Mama Day

Gloria Naylor
New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1988

In a world that privileges newness and immediacy, we may forget our roots—those complex strands of culture, history, and myth that define and anchor us. In Mama Day, Gloria Naylor upends prevailing notions of time, place and logic. A New York couple, Cocoa and George, travel to Willow Springs, an island inhabited solely by the descendents of African slaves and presided over by Mama Day, Cocoa's great-aunt. Facing despair and death, the couple must look beyond "reason" and rely on intuition, faith and Mama Day's mystical powers in order to survive. Drawing on Shakespeare's The Tempest and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (two other survival tales), Naylor speaks to the necessity of questioning our assumptions and valuing multiple ways of knowing. Mama Day attests to the importance of community and the abiding power of love, not only to allow us to survive, but also to give us a chance to thrive.

Luisa Giulianetti
Assistant Director, Student Learning Center

Find in your library

May 30, 2007 | Categories: 2007: Survival | Kathleen Gallagher

Welcome to Berkeley! Every summer, we send new freshmen a list of books suggested by faculty and staff from across campus. This is not an “official” list, or even a list of required reading. It’s just for you to enjoy as you wish.

This year, we asked the Cal community to recommend books—of any genre—about survival: the threats to survival, the paths to survival, tales of survival from the past, and thoughts on what it means to survive—or not. The books they recommended variously explore how humans, plants, and animals struggle to cope, and sometimes thrive, in certain environments. Collectively the list offers scientific, humanistic, social, historical, and futuristic perspectives on how this theme relates to us as individuals, cultures, species, and as a planet.

These books are all available in the UC Berkeley libraries. Since many of you will be far from campus this summer, you may want to check out a copy from your local library or buy one from a bookstore near you. We hope you’ll choose to read at least one, as a reminder that UC Berkeley is a vital intellectual community that generates and debates fascinating and important ideas.

Elizabeth Dupuis
The Library

Steve Tollefson
College Writing Programs
Office of Educational Development

Mama Day

Search

Categories

Subscribe