Jianxin Shi (National Cancer Institute, NCI) and colleagues performed an integrative genomic analysis for lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) patients in the NCI EAGLE (Environment And Genetics in Lung Cancer Etiology) study. This study identified several driver genes in LUAD including two novel ones. Interestingly, though, 25 percent of the patients surveyed did not have mutations in existing driver genes, suggesting that novel mechanisms were behind many of these cancers. The study also showed that the number of somatic mutations and certain other mutation types was associated with increased risk of distant metastasis.
Reema Bharti Novel 25
Gloria Naylor's first novel, The Women of Brewster Place (1982), made her an overnight success, but her third novel, Mama Day (1988), solidified her reputation as one of the foremost authors of the African-American women's fiction renaissance, along with Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, and others. Although reviewers were initially confused by the novel's mixture of realism and the supernatural, most readers consider Mama Day a powerful and richly-layered depiction of how the past and the present, the real and the unreal, the living and the dead, the natural and the supernatural converge in the lives of African-Americans.
The novel juxtaposes the story of a successful African-American businessman, George, who has grown up in New York City, cut off from any sense of where he or his people came from, with that of a young African-American woman, Cocoa, who must come to terms with her powerful ancestral legacy. Their clash and uneasy union is brought to a head when they visit Cocoa's home, Willow Springs, a magical place that holds the secrets of Cocoa's past and the key to her future.
It was in college that she first learned about the rich tradition of African-American literature. She told Allison Gloch in 1993, "I was 27 years old before I knew Black women even wrote books." Her reading of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and others, inspired her to begin writing herself. Her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place, chronicled the lives of seven very different women living in an African-American community. The success of the novel immediately made her a prominent figure in the renaissance of African-American women writers. The following year, the novel won an American Book Award, and she received her M.A. in African-American Studies from Yale University. Her master's thesis became her second novel, Linden Hills (1985), which used Dante's Inferno as a thematic and structural guide for her explication of the moral downfall of well-to-do blacks who lose touch with their racial heritage.
Naylor connects her writings by having the same characters appear in more than one novel. Mama Day first appeared in Linden Hills, and George's mother became a central character in Bailey's Cafe (1992). The Day family will reappear in a future novel, Sapphira Wade, she told Loris. In this book, "Cocoa comes back as an old woman. It's 2023." Naylor will also tell the stories of Bascombe and Sapphira Wade from 1817 to 1823. "Always in my head Sapphira Wade would be the cornerstone because she has been the guiding spirit for now close to twenty years, and now it's time to grapple with her," Naylor said. For Naylor, writing about the present and future African-American community means grappling with its past as well as the rich folklore, language, and tradition that have sustained it.
George is an engineer from New York who marries Cocoa. His first-person narration makes up about a third of the text, as he explains to Cocoa his perspective on their courtship, marriage, and visit to Willow Springs. Near the end of the novel the reader learns that George has died and that he speaks from beyond the grave.
In the first half of the novel, Mama Day helps Bernice become pregnant, performing a mysterious ritual with the help of her chickens. Her true "gift," she believes, is to help things grow. "Can't nothing be wrong in bringing on life, knowing how to get under, around, and beside nature to give it a slight push," she tells herself." "But she ain't never, Lord, she ain't never tried to get over nature."
In the second half of the novel, Mama Day must help save her grandniece Cocoa. Although she has tried to protect Cocoa from Ruby's murderous jealousy, she can only enact revenge on Ruby for poisoning Cocoa by sprinkling a metallic powder around her house, causing lightning to strike twice and kill her. She retreats to the other place, which she visits often, to learn from her Day ancestors how she can save Cocoa. While there, she finds a ledger with the bill of sale for a slave woman, her great-great-grandmother, whose name she has never known. But time has washed away most of the words, leaving only the letters Sa. In a dream, she learns the name Sapphira and that she must listen past the pain of her mothers. She realizes that Cocoa has placed part of herself in George's hands, so she must enlist his help. But because George does not trust her, he cannot bring back the symbol of life from the chickens' nests. Instead, he attacks the chickens and destroys them and himself, saving Cocoa in his own way by sacrificing himself. At the end of the novel, Mama Day is still alive at the age of 104, and she anticipates peeking into the next century before she finally dies.
Mama Day is imbued with supernatural occurrences. As part of the hoodoo religion they have inherited from their slave ancestors, the inhabitants of Willow Springs believe in the supernatural. Near the end of the novel, readers learn that George, one of the narrators, has been dead for fourteen years, and that Cocoa speaks to him regularly.
This language expresses the white world's view of Sapphira's power, but the novel goes to great lengths to demystify and present in a positive light the powers Mama Day possesses. In the world of Willow Springs, where all the inhabitants are descendants of slaves, magic and the supernatural are everyday parts of life, and Mama Day's gift is something to be respected and occasionally feared.
The novel makes a clear distinction between the kind of conjuring or hoodoo that Mama Day practices and two other kinds: the trickery of Dr. Buzzard and the evil practices of Ruby. Mama Day uses her powers for benevolent purposes, healing the sick, helping women to give birth, and helping Bernice get pregnant. As she says, she gets "joy" "from any kind of life." Her job is "bringing on life, knowing how to get under, around, and beside nature to give it a slight push." She works in concert with nature to help things grow, while Ruby uses spells, poisons, and herbal mixtures with graveyard dust to kill and drive insane the women whom she fears are after her man. The only time Mama Day kills is when she attracts lightning to Ruby's house in revenge for Ruby's poisoning of Cocoa. And while Dr. Buzzard also claims to heal, his remedies are fake, consisting mostly of alcohol and nothing of any real medicinal value. He also exploits the villagers' fears and beliefs in ghosts to hawk his charms and talismans.
For the first half of the novel, George and Cocoa live in New York, and their experiences there alternate with the goings-on in Willow Springs. The second half of the novel takes place entirely in Willow Springs, an imaginary place. The two communities provide a stark contrast. While New York is a large city, Willow Springs is a small rural island. And while New York is one of the most famous cities in the world, Willow Springs does not even exist on maps, and the inhabitants like it that way. "Part of Willow Springs's problems was that it got put on some maps right after the War Between the States."
When Mama Day first appeared in 1988, the novel was met with mixed reviews. Some reviewers had a great respect for Naylor's ambitious book and its accomplishments, while others were simply confused. Those who liked the book commented on its power to absorb the reader in its magical world. As Rachel Hass wrote in The Boston Review, "The rhythm of the prose pulls you inside the story like a magnet." And in the Los Angeles Times, Rita Mae Brown urged, "Don't worry about finding the plot. Let the plot find you." But she also admitted, "Naylor's technique can be a confusing one to read." While Brown found this difficulty to be surmountable, leaving readers with rich rewards for their efforts, others did not.
What seemed to bother reviewers most were the novel's diversity of speakers and its mixture of realism and fantasy. Linda Simon, in the Women's Review of Books, criticized Naylor for not "opt[ing] for character development in a more realistic setting." In the end, Simon felt that too many questions were left unanswered because of the novel's reliance on magic to resolve the situation. But for Bharati Mukherjee in The New York Times Books Review, it was the sections about the magical world of Willow Springs that carried the novel. Naylor "is less proficient in making the familiar wondrous than she is making the wondrous familiar," she concluded. Overall, although some reviewers found the novel confusing, many believed that Naylor had established herself as an important author with Mama Day.
In the 1990s, the novel has received substantial attention from critics and scholars who have found it a rich and multi-layered text deserving serious analysis. Some specifically deride earlier reviewers for misunderstanding the novel. Missy Dehn Kubitschek wrote in a Melus essay, for example, that "The major reviews of Naylor's 1988 novel, Mama Day, refuse in crucial ways to grant the novel's donnée, even when they are generally positive." They do so, she argues, because they oversimplify the novel's message, seeing it as belonging to "one or another overly exclusive tradition." The wide variety of analyses of the novel, which focus on many equally important aspects of the novel, attest to Ku-bitschek's claim that Mama Day is a much richer text than reviewers first realized. 2ff7e9595c
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