The Prismatic Past in Oral History and Mama Day

Abstract

The past exerts a distinct and powerful influence in most of southern fiction. This is less true in works of contemporary women writers who are southern themselves or whose works fall in realm of southern fiction. In hands of Lee Smith and Gloria Naylor, past becomes a multi-dimensional, prismatic entity that shapes familial, community, and cultural history. In Oral History by Lee Smith and in Mama Day by Gloria Naylor, concern is not so much with preserving past, but with examining, deconstructing, and ultimately redefining past. These novels represent two diverse aspects of southern culture and experiences of past. Oral History focuses on white Appalachian culture, while Mama Day focuses on rural black island culture. Despite differences of race and culture, these two novels share remarkable similarities in their treatment of past and in importance of individual voices in revealing past. Smith and Naylor use similar narrative techniques to relate familial and cultural histories. Taken together their novels yield a portrait of past that is prismatic and yet, at same time, strangely unified. To complicate matters, worlds and voices that Smith and Naylor each creates in rendering past stand as metaphors for Other Indeed, characters from Oral History and Mama Day (as well as authors themselves) are gender and racial representations of non-canonical which stand in opposition to white male Western literature. Place also figures significantly into this: Smith's Hoot Owl Holier and Naylor's Willow Springs are isolated communities that serve as repositories of memories and experiences of Other. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. states that race (and, by extrapolation, gender) has been an invisible quantity, a persistent yet implicit presence in study of literature (2). In defiance of this, Oral History and Mama Day come together in their presentation of Other as a vital and explicit element infusing each work. In both novels Other is manifested in several ways and is central to mystery at center of past. Women's voices and racial and cultural histories inherent in each work constitute force of Other. The reliance on orality in conveying past further enhances Other's presence. However, this emphasis on orality rather than on more traditional written word makes past far more difficult to comprehend. In trying to decipher past in Smith or Naylor's novel, one is like the inquiring anthropologist, who must learn language, listen and report, with all implicit risks of distortion involved in child's game of telephone (Miller 286). In this process of revealing past through multiple narrators, Smith herself emphasizes that no matter who's telling story, it is always teller's tale, and you never finally know exactly way it was (qtd. in Arnold 246). While distortion may be inevitable and truth about past never fully known, all of this is part of a complex process that reveals rich and prismatic quality of past in both Smith and Naylor's works. In Oral History past is presented as a family and cultural history which is in sore conflict with present. Through narratives of different characters, rich Appalachian past of novel is conveyed in recitation of stories, folklore, and legends as they pertain to Hoot Owl Holler and Cantrell family. In this process, Smith incorporates perspectives of such characters as Mrs. Ludie Davenport, Jink Cantrell, Ora Mae, and Little Luther Wade. In all, Smith utilizes nine voices, including what appears to be a community voice, to reveal Hoot Owl Holler's history and Cantrell family saga. These various narrators share same community history and participate in same collective memory. However, each character has a different perspective and experience of these things. …

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