traces of a coherent system of order must be reassembled. These fragments embody aspects of a theory of critical principles around which the discrete texts of the tradition configure, in the critic’s reading of the textual past. To reassemble fragments, of course, is to engage in an act of speculation, to attempt to weave a fiction of origins and subjugation. It is to render the implicit as explicit, and at times to imagine the whole from the part.

—Henry Louis Gates, Jr ., The Signifying Monkey (xxiii–xxiv).