[In the following essay, Saldivar traces the magic realism in the works of Ntozake Shange to both Latin-American and Afro-Caribbean influences.]

It is probably true that critics of African and Afro-American literature were trained to think of the institution of literature essentially as a set of Western texts.

—Henry Louis Gates Jr. The Signifying Monkey

Ntozake Shange has been widely praised for her oppositional feminist “combat-breathing” poetics in her explosive Broadway choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1976) and for her powerful “lyricism” in Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), but her use of Afro-Caribbean and Latin American magic realism has received little attention, owing to an inadequate understanding of a vast and rich literary and cultural movement in the Americas that began over forty years ago.¹

The reasons for this state of affairs are complex. Henry Louis Gates correctly claims that critics of African American texts are trained to think of “the institution of literature essentially as a set of Western texts.”² W. Lawrence Hogue contends that a primary reason for the dearth of comparative cultural pan-American studies is that most critics in the United States are “silent on the production … of texts.”³ In Discourse and the Other: The Production of the Afro-American Text (1986), Hogue critically judges various African American interpretive practices, ranging from Amiri Baraka's “advocacy of a nationalist Afro-American literature” (11) in the 1960s to Robert Stepto's protostructuralist attempts in the 1970s “to isolate an Afro-American cultural myth, the pregeneric myth, and [use] it to define an Afro-American literary tradition” (13). Hogue also analyzes the more recent attempts by Houston Baker Jr. and Barbara Christian, who in their critical practices have created what Hogue calls a powerful but incomplete “theory of the Afro-American literary tradition.” Although Hogue is generally sympathetic to Baker's early “anthropology of art,” he points out the following problem in Baker's seminal study of African American literature, The Journey Back: “He [Baker] ignores the fact that Afro-American myths, stereotypes, and cultural forms are not innocent, that they are bound culturally and historically—even within Afro-American reality—and therefore have political and ideological functions” (15). More important for Hogue, “Baker's anthropology of art is silent on literary production” (16). Hogue's self-conscious analysis is itself silent on Baker's sophisticated and powerful reading of the “blues vernacular” in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (1984) and his magisterial reading of Caliban's “triple play” in Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987).

Hogue turns his Foucauldian hermeneutics of suspicion to Barbara Christian's groundbreaking book, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976. Although Hogue praises Christian's attempt to account for how “certain ideological and literary forces” produce the image of black women in American society, he finds troubling “gaps” and “silences” in her discourse. He contends: “Without discussing the issue of literary production, Christian's critical practice cannot fully explain how images of black women are tied to the production of literary texts, or why certain black women novelists are published and promoted, others published and excluded, and still others aborted at editors' and publishers' desks” (19). Like the earlier studies of Baraka, Stepto, and Baker, Hogue believes that Christian's analysis of “canon formation” is unconsciously “informed by an external ideological discourse” (20). In contradistinction to Baraka, Stepto, Baker, and Christian, Hogue argues that certain African American writers are published and promoted in the mainstream canon “because they reproduce certain sanctioned … stereotypes and conventions. Others [are] published and ignored because they fail to reproduce sanctioned literary myths and conventions” (21).

Instructive gaps and silences in Hogue's lucid analysis of contemporary African American women's fiction, however, can be found. In his chapter “Sixties' Social Movements, the Literary Establishment, and the Production of the Afro-American Text,” he asserts that the radical “feminist discourse” of the 1970s “produced texts such as Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sula, Alice Walker's The Third Life of Grange Copeland and The Color Purple, Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls, and Gayl Jones's Corregidora that produced new myths about black women” (62). Unfortunately, what Hogue's Foucauldian analysis was not in a position to recognize was how some African American writers such as Morrison and Shange were profoundly engaged in a bold cultural conversation with the Afro-Caribbean and Latin American tradition of magic realism. A writer such as Shange thus creates texts that are “double voiced,” to use Gates's term, in the sense that her literary antecedents are both black and mestizo (African American and Latin American) novelists.⁴ By examining the historical and ideological intertextual forces that produced her magic realism in Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, we can supplement previous studies of African American literary production. Shange's new narrative is a “mulatta” text, with a two-toned heritage. She speaks in an always distinct and resonant voice, a voice that “signifies” on black male vernacular and mestizo Latin American magic realist traditions.

Shange has been actively engaged during the 1980s and into the 1990s with a group of committed artists and intellectuals associated with the Casa de las Américas. She has traveled extensively throughout the Americas and has read her works in Brazil, Haiti, Cuba, and Nicaragua. Her books A Daughter's Geography (1983) and See No Evil (1984) speak eloquently of her political interests in Castro's and the Sandinistas' revolutions.

In an interview at the University of Houston in 1985, Shange insists that she moved to Texas “to escape the celebrity status” she received after the successful Broadway production of For Colored Girls and to be closer to the Latin American cultures of resistance.⁵ In Houston, she tells us, she could “find another version of reality” (2). In Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, she is directly concerned with this different “version of reality,” whose depth and complexity cannot be fully presented by existing U.S. ideological and literary labels and categories. Her novel is concerned with both the Afro-Caribbean and Latin American mythical thought systems outside those appropriated by the dominant official Western society. Before discussing the merits and demerits of magic realism in Shange's new narrative, we must look afresh at the problems, theoretical and historical, involved in lo real maravilloso (marvelous realism) and el realismo mágico (magic realism).

SOME CONCEPTS AND DEFINITIONS OF MAGIC REALISM

What is the history of the Americas but the chronicle of lo real maravilloso?

—Alejo Carpentier

Magic realism … is to be grasped as a possible alternative to the narrative logic of contemporary postmodernism.

—Fredric Jameson, “On Magic Realism in Film”

It is generally accepted that the magic realist movement led by Carpentier, García Márquez, Fuentes, and, more recently, Allende has had a powerful influence in the 1980s on a diverse group of U.S. writers: Gary Soto (The Tale of Sunlight), Alberto Ríos (Whispering to Fool the Wind), Helena María Viramontes (The Moths), Paul Theroux (The Mosquito Coast), and Dennis Johnson (Fiskadoro). The possibility that magic realism functions as a force or as a discursive formation in contemporary African American literature has not been fully explored, however.

As Jameson has noted, “the concept of magic realism raises many problems, both theoretical and historical.”⁶ We will not retrace here the rich polemical debate among Latin American and U.S. scholars over the concept “magic realism”; Fernando Alegría, Roberto González Echevarría, and Amaryll Beatrice Chanady have written cogent and useful critical surveys of the debate.⁷ My task is to make the demanding argument about magic realism available to readers who have heard of its importance but so far have been baffled.

According to González Echevarría, magic realism as a concept appears in “three different moments” in the twentieth century.⁸ The first appeared during the avant-garde 1920s in Europe “when the term is used by Franz Roh in his Nach-Expressionismus: Magischer Realismus (1925) and when the Surrealists, especially Breton in the first Manifesto (1924), proclaim the ‘marvelous’ (le merveilleux) an aesthetic category and even a way of life” (109). The second moment was in the late 1940s when the expressions el realismo mágico and lo real maravilloso were used by the Latin American writers-intellectuals Arturo Uslar Pietri and Alejo Carpentier to measure, compare, and evaluate indigenous Latin American cultural art forms.⁹ Whereas Pietri adopted Roh's term “magic realism,” Carpentier, the more influential writer and sophisticated theoretician, adopted in González Echevarría's view “the Surrealists' version and create[d] the term ‘marvelous American reality’” (110).

A third period of magic realism began in 1955 when the Latin American scholar Angel Flores published his influential essay “Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction.” For González Echevarría, this third phase continued through the 1960s, “when criticism searches for the Latin American roots of some of the novels produced during the ‘boom’ and attempts to justify their experimental nature” (111). As will be seen, a “fourth phase” occurred as Ntozake Shange and Arturo Islas, among others, expanded the tradition of magic realism in new and political (often “Signifyin[g]”) ways.

Flores argued that what distinguishes magic realism from other realisms is that it attempts to transform “the common and the everyday into the awesome and the unreal.”¹⁰ Furthermore, he emphasized the connections between magic realism and examples of European modernist aesthetics practiced by Kafka and Chirico.

In 1967 Luis Leal joined the growing debate by attacking Flores's essay. In “El realismo mágico en la literatura hispanoamericana,” he argued that magic realism was, for all intents and purposes, an exclusively New World literary movement. Included in his school of Latin American magic realist writers were Arturo Uslar Pietri, Miguel Angel Asturias, Carpentier, Lino Novas Calvo, Juan Rulfo, Félix Pita Rodríguez, and Nicolás Guillén. According to Leal, the following is the basic difference among the competing schools of “magic realism,” “realism,” and “surrealism”:

El mágico realista no trata de copiar (como lo hacen los realistas) o de vulnerar (como lo hacen los surrealistas) la realidad circundante, sino de captar el misterio que palpita en las cosas.

[The magic realist does not attempt to copy (like the realists) or make the real vulnerable (like the surrealists), but attempts to capture the mystery that palpitates in things.]¹¹

Leal's essay ignores the profound impact surrealism, European modernism, and ethnography had on the generation of writers he analyzes, especially Asturias and Carpentier.¹²

Carpentier made the connections in the famous prologue to his revolutionary Afro-Caribbean novel, El reino de este mundo (1949); an expanded version of this prologue was reprinted in Tientos y diferencias (1964). To the rhetorical question “What is the history of the Americas but the chronicle of lo real maravilloso?,” he suggests the ideology that lies at the center of his early magical narratives: how to write in a European language—with its Western systems of thought—about realities and thought structures never before seen in Europe. In the oxymoron lo real maravilloso, Carpentier is concerned not only with African magic (obeah), but with the perceptions and ideas of the world underlying the horizon of Afro-Caribbean magic. For the first time in 1949, he asks these questions: What is the New World African, Amerindian, and mestizo heritage of the Caribbean? How can it function as an ideology, a stylistics, and a point of view?

In Paris, Carpentier was introduced by Desnos to André Breton and began his bold cultural conversation with European modernism and surrealism. Throughout his Parisian stay, Carpentier was concerned with the role of art in revolution, as well as with what constituted surrealism. Not surprisingly, he was attracted to the surrealists' attack on human consciousness, which was part of their larger assault on all forms of bourgeois established order. As we know from their much-quoted maxim, knowledge for these Europeans is the sound “boom,” and everyone is entitled to a “boom” of his or her own making.¹³ Carpentier was thus initially fascinated by Breton's attempts to break through “the provoking insanities of realism.”¹⁴

He learned much from the surrealists' experiments, which he employed to explore a kind of second reality hidden within the world of dreams and the unconscious. By whatever means, chiefly automatic writing and the imitation of dreams, the individual, according to the surrealists, must strive to achieve “surreality,” which Breton saw as the absolute of the unconscious.¹⁵ Surrealism thus led Carpentier to see afresh “aspectos de la vida americana que no había advertido,” as he was to confess.¹⁶

But what caused Carpentier's “break” with Breton's surrealism? Emir Rodríguez Monegal argues convincingly that “political tensions” that arose among the surrealists caused Carpentier to become alienated from them.¹⁷ González Echevarría suggests in The Pilgrim at Home that Carpentier went his own way because European surrealism clashed with the Cuban's “Spenglerian conception of man and history he had absorbed through avant-garde journals like the Revista de Occidente” (122).

Thus, in spite of his early fascination with surrealism in general, and with Breton in particular, Carpentier never became a committed disciple. Unlike Breton and the surrealists, he argued in his prologue and the essay “De lo real maravilloso” that the “second reality” the surrealists explored in automatic reality is merely part of the everyday world. Further, as a follower of Spengler's Decline of the West (in Spengler's universal history there is no fixed “center”), Carpentier eschewed Breton's and the surrealists' Eurocentric doctrines of the marvelous and argued that all things of a truly magical nature are, in fact, found within the reality of the Caribbean Americas—not the “boring” cities of Europe. According to Carpentier, the “discovery,” conquest, and colonization of the New World are magical events in themselves:

Open Bernal Díaz del Castillo's great chronicle [True History of the Conquest of New Spain (1552)] and one will encounter the only real and authentic book of chivalry ever written: a book of dust and grime chivalry where the genies who cast evil spells were the visible and palpable teules, where the unknown beasts were real, where one actually gazed on unimagined cities and saw dragons in their native rivers and strange mountains swirling with snow and smoke.¹⁸

For Carpentier, then, Bernal Díaz del Castillo's chronicle of the Spanish Conquest of Mexico is an exemplary magic realist narrative because Díaz (unwittingly) had written about the clash of cultures—Old World and New World—and had described, in great detail, the superposition of one layer of reality on another. Thus envisaged, in Díaz's narrative armored Spaniards led by Cortés wander over “magical” deserts and cross over barren peaks, some of which burst into flame at their approach. Further, Díaz describes the Aztecs assailing the Spaniards with blood rituals of human sacrifice. At the end of these travels (travails), Cortés enters a great supernatural New World city, heaped with flora, floating in the midst of a blue lake.

Forming a background for Carpentier's theory is what he sees as a “fecundity” of the New World landscape. His concept of “marvelous reality” thus can be summarized in his own words:

Due to the untouched nature of its landscape, its ontology, the Faustian presence of the Indian and the Black, the revelation inherent in the continent's recent discovery and the fruitful cross-breeding this discovery engendered, America is still very far from exhausting its wealth of mythologies. Indeed, what is the history of America if not the chronicle of marvelous reality?

(xiv-xv)

In outlining his theory of lo real maravilloso, Carpentier posits the conditions that must be met for the marvelous to exist (x-xi). Lo real maravilloso unmistakably emerges as such only when it arises from (1) an unexpected alteration of reality (a miracle); (2) a privileged revelation of reality; (3) an unaccustomed or singularly enhancing illumination of the riches of reality that had passed unnoticed; (4) an expansion of the scales and categories of reality, now perceived with a particular intensity by virtue of an exaltation of spirit that leads to a kind of liminal state.

Carpentier thus set up an antithesis between surrealism and magic realism. He unfavorably compares surrealism with a privileged New World aesthetic grounded in a reality that is inherently magical. To be sure, Carpentier's thesis rests on the claims that New World artists and people experience the marvelous in their daily existence and therefore have no need to invent a domain of fantasy. On the basis of local New World privilege, he rejects surrealism as sterile and legitimizes the mode of writing he elects: “a chronicle of the marvelous real.”

More recently, Gabriel García Márquez in El olor de la guayaba (The Fragrance of Guava) also anchored his notion of magic realism within a local Afro-Caribbean context:

I believe that the Caribbean has taught me to see reality in a different way, to accept supernatural elements as something that is part of our daily life. The Caribbean is a distinctive world whose first magic piece of literature is The Diary of Christopher Columbus, a book which speaks of fabulous plants and mythical worlds. Yes, the history of the Caribbean is full of magic.¹⁹

Although García Márquez's use of magic realism includes Carpentier's familiar tropes of the supernatural—one of the foundation concepts of magic realism—his version differs from Carpentier's in this important way. García Márquez's concept of magic realism presupposes the narrator's identification with the oral expression of popular cultures in the Third World pueblo. In other words, the narrative dramatization of magic realism is usually expressed through a collective voice, inverting, in a jesting manner, the values of the official culture.

Finally, at a recent PEN conference, Fernando Alegría, the noted Chilean literary scholar and writer, expanded the debate by arguing audaciously in his essay “Latin American Fantasy and Reality” (1987) that “reality” in the Caribbean and in Latin America “is neither marvelous nor magical.”²⁰ In reading Carpentier or Asturias, Alegría contends, “we come to realize [that their realism] is a truthful image of economic injustice and social mockery which passes off as authoritarian democracy in Latin America.” To support his ideological reading of magic realism, Alegría turns to an interpretation of García Márquez's “puzzling speech,” “The Solitude of Latin America,” given at the Nobel Prize awards in 1982. García Márquez spoke specifically about politics and economics on a global scale, emphasizing the heated quarrel between the superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. According to Alegría, García Márquez addressed these issues “to clear up the legend of magical realism in his own fiction.” Further, in Alegría's view, García Márquez wanted once and for all to “acknowledge the basic reality lying at the bottom of the mythical world of Latin America.” He used “statistics,” Alegría suggests, to give his audience, “stuffed into their fancy-label penguin suits, an astonishing, brutal image of a continent torn asunder and bathed in blood” (117-18):

There have been five wars and seventeen military coups; there emerged a diabolic dictator who is carrying out, in God's name, the first Latin American ethnocide of our time. In the meantime, twenty million Latin American children died before the age of one—more than have been born in Europe since 1970. Those missing because of repression number nearly 120,000. … Numerous women arrested while pregnant have given birth in Argentine prisons, yet nobody knows the whereabouts and identity of their children, who were furtively adopted or sent to an orphanage by the order of the military authorities … Nearly two hundred thousand men and women have died throughout the continent, and over one hundred thousand have lost their lives in three small and ill-fated countries of Central America: Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala …

I dare to think that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instance of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune.²¹

Alegría is correct when he redefines García Márquez's version of magic realism as a truthful vision of “outsized reality.” Perhaps it was “The Solitude of Latin America” that led Jameson in his essay dedicated to Fernández Retamar and the Cuban revolution to theorize and define magic realism as a formal mode “constitutively dependent on a type of historical raw material in which disjunction is structurally present; or, to generalize the hypothesis more starkly, magic realism depends on a content which betrays the overlap or the coexistence of precapitalist with nascent or technological features.”²²

It is precisely this “articulated superposition of whole layers of the past within the present” in Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo that aligns her with such committed magic realist authors as Carpentier, García Márquez, and Islas.

FEMINIST CULTURE AND MAGIC REALISM

Where there is a woman there is magic.

—Sassafras, Cypress & Indigo

What are some of the rules of the black vernacular “Signifyin[g]” formation that produces Shange's radical-feminist text, written in a magic realist style? What are the statements and concepts that inform the author's controversial “mulatta” poetics?²³

In Claudia Tate's Black Women Writers at Work (1983), Shange specifies her concern for a particular African American vernacular and “Signifyin[g]” practice:

My lower case letters, slashes, and spelling [were] influenced by Le Roi Jones's The Dead Lecturer and The System of Dante's Hell and Ishmael Reed's Yellow Book Radio. I like the kinds of diction Ishmael uses, and I like the way Le Roi's poems look on the page … I like the idea that letters dance, not just that words dance; of course, the words also dance.²⁴

Shange's African American tradition is close to music, an insight she thematized in For Colored Girls, where she uses popular Motown music, oral speech, feminist poetry, and dance to critique patriarchy in the United States. Therefore, one statement or concept that informs Shange's work in general, and Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo in particular, is her attempt to deconstruct traditional modes of representing discourse on the page. Shange's novel does not always read like a Western traditional novel, but it is designed to challenge the traditional notions of realism.

Another statement that informs the book's production is the need, according to Shange, for black women to insert themselves into the cultural conversations of U.S. history. As she said in response to the “media blitz” that followed her Broadway production, For Colored Girls “is a record of me once I left my mother's house. I was raised as if everything was all right. And in fact, once I got out of my house, everything was not all right.”²⁵ In addition, Shange believes that her generation of black women was brought up to be silent in the face of male oppression. Her mother, she suggests, failed to pass on to her certain truths about male violence. In her work, then, Shange reproduces a version of the black female experience designed to encourage women of color “to tell their stories.” Because she sees herself responsible for letting others abuse her, she now sees her power as an artist as an attempt to encourage women to refuse victimization.

Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo represents the author's commitment to radical feminism: her struggle to articulate the stories and voices of repressed and silenced black females. As Barbara Christian says of the African American women's fiction of the 1970s and 1980s, Shange, Morrison, Bambara, Walker, Lorde, and Marshall “explor[ed] these themes—that sexism must be struggled against in black communities and that sexism is integrally connected to racism.”²⁶ As Hortense Spillers suggests, the novel is structured with “the allusive echoes of the Moirae, the three women of fate in classical mythology, who weave the thread of human life, or the natural objects and substances to which the names of the sisters refer.”²⁷ In other words, Shange's narrative attempts to make a new mythos of the black female self. By way of discrete chapters on each of the three sisters, Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo, and through Hilda Effania's letters, she traces the process of change in the lives of these women.

Finally, Afro-Caribbean and Latin American magic realism inform significant parts of Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo. When asked about her use of magic realism in the novel, Shange matter-of-factly responded that her character Indigo was her attempt to “Signify” on García Márquez's wonderful character Remedios the Beauty in One Hundred Years of Solitude.²⁸ Shange's mulatta text therefore is double-voiced and talks to other works in a process of intertextual revision. Indigo is a magic realist character with a difference.

Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, published in 1982 at the peak of both the “fourth moment” of magic realism in the Americas and the women of color movement, begins:

Where there is a woman there is magic. If there is a moon falling from her mouth, she is a woman who knows her magic, who can share or not share her powers. A woman with a moon falling from her mouth, roses between her legs and tiaras of Spanish moss, this woman is a consort of the spirits. Indigo seldom spoke. There was a moon in her mouth. Having a moon in her mouth kept her laughing. Whenever her mother tried to pull the moss off her head, or clip the roses round her thighs, Indigo was laughing.

“Mama, if you pull 'em off, they'll just grow back. It's my blood. I've got earth blood, filled up with the Geeches long gone, and the sea.”²⁹

Not since the first half of Jean Toomer's Cane, or García Márquez's descriptions of Remedios the Beauty, have readers seen such an urgently passionate discourse that captures and celebrates female gender. Through etymological word-play and word associations, Shange introduces the highly charged leitmotivs that characterize Indigo's section in the novel: mouth, moon, blood, spirits, and magic. Throughout the novel's first section, she represents Indigo as in touch with her emergent female sexuality and with the beginning of magic realism, for Indigo “is a consort of the spirits.”

Like Carpentier's magical character Mackandal in El reino de este mundo, Shange's Indigo can compel the wind to blow a white woman's hat off (71-72); she can “move the razors off the roosters [and] put them in the palms of onlookers” to let them “know the havoc of pain” (44); and she can, in García Márquez's sense, “see reality in a different way, to accept supernatural elements as something that is part of our daily life.”

Indigo, as an incarnate of magic realism, thus can see things in Charleston, South Carolina, in ways that her sisters, Sassafrass and Cypress, could not. For example, Shange tells us of Mrs. Yancey's courtship by Uncle John, a local junk man and connoisseur of magic realism in the black community. Although most of their courtship is ordinary, Indigo arrives on the scene and experiences a profound transformation:

Everybody knew Uncle John lived in his wagon, but nobody had ever seen what Indigo saw. Uncle John went over to his wagon, pulled out a fine easy chair and set it by the curb, then motioned for Mrs. Yancey to have a seat. Next thing Indigo knew, he had spread a Persian rug in the middle of the street, set a formal table, pulled out a wine bucket, and started dinner on the stove at the back of his wagon. … Out of nowhere the guys from the Geechee Capitans, a motorcycle gang of disrepute led by Pretty Man, came speeding down the street. Uncle John didn't exhibit much concern about these young ruffians … He looked up, waved his hand, and the Geechee Capitans, who had never done a good turn by anybody in the city of Charleston, South Carolina, made road blocks on either side of Uncle John's parlor. …

When Uncle John pulled out a Victrola, played a Fletcher Henderson 78, and asked Mrs. Yancey to dance, Indigo knew it was time to go home. There was too much magic out in the night.

(13-14)

In this passage we see a characteristic of Shange's magic realism: her new narrative is informed throughout by an element of the unexpected, of chance, of the ordinary experience that is not ordinary, and, finally, of the opaque daily event that must be interpreted (Indigo suggests that there was too much magic in the night) to be truly seen.

But what accounts for Indigo's “consorting” with the magical, supernatural, and spiritual worlds? Shange provides the reader with two answers. First, Indigo is initiated into the world of magic realism by Uncle John when he “tells [her] some matters of the real of the unreal” (26). Specifically, Uncle John suggests to Indigo that one way of experiencing magic is by understanding the African American vernacular uses of music, especially “the blues”: “What ya think music is, whatchu think the blues be, & them get happy church music is about, but talkin wit the unreal what's mo' real than most folks ever gonna know” (27). Thus building on the rich African American blues tradition, Shange joins Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Sherely Anne Williams, Amiri Baraka, Henry Louis Gates, and Houston Baker in celebrating the strengths and beauties of the blues vernacular tradition that arises, in LeRoi Jones's term, out of the depth of the black soul.³⁰ But it must be emphasized that Shange celebrates the blues with a “Signifyin[g]” difference—the blues constitute “talkin wit the unreal.” Throughout Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, Shange shows us how Indigo “colored and made the world richer what was blank & plain. The slaves who were ourselves knew all about Indigo & Indigo herself” (40).

Shange also posits a second reason for Indigo's intimacy with magic and the supernatural. Throughout the novel, the author suggests that women in and of themselves are magical subjects. As Hortense Spillers argues, “There is a rhetoric appropriate to Shange's realm of women, a set of gestures and desires that distinguishes female from male, even though the latter is ultimately absorbed by the womb.” Indigo grounds it at a more basic gender level when she has a conversation with one of her dolls about her “Marvelous Menstruating Moments”: “When you first realize your blood has come, smile; an honest smile, for you are about to have an intense union with your magic” (19). Like many contemporary feminist anthropologists such as Carol Delaney and Emily Martin, Shange criticizes traditional understanding of menstruation not solely as the negative, polluting phenomenon described by males but as a magical and potentially positive experience with deep implications for the spiritual lives and power of women.³¹

The first fifty pages of Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, then, in magical and radical feminist rhetoric tell the story of Indigo's creating, nurturing, and celebrating her feminine essence. Clearly, one aspect of this magic realism is associated with the author's belief that Indigo is special because her gender allows her to fully experience her “blood earth.” The other element is her mastery of music, for she captured through her violin “the hum of dusk, the crescendo of cicadas, swamp in light wind, thunder at high tide, & her mother's laughter down the hall” (36). It must be stressed, however, that Shange's discussion of what accounts for Indigo's “consorting” with the magical finally leaves the reader with these questions unanswered: Why should the blues provide a privileged means of access to the “unreal”? And if the “magical” somehow inheres in an essentialized notion of femaleness, then how does Shange explain why the “source” for magic realism within the Latin American grain is emphatically male—Carpentier, García Márquez, and Fuentes?

The other major sections of Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo concentrate on Hilda Effania's middle daughter, Cypress, a ballerina who uses her training in traditional dance “to find out the truth about colored people's movements.” Unlike Indigo, who stays with her mother in Charleston, Cypress moves to San Francisco, and then to New York, using her love for dance to “take on the struggle of colored Americans” (135).

When Cypress finally settles in New York, she enters into a community of Third World lesbian dancers called the Azure Bosom. Cypress delights, for the first time, in female sexuality. Some of these women, Shange writes, “were super chic and independent ones like Celine … others rounder than Xchell and more bangled than Cypress … [There were] women like Smokey Robinson and women like Miriam Makeba” (145). As Barbara Christian has noted in “No More Buried Lives,” the Azure Bosom is “rooted in the image of the Haitian Voodun, Erzulie.”³² Shange protests the abuse of women's bodies and allows women collectively “to linger in their own eroticism, to be happy with loving themselves” (144). Yet her vision of Cypress's world is not idealized; at parties Cypress realizes that the celebrations were “more like a slave market where everybody is selling herself” (145).

Shange's radical-feminist poetics, at least in this section of the novel, bring into consideration the issues of race, class, and gender. This is especially true of Cypress's utopian dream near the end of the novel. In her dream, Cypress survives a nuclear war, and “somehow the men and women are separated.” The women survivors are “left to contend with the fruitlessness of the soils, the weight of the skies” (203). In a wonderful narrative of condensation, displacement, and revision, Shange constructs and then deconstructs Cypress's desire for an essentialized and idealist feminist world. To understand clearly Shange's cultural critique of radical feminism, let me quote from most of Cypress's dream:

Cypress was initiated into the new world—not quite herself. All vestiges of male-dominated culture were to be “rehabilitated” out of her psyche; the true matriarch was to be nurtured … But here there were no patriarchs, ordering and demanding. Here there were only Mothers and Daughters. “Mothers” were supreme; there was no higher honor than to be deemed “Mother,” yet this had nothing to do with biological offspring. Women who had no children were of a higher caste than the “bearers,” as they were called. The “bearers” were never seen in public assemblies, nor were they allowed to wear bright colors, because they might bear sons.

(203)

On one level, the creation of a new social form is explicitly drawn out in Cypress's dream vision. Women in this world might genuinely learn to love each other. But Shange's narrative is not ahistorical. Throughout Cypress's dream, the author reminds us of the painful lessons of the logic of postmodernist societies—namely, that our postmodernist culture is always a sign of the internal and superstructural expression of class, race, and economic domination.

This explains why Cypress's dream also emphasizes that the underside of postmodernism is always blood, torture, death, and horror. Thus, some of the women in Cypress's dream are “breeders,” and they make up an imprisoned class; and the majority of the bearers in Shange's brave new world are Latinas and black. Male babies are murdered, and males captured in the periphery are incarcerated in glass cages. Shange's novel thus represents the African American historical experience not as one continuous development, centered on one object, but as a double-voiced vision of the American historical past made up to different experiences. This is especially true of her sections on Sassafrass, the oldest daughter. Like Indigo and Cypress, Sassafrass is an artist—a weaver of cloth and a poet. Unlike her sisters, she desires to return to social forms and modes of production that are explicitly precapitalist:

As she passed the shuttle through the claret cotton warp, Sassafrass conjured images of weaving from all time and all places: Toltecas spinning shimmering threads; East Indian women designing intricate patterns for Shatki, the impetus and destruction of creation; and Navajo women working on thick tapestries.

(92)

Pervaded with images of weaving and symbols of kinship, the world, as Sassafrass imagines it, assumes a different social form.

Sassafrass attends an expensive boarding school in New England, the Callahan School, but she eschews traditional bourgeois ideologies by moving in with her lover, Roscoe Mitchell, in Los Angeles. Mitch, a black nationalist who shoots heroin and often imagines himself on the same bandstand with John Coltrane, turns out to be given to violence. This section of the novel is the most violent, in which Sassafrass must pay a high price for her independence. After putting up with Mitch's head-bashing for too long, she convinces him to join her in entering the New World Found Collective, a religious Afro-Caribbean commune in Louisiana. Here she is finally free to practice the Bembee religion in a community where social unity and spirituality can be achieved. In illuminating African-oriented religions like voodoo in Haiti, santería in Cuba, espiritismo in Puerto Rico, and Shango and Pocomania (both in Trinidad), Shange attempts, in this final section, to bring the history and cultural identity of black people in the Caribbean, Latin America, and U.S. Southern states closer together. At the end, Sassafrass tries “everything to be a decent lbejii, a Santera. She desperately wanted to make Ocha. To wear white with her elekes. To keep the company of the priests and priestesses. The New World Found Collective where she and Mitch had been living for over a year offered spiritual redemption, if little else” (213).

Although many readers find Shange's novel depressing (Spillers writes that her “particular strength is the lament, and the lament is an apparently limited, probably even sentimental, form”),³³ its ending is a socially symbolic celebration of the unity of black people in all the Americas. Her emphasis on the Bembee religion, on santería, and on other rituals allows for another reading of the African American historical past. In the end, Shange's description of Sassafrass's African-based religious experiences offers an alternative to the Eurocentric understanding of America. Blacks as a people in the Americas, she reminds us, have experienced a history according to different circumstances. This strong understanding of a non-European America in her narratives has helped make her work especially attractive to Cuban and Nicaraguan audiences. In a speech commemorating the fifteenth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs victory, Castro affirms Cuban solidarity with African cultures and acknowledges that Cubans are an Afro-Latin people.³⁴ Like him, Cuban and Nicaraguan readers of Shange can recognize that Cuba's revolutionary experience and black heritage constitute a bond with African and Caribbean nations.

Finally, because place and territory are crucial in Shange's work, the Caribbean should be understood not as some vague politico-geographic region but as what Wallerstein calls “the extended Caribbean,” a coastal and insular region stretching from southern Virginia to easternmost Brazil.³⁵ The Caribbean social space that Sassafrass desires at the end is the tropical belt defined ecologically or meteorologically. For Shange, then, the extended Caribbean is a historical and magical entity that can offer us a new way of imposing an imaginary coherence on the black experience of dispersal and fragmentation. Only from this position can we properly understand the traumatic character of the New World primal scene—where the fatal encounter was staged between Africa and the West.³⁶

Notes

1. For a Fanonian reading of Shange's “combat-breathing” in For Colored Girls, see Sandra R. Richards, “Conflicting Impulses in the Plays of Ntozake Shange,” in Black American Literature Forum 17, no. 2 (Summer 1983): 73-78. For a reading of Shange's “lyricism” in Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, see Hortense J. Spillers's review in American Book Review 5 (Summer 1983): 13. Although Spillers notes that Shange's narrative style is very similar to Jean Toomer's Cane, she fails to mention the cultural conversations among Toomer, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen with African and Caribbean writers living in Paris. Perhaps these dialogues may explain Toomer's lyricism in Cane and its subsequent influence on Shange's poetics. Finally, see Michael Awkward, Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision, and Afro-American Women's Novels (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), and Houston Baker Jr., Working of the Spirit: Afro-American Women's Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

2. See Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), xxii. Throughout this chapter I rely on Gates's notion of the “Signifyin[g]” vernacular tradition in African American literature and culture. Like Gates, I have elected to write the black term with a bracketed final g to connote that this word is spoken by black people without the final g, as “signifyin.” For Gates, to signify is “to engage in certain rhetorical games” (48). More precisely, “Signifyin[g]” is always “black double-voicedness; because it always entails formal revision and an intertextual relation” (51).

3. W. Lawrence Hogue, Discourse and the Other: The Production of the Afro-American Text (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1986), 7. Subsequent page references to this work will be cited parenthetically in the text.

4. Gates's notion of the double-voiced African American text relies on Bakhtin's theory of the double-voiced word. For Bakhtin, a double-voiced word is a sort of palimpsest in which the uppermost inscription is a commentary on the one beneath it. For Gates, however, the African American vernacular tradition of “Signifyin[g]” decolonizes the Western inscriptions beneath it.

5. See Perspectives, University of Houston System 6-7 (March 1984): 2.

6. Fredric Jameson, “On Magic Realism in Film,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Winter 1986): 301.

7. For its new interpretations of García Márquez, Carpentier, and magic realism, see Fernando Alegría, Nueva historia de la novela hispanoamericana (Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones Norte, 1986), 186-297. See also Roberto González Echevarría, “Carpentier y el realismo mágico,” in Donald Yates, ed., Otros Mundos, Otros Fuegos, Congreso Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana 16 (East Lansing: Michigan State University, Latin American Studies Center, 1975), 221-31; and Amaryll Beatrice Chanady, Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved versus Unresolved Antimony (New York: Garland, 1985).

8. Roberto González Echevarría, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 107-29. Subsequent page references to this work will be cited parenthetically in the text.

9. Arturo Uslar Pietri used the term realismo mágico in his book Letra y hombres de Venezuela (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1948): Alejo Carpentier used the phrase lo real maravilloso in his “Prólogo” to El reino de este mundo in 1949.

10. Angel Flores, “Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction,” Hispania 38, no. 2 (May 1955): 190.

11. Luis Leal, “El realismo mágico en la literatura hispanoamericana,” Cuadernos Americanos 153, no. 4 (July-August 1967): 234.

12. Echevarría argues in The Pilgrim at Home that in the fiction of Asturias and Carpentier there is “a primitivistic orientation” (112).

13. See Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto,” in Robert Motherwell, Dada Painters and Poets (New York: George Wittenborn Publishers, 1951), 78-79.

14. See André Breton, “What Is Surrealism?” in Richard Ellman and Charles Feidelson Jr., eds., The Modern Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 601-16.

15. Ibid.

16. Quoted in Gerald J. Langowski, El surrealismo en la ficción hispanoamericana (Madrid: Gredos, 1982), 89.

17. Emir Rodríguez Monegal, “Alejo Carpentier: lo real y lo maravilloso en El reino de este mundo,” Revista Iberoamericana 37 (1971): 619-49.

18. Alejo Carpentier, “Prólogo,” El reino de este mundo (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1967), xiv-xv. The translation is mine. Subsequent page references to the “Prólogo” will be cited parenthetially in the text.

19. Gabriel García Márquez and Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, El olor de la guayaba (Barcelona: Bruguera, 1982); published in English as The Fragrance of Guava: Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza in Conversation with Gabriel García Márquez, trans. T. Nairn (London: Verso, 1983), 54-55.

20. Fernando Alegría, “Latin America: Fantasy and Reality,” Americas Review 14, nos. 3-4 (Fall-Winter 1986): 117. Subsequent page references to this work will be cited parenthetically in the text.

21. Gabriel García Márquez, “The Solitude of Latin America,” New York Times (6 February 1982): 17.

22. Jameson, “On Magic Realism in Film,” 311.

23. For a reactionary reading of Shange's ethnopoetics, see John Simon's review of For Colored Girls in New Leader 7, no. 5 (1976), where he states: “What accounts for the … inordinate praise of too many black plays is not so much black talent as white guilt” (21-22).

24. Claudia Tate, Black Women Writers at Work (New York: Continuum, 1983), 163.

25. Ibid.

26. Barbara Christian, “Trajectories of Self-Definition: Placing Contemporary Afro-American Women's Fiction,” in Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers eds., Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 242.

27. Spillers, review of Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, 13.

28. Ntozake Shange, interview with author, 5 May 1985.

29. Ntozake Shange, Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982), 3. Subsequent page references will be cited parenthetically in the text.

30. LeRoi Jones, quoted in Michael G. Cooke, Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century: The Achievement of Intimacy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984), 22.

31. See, for example, the feminist essays by Carol Delaney and Emily Martin in Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation, ed. Thomas Buckley and Alma Gottlieb (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

32. Barbara Christian, “No More Buried Lives: The Theme of Lesbianism in Audre Lorde's Zami, Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, Ntozake Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, and Alice Walker's The Color Purple,” in Black Feminist Criticism: Perspective on Black Women Writers (New York: Pergamon Press, 1985), 192.

33. Spillers, review of Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, 13.

34. See Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Daily Report 6, no. 77 (1976): Q-1:8.

35. See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600-1750 (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 103.

36. See Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Jonathan Rutherford, ed., Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 222-37.