Mama Day:  Some Thoughts and Questions

Gloria Naylor on writing:

"I wrote because I had no choice, but 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 love were either male or white.  And who was I to argue that Ellison, Austen, Dickens, the Brontes, Baldwin and Faulkner werenít masters?  They were and are.  But inside there was still the faintest whisper:  Was there no one telling my story?  And since it appeared there was not, how could I presume to?  Those were frustrating years."

Stephen Greenblatt on cultural criticism:

"If it is the task of cultural criticism to decipher the power of Prospero, it is equally its task to hear the accents of Caliban."

Roland Barthes, from "The Death of the Author," in Image--Music--Text (1977)

"Thus is revealed the total existence of writing:  a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations to dialogue, parody, and contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author.  The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a textís unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.  Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal:  the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted."

Zora Neal Hurston on anthropology in Mules and Men :

"The Negro, in spite of his open-faced laughter, his seeming acquiescence, is particularly evasive.  You see we are a polite people and we do not say to our questioner, "Get out of here!"  We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person because, knowing so little about us, he doesnít know what he is missing.  The Indian resists curiosity by a stony silence.  The Negro offers a feather bed resistance...The theory behind our tactics:  ëThe white man is always trying to know into somebody elseís business.  All right, Iíll set something outside the door of my mind to play with and handle.  He can read my writing but he shoí canít read my mind.  Iíll put this play toy in his hand, and he will seize it and go away.  Then Iíll say my say and sing my song.í"