Summer of the Cicadas (2024)

Summer of the Cicadas [SOTC] is a project that I began ten years go. I, like the Black American writers before me, have returned to the matrilineal metaphor to explore the compromised boundaries of identity. SOTC focuses on a young woman, Viola Moon, as she tries to come to terms with who she is in relation to both familial and cultural boundaries. Viola, Vi for short, believes that she and her mother, Cecilia, have the ability to share dreams. So when Cecilia is diagnosed with breast cancer and has a double mastectomy and their relationship changes, Vi is thrown into a state of confusion. Vi becomes so obsessed with the physical amputation of Cecilia’s breasts and the severing of the maternal bond that accompanied it that she attempts to cut off her own breasts, resulting in a large keloid scar that resembles a question mark encircling her heart. The novel begins the summer after her attempted self-mutilation and subsequent stay in a facility for the mentally ill. She is released just in time to travel south and begin her tenure at a Historically Black University. Vi begins to dream her mother’s dream once at A& M University. The dream’s insistent star, a starving baby girl, pushes Vi’s fragile identity into a greater state of confusion, making a transition into the tradition-laden A&M University impossible. The contemporary work that I have found most similar to the work that I am in doing is Alicia Perry’s Stigmata. Like my Vi, Perry’s Lizzie is a young woman who is haunted by her matrilineal past, and that past places hers mental health in question for ten years. What happens to this feminist (re)imagination when time cannot be transcended, and the revisionary daughter only has her imagination and that imagination is focused on a singular present and future and the world she resides in is unwilling to make room for either? What happens when she chooses to sever herself from that past? Does it sever the future? Does it place her futurity at risk? The largest difference between my character and Perry’s is that while Perry ultimately presents a “magical” source for historical recovery, my Vi’s historical recovery is magic-less. So SOTC becomes a palimpsest, built on top of the unmothered daughter texts of black American women writers, highlighting the patriarchal tradition of honoring history. It’s those father texts that make Viola possible. SOTC asks if historical recovery is necessary, or helpful toward the being of a black American woman. Viola Moon further complicates the magical daughter/ lost mother trope by not only illuminating the long lasting effect of the social “illnesses” of racism and sexism, but she also illuminates the psychological effect of the theoretical “cures” for these –isms. SOTC represents a reading of both the unmothered texts and their fathers. Vi, the daughter of an orphaned and distant mother, must come to terms with both her physical and psychological break from the matrilineal; similar to her American literary forefathers, she hides in dark places, searching for a connection to a history that is lost. Vi sees what others don’t; the stagnancy in either generalization, illustrating what can happen to Rody’s feminist reimagination when time cannot be transcended, and the revisionary daughter only wants to focus on a singular present and future; a daughter who chooses to sever herself from the past. Does it sever the future? Does it place her futurity at risk? Vi is figuratively “smothered” by her mother’s nightmares. What Vi will discover is that her memories are not magically linked to her mother. Vi discovers that her memories are simply narratives that her mother has whispered into her ear as she slept. Her inheritance is not a disembodied place-resistant magical second sight but an oral history of a suppressed memory. So at the close of the novel, when Viola is handed a barely-alive premature child, which she is not ready to either acknowledge or mother, questions of motherhood, gender, and history, and culture are raised. And when Vi refuses to name the child, the question is not so much if the child will survive long enough to need a name, but is her survival somehow contingent on her naming. Summer of the Cicadas becomes, not only the story of Viola Ikewe Moon’s struggle to find an identity outside of those externally ascribed by her familial and community connections, but also an interrogation of how the trope of the maternal and magical recovery mitigate and complicate those connections.

History