Rootwork: Arthur Flowers, Zora Neale Hurston, and the "literary hoodoo" tradition

Madlyn Jablon touches upon this revising of strategies in her discussion of Another Good Loving Blues as metafiction. For Jablon, what Gates has called Signifyin(g) can also be seen as a form of metafiction inherent in African American literature, a "by-product of the contemporary [African American] writer's dialogue with literary predecessors" (4). Flowers clearly participates in this project. He acknowledges his debt to Hurston (a literary ancestor) and borrows her emphasis on orality. At the same time, he updates his storytelling to include contemporary Western metafictional techniques, inserting himself into the novel and joyfully reveling in his storytelling prowess. This blending of cultures and techniques suggests a way for contemporary African American writers to become "contemporary griots of the West," to extend and develop the "literary hoodoo" tradition and preserve its significance in the twenty-first century.

In Another Good Loving Blues, then, Arthur Flowers has created a "sacred text," one that "record[s] a culture's spiritual and social wisdom" (Mojo 97). Like Lucas Bodeen's blues piano playing and Melvira Dupree's conjuring, Flowers' novel offers redemptive possibilities for other writers, for his readers, and for his double culture. In his fusion of oral and written forms, of African and Western sources of power, Flowers has created a work that provides the same sort of spiritual uplift that his characters strive to offer: It is the story of a love that survives, infused with a metaphysic of African spirituality and narrated in a modernized griotic tradition. Like the blues, like conjuring, and like Hurston's written works in their time, Another Good Loving Blues exists in its time and place as evidence of Arthur Flowers' literary "Rootwork."

Notes

(1.) According to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s much cited discussion in The Signifiying Monkey, Signifying(g) refers to the practice by black authors of addressing and revising previous texts by earlier black writers. Signifyin(g) is "black double-voicedness, because it always entails a formal revision and an intertextual relation" (51).

(2.) Sandra Paquet also discusses how Nanny has alienated Janie from her culture in debilitating ways. While noting the importance of ancestors, however, and Nanny's failure to act as one, Paquet also argues that Tea Cake serves as an ancestor to Janie by taking her to the muck. While Tea Cake does introduce Janie to communal and tribal values formerly unknown to her, he is not her elder, and he too is out of touch with much natural wisdom.

Works Cited

Rev. of Another Good Loving Blues. Publishers' Weekly 239 (30 Nov. 1992): 35

Awkward, Michael. "Introduction." New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God. Ed. Awkward. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. 1-27.

Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1987.

Ducato, Theresa. Rev, of Another Good Loving Blues. Booklist 89 (15 Jan. 1993): 876-77.

duCille, Ann, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women's Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.