‘A beginning for them all’: The medieval pluriverse of Gloria Naylor’s ‘Sapphira Wade’

Abstract

This essay argues that Gloria Naylor’s (1950-2016) unpublished and unfinished novel, ‘Sapphira Wade’ (2006a), marks a significant shift in the author’s medievalism, through its allusions to a global set of medieval narratives. Naylor’s unfinished draft, in the context of her extensive research materials, places Snorri Sturluson’s Sagas of Norwegian Kings and the Vinland Sagas alongside the ancient narratives of the Sámi of northern Scandinavia; Mande oral histories of Sunjata, king of thirteenth-century Mali; and the Arabic A Thousand and One Nights. Exploring these texts and their importance to the founding of an independent Norway in 1814 and nineteenth-century West African jihad states, Naylor’s ‘Sapphira Wade’ considers both how the medieval past has been appropriated for nationalist violence and how a decentred medieval world might foster a new poetics of what it means to be human, separate from the norms of white, bourgeois masculinity.