Entre apocalypse et rédemption : l'écriture de Gloria Naylor

Emmanuelle Andres, Claudine Raynaud, Suzette Tanis-Plant

Description

Les articles réunis dans cet ouvrage partent de l'hypothèse selon laquelle les romans de Gloria Naylor oscillent entre les pôles antithétiques de l'apocalypse et de la rédemption. Leurs auteurs ont exploré l'inscription de la violence et les stratégies de survie dans l'écriture de Gloria Naylor. Le rapport des textes à un héritage littéraire et culturel éclectique brouille davantage la frontière entre le pur et l'impur, entre le corps et l'esprit, entre répression et expression, entre damnation et salut.

Sujets

• Communication
• Littérature
• Medias
• Harmattan Littérature

Informations

• Publié par: L'Harmattan
• Date de parution: 01 février 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 54
• EAN13: 9782296696037
• Langue: Français

Extrait

Entre apocalypse et rédemption :
l’écriture de Gloria Naylor

Writing In Between Apocalypse and Redemption:
Gloria Naylor’s Fiction
© L’H ARMATTAN, 2010
rue de l’École-Polytechnique ; 75005 Paris

http://www.librairieharmattan.com
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ISBN : 978-2-296-11423-4
EAN : 9782296114234

Fabrication numérique : Socprest, 2012
Ouvrage numérisé avec le soutien du Centre National du Livre
Textes réunis par

Emmanuelle ANDRÈS, Claudine RAYNAUD, Suzette TANIS-PLANT


Entre apocalypse et rédemption :
l’écriture de Gloria Naylor

Writing In Between Apocalypse and Redemption :
Gloria Naylor’s Fiction


Sélection des Actes du
Colloque International de Tours, 10 juin 2005

JE 2450 : « Etudes Afro-Américaines »


L’Harmattan
Etudes Africaines-Américaines & Diasporiques
African-American & Diasporic Studies

Collection bilingue/Bilingual collection
Dirigée par Marc Mvé Bekale, Hélène Ledantec-Lowry et Ariette Frund

La présente collection accueille toutes les études touchant au domaine africain-américain et aux nouvelles interactions littéraires, culturelles et politiques entre l’Afrique et sa diaspora. Elle encourage des travaux ouverts à l’interdisciplinarité.

The present French-English collection welcomes all scholarly studies in the African-American field as well as research works addressing the new literary, cultural and political dynamics between Africa and its diaspora. We particularly encourage cross-disciplinary works.


Ouvrages déjà parus :

Christine DUALE. Les noirs et la réussite universitaire aux Etats-Unis (2008)

Marc MVE BEKALE. Traite négrière et expérience du temps dans la littérature américaine (2007)
INTRODUCTION:
A PAINSTAKING ELOQUENCE

Emmanuelle ANDRÈS, Universités de La Rochelle et de Tours,
Claudine RAYNAUD, CNRS, Université de Tours,
Suzette TANIS-PLANT, INRA, Université de Tours

The author of six novels as well as the editor of an anthology of African American literature, Gloria Naylor (b.1950) represents the generation of black women writers whose vocation was made possible by the success of their literary foremothers. In numerous interviews, Naylor explicitly states that reading Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye was an epiphany. It showed her that writing was a feasible endeavor for a black woman:

The Bluest Eye is the beginning. The presence of the work served two vital purposes at that moment in my life. It said to a young poet, struggling to break into prose, that the barriers were flexible; at the core of it all is language, and if you are skilled enough with that, you can create your own genre. It said a young black woman, struggling to find a mirror of her work in society, not only is your story worth telling but it can be told in words so painstakingly eloquent that it becomes a song. (Montgomery, 2004, 11)

It "authorized" her to take the pen and make it her living.
Naylor is the recipient of numerous national awards, including the American Book Award for the best First Novel. Yet hers is also a popular success. The Women of Brewster Place (1982) was a bestseller that was made into a television film directed by Donna Deitch (1989) and starring Oprah Winfrey and Cecily Tison. The play based on Bailey’s Cafe (1992) was staged by the Hartford Stage Company in the spring of 1993.
Although scholars have made her the object of intense critical attention since she started publishing, the quality and the scope of Naylor’s work require renewed scrutiny in and of itself Their interest has primarily focused on the major women writers of the New Black Renaissance such as Morrison, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, and Paule Marshall, while Naylor was often viewed in comparison or in contrast to them. Naylor was in very good company indeed, yet certain facets of a writer’s oeuvre only emerge when it is placed squarely at the center of one’s reflection. In 2004, the publication of Conversations with Gloria Naylor at the University of Mississippi Press consecrated Naylor’s literary career with a collection of her interviews. At that juncture, the purpose of the 2005 Tours conference, from which most of the following articles have emerged, was to map out the fictional space of this major African American woman writer and to assess the tensions that run through her work from The Women of Brewster Place to 1996 . {1} Founded upon the premise that Naylor’s fiction hovers between the antithetical poles of apocalypse and redemption, scholars investigated inscriptions of violence in her writing.
The thrust of the research focused on a central question: how does Naylor write in between doom and salvation? Several scholars first set out to circumscribe the imaginary spaces within Naylor’s writings as well as reveal the numerous ways they reflect the concepts of apocalypse and redemption, thereby setting the scene for violence between the protagonists. Because Naylor’s writing is often set in a dense spiritual context, other scholars focused on the connotations of "apocalypse" and "redemption" to place an emphasis on the sacred in its relation to the imaginary. The concept of holiness, however, cannot be encompassed in "mere" religiosity, and the sense of mystery and alienation endowed by sacredness is all too present in Naylor’s secular, at times profane, writing.
This sense of otherness may partly explain why the insistence on the body takes on a different slant in Naylor’s writing. Questions arose concerning the violence suffered by the gendered body, in particular, and they also bore on textual poetics, on the violence of the writing itself More specifically, some scholars asked: how does violence enter Naylor’s writing? If the territories of Naylor’s imagination are interwoven with powerful intertexts, what is, then, the place of that other heritage–these other sites–in the creation of the antithetical tension?
These initial interrogations led to unexpected findings when reading Naylor’s latest book, 1996, or placing one of her novels in relation to a film by a contemporary black female filmmaker. Perhaps one of the sites resides in the "materiality" of the text, in the very construction of the narrative voices. In between 1996 and Mama Day ,tension is created between the chaos of voices battling in one’s mind as a result of electronic surveillance and the saving voice that can be claimed as one’s own. The path each scholar took to explore Naylor’s oeuvre in light of all these interrogations is as follows.
In her article "Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Cafe : A Panic Reading of Bailey’s Narrative," Angela DiPace gives dimension to the two particular spaces created by the author in that book, by putting an emphasis on the void that abuts Bailey’s cafe and Eve’s garden that blooms profusely in all seasons. DiPace, in a way similar to, but not quite like Florentine Rosca, speaks of these places as signifiers of recuperative space. DiPace explains that the cafe becomes a place for some to take "a breather for a while, the edge of the world–frightening as it is–could be the end of the world […]" ( BC ,28). As for the garden, it has been the best garden around since paradise was lost. However, as DiPace argues, what is finally recuperated at these two imaginary places are the narratives of Bailey, Sadie, Eve, Ester, Peaches, Jesse Bell, and Stanley. Indeed, out of that recuperative space arises a re-semblance of history, wherein Naylor explodes to smithereens any black/white delusional desire not to view racism in the latter part of the twentieth-century as a catastrophe comparable to the atomic bombings and the Jewish Holocaust/Diaspora.
Rosea begins her reading of Mama Day and Bailey’s Cafe by pointing out that careful consideration of space(s)–whether geographical, communal or supernatural–and the people inhabiting them are hallmarks of Naylor’s fiction. As compared to The Women of Brewster Place and Linden Hills, Rosca finds that, in the novels under study, insistence is laid on open spaces, be they either the enchanted island in Mama Day or the cafe at the edge of the world in Bailey’s Cafe. These are new and different spatial configurations well worth investigating to better understand the overall topography of Naylor’s novels. Rosca explores the creation of these phantasmagorical worlds, as well as their position and strategic function in the narrative act. No matter how much information the narrator gives the reader to locate these places, they remain ambiguous. The stories are set on islands of (in)determinacy. Both are, in the final analysis, imaginary islands where the boundary between myth and reality is an indistinct and evasive one. They are signifying spaces that validate the experiences of the protagonists.
Germain N’Guessan bases his reading of Mama Day on the fact that one of the most recurrent themes in contemporary African American women’s novels is a legitimate will to (re)connect with the ancestral land. He juxtaposes elements found in African culture and those used by Naylor in Mama Day to explore how Naylor’s narrative stages the reconstruction of an authentic African culture and thereby reflects this desire. He argues that although Naylor’s fictive universe is far from the day-to-day lives of Africans, she nevertheless tries to