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nge in the midst of other African American women writers’ writing of plants. As Shange’s mastery of writing, the recipes in this novel “offer ways of dealing with historical trauma wrought by Western culture”(Clark, 2007: 151). One of Shange’s major concerns lies in the act of defining the place of women, African American women in particular. Naming the character with plants and embodying the plants with African culinary practice serve aesthetic, thematic functions, allowing both author and characters to explore, among other concerns, issues of self, artistic fulfillment, and community as well as structure and style are prominent. Cooking is always practiced in personal realms of women’s daily lives, but Shange expands the possibilities of cooking into novel forms, breaking conventions of narrative. Hilda Effinia transmits and shares her recipes with her daughters. Shange stresses the uniqueness of the plant food in this novel subtly, “if I told them white folks at the Callahan School that I wanted some red sauce & rice with shrimp, clams, hot sausage, corn, okra, chicken & crab meat, they’d go round the campus saying... Can you imagine what she wanted for dinner” (Shange, 1982: 55). The white people consider Sassafrass’s requirements for food to be strange and ludicrous. However, what the white folks do not know is that the special ingredients exactly represent Sassfrass’s black identity, recording the memories of her ancestors and her nation. The plant ingredients used in different dishes for various occasions are featured with strong sense of Blackness.

Conclusion

Grounding on African American women’s everyday experience and African tradition, Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo incorporates many modes of expressions and celebrates African American women’s artistic creation. Plants, often thought as fixed and immovable beings owing to their lifeless existence are imagined as active and lively in this novel. Shange employs various plant symbols as both important part in the lives of the protagonists and significant aspects of African American culture. Each of the principal female characters is strongly bonded to the plant symbols and to an African American women’s profession.

This thesis explores the plant symbols in this novel and argues that Ntozake Shange’ s writing of plants in Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo is embodied in the hoodoo tradition, the cooking recipes, and the names of the characters, which is associated with the growth of the female characters in every aspect. Therefore, these plant symbols play an indispensable role in articulating the characters’ artistic creation, healing the effects of interlocking oppression, and recalling the female characters to the American South. Compared with other African American women writer’s writing of plants, Shange develops the plant symbols into the embodiment of African culinary practice and incarnation of African written conjuration.

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