“What Does the Fictional Island Do?”: A Conjuring Cartography Companion
In this 1988 interview, Gloria Naylor detailed motivations behind the creation of Willow Springs—the community at the center of Mama Day. The creation of this fictive landscape was central to Dr. Randi Gill-Sadler’s analysis of Naylor’s novel. What does the fictional island do for Black women writers like Naylor?
As Gil-Sadler noted in her talk, “Conjuring Cartography: Black PlaceMaking in the Cold War in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day” other Black women writers also turned to fictive islands as sites of possibilities and critique of imperialism and expansion during the 1970s and 1980s, a period known as the Black women’s literary Renaissance. These writers include Paule Marshall, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, and Audre Lorde. Gil-Sadler grapped with questions of what does it mean for these authors to create places that do not appear on maps? What does it mean to create a space that “reckons with the histories of slavery and colonialism”?
She [Naylor] said she needed a landscape to demonstrate a state of mind, but I would argue perhaps it was not only demonstrating a state of mind, but creating a landscape outside of the mind of the state…creating a place that doesn’t show up on maps, creating a place that reckons with the histories of slavery and colonialism…”
dr. randi gill-sadler
I encountered Naylor’s Mama Day first as a graduate student. Despite my familiarity with Mama Day and Naylor’s most famous work, The Women of Brewster Place , Dr. Gil-Sadler contextualized Willow Springs and fictional cartographies by framing the ways in which Black women used these geographies as a place to escape and as a site to critique the state.
Naylor conjuring of Willow Springs in Mama’s Day contest Cold War’s approaches to knowledge productions and geographies that seek to dispossess, collect, and contain bodies of knowledge that threaten the furthering of imperialism.
Dr. Randi Gill-Sadler
I was struck by Gil-Sadler’s call to read Black women works more robust. In a push to read more robustly, I compiled a starter guide, a simple companion to “Conjuring Cartography” with works I am beginning to read, re-read, and grapple with over the course of this year. I want to understand how these writers used geographies to rebel and how they take on electric.marronage rule #1—how do you [they] escape?
Do you have a suggestion? Comment below.
C.J. Thomas
