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d get your system right” (Naylor, 1989: 51). In addition to using plants as medicine, “Mama Day” also collects plants for food and household items. While Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, with strong vibes of American botanical folklore, makes use of various plant species to take on great significance in the characters. 

2.2 Plant Symbols in Cooking Recipes

Since the 1990s, many cookbooks like The African-American Kitchen: Cooking from Our Heritage (1994) by Angela Shelf Medearis, A Taste of Heritage: The New African-American Cuisine (1998) by Chef Joe Randall and Toni Tipton-Martin, and culinary memoir such as Austin Clarke’s Pig Tails ‘n Breadfruit (2000) featured plants for dishes. These cookbooks or memoirs include recipes of the anonymous field slaves who toiled all day long only to come home and feed their own families. These recipes, containing centuries of old information about the traditional preparation of different foods in Africa, crossed the Atlantic along with the slave cargo to make up for the lack of native food for African Americans. Ntozake Shange herself surveys the recipes from different places in her If I Can Cook/ You Know God Can: African American Food Memories, Meditations, and recipes and records various plant foods. Patricia E. Clark asserts, “The language of a food recipe is not merely a set of instructions, but also contains the imperative meaning through its secondary, ‘unspoken’, aim, the consumption or the taking in of a dish, by way of a detour through its primary aim, the creation of a dish” (Clark, 2007: 153). When recipes are turned into literary texts, they can be treated as resourceful materials to study their cultural groundings. Laying claim to the tasks of gathering and preparing food, the recipes place culinary arts in the same sphere as organizing, writing, dancing, mapping, and inscribing. Every recipe with its unique ingredients catches a glimpse of the peculiarity of the African American culture. As a focal part of African American recipes, plants function as the cultural mark of the African tradition and the organic association with African American women. 

Chapter Three   Plant Symbols and Female Characters ...................... 22

3.1  Articulating African American women’s Artistic Creation ...................... 22

3.2  Healing the Effects of Interlocking oppression ........................... 25

3.3  Recalling the Three characters to the South ................... 29

Chapter Four   Shange’s Enrichment of the Cultural Connotation of Plant symbols ...................... 33

4.1  Plants as the Embodiment of African Culinary Practice ........................... 34

4.2  Plants as the Incarnation of African Written Conjuration ......................... 35

Conclusion ................................ 38

Chapter Four   Shange’s Enrichment of the Cultural Connotation of Plant Symbols

4.1 Plants as the Embodiment of African Culinary Practice

To make the text active, Shange includes many elements that deviate from conventional norms. The plant symbols in Sassafrass, Cypress& Indigo clearly place Sha本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。