University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH UNIVERSITY OF GHANA, LEGON CONSTRUCTION OF FEMALE IDENTITY IN THE NEO-SLAVE NARRATIVE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF TONI MORRISON’S BELOVED AND A MERCY. BY JOSEPHINE EKUWA SAIGHOE (10551684) THIS THESIS IS SUBMITTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF GHANA, LEGON, IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQIREMENTS FOR THE AWARD OF MPHIL ENGLISH DEGREE JULY, 2018 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh DECLARATION I, Josephine Ekuwa Saighoe, do declare that, apart from references from other works which have been duly acknowledged, this thesis is entirely the result of my original research. I have neither submitted this work in part nor whole for the award of another degree elsewhere. ………………………… Date………………………… Josephine Ekuwa Saighoe (10551684) i University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh CERTIFICATION We hereby certify that this thesis was supervised in accordance with the procedures laid down by the University of Ghana. …………………….. Date…………………… DR. MAWULI ADJEI (SUPERVISOR) …………………….. Date……………………. DR. KWAME ADIKA (SUPERVISOR) ii University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh DEDICATION Who I am What I am Who I am going to be I thank you for being a part of me To my beautiful parents, Dr. and Mrs. Saighoe, for bringing me up in the way of the Lord and investing in my life. iii University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I will praise the name of God with a song, and will magnify Him with thanksgiving. Psalm 69: 30 Praise and thanks be to the Almighty God, who has been the source of my strength and whose love and grace have seen me through my post graduate education. The road has been muddy and rough but we got there. This dissertation would not have been possible without the patience, guidance, constructive criticisms and suggestions of my supervisors, Dr. Mawuli Adjei and Dr. Kwame Adika. I am grateful for everything. I would like to thank them for their invaluable advice and selfless contribution to this study. My special appreciation also goes to Orleans. I have greatly benefited from friendships with several people; Kenneth, Evelyn, Asabea, Charity, Reena, Kingsley, Joseph, Nii and others, who for brevity of space, I cannot mention. I would like to acknowledge the prayers, love and unrelenting support of my parents, Dr. and Mrs. Saighoe. Finally, I thank my siblings especially, Philip and Dominic for their contribution in diverse ways and to my family for providing me a sense of belonging. iv University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh ABSTRACT The focus of the study is to explore the construction of female identity in Toni Morrison’s neo-slave narratives, Beloved and A Mercy. Identity refers to traits and characteristics, social relations, roles and social group memberships that define who one is. Identity can be developed through the collection of features that apply to our inner and outer selves, such as skin colour, gender, profession, sexual preferences, religion, language, etc. The combination of these features then distinguishes one person from the other or a group of people from another group. The identity of the Black female was built on racial and gender stereotypes especially during the era of neo-slave narratives. The interlocking factors of race and gender that oppressed the lives of Black women in America prompted female writers like Toni Morrison to provide a self-defining voice and a collective perspective of the Black woman and her womanhood. Through her literary works, Morrison questions Black women’s stereotypical representations in dominant discourses. Toni Morrison develops her characters based on the history of slavery and illuminates the limiting constructs of race and gender. Through the lens of Black feminism theory, the study presents a discussion on the construction of female identity in the two neo-slave narratives. The study comes to the conclusion that female identity in Beloved and A Mercy is constructed through metaphors, rememory, naming and renaming, and female solidarity. v University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh TABLE OF CONTENTS Declaration……………………………………………………………………… i Certification……………………………………………………………………… ii Dedication………………………………………………………………………… iii Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………….. iv Abstract…………………………………………………………………………… v Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………. vi CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Background to the Study……………………………………………………1 1.2 Neo- Slave Narratives………………………………………………………..5 1.3 Justification of Study………………………………………………………..8 1.4 Biographical Sketch of Toni Morrison………………………………………8 1.5 Synopsis of Beloved and A Mercy…………………………………………..8 1.6 Statement of Problem……………………………………………………….13 1.7 Objectives…………………………………………………………………...13 1.8 Research Questions…………………………………………………………14 1.9 Significance of Study……………………………………………………….14 1.10 Theoretical Framework………………………………………..…………...14 1.11 Methodology……………………………………………………………….18 vi University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Black Female Identity……………………………………………………20 2.2 Review of Literature on Beloved and A Mercy…………………………...23 CHAPTER THREE: ANALYSIS ON BELOVED 3.1 Construction of Female Identity in Beloved……………………………….41 3.1.1 “Definitions Belonged to the Definer not the Defined”: A Study of Metaphor and Rememory in Beloved…………………………………………………………42 3.1.2 “Freeing Yourself was One Thing, Claiming Ownership of that Freed Self was Another”: Naming and Renaming in Beloved……………………………49 3.1.3 Female Solidarity in Beloved…………………………………………...57 CHAPTER FOUR: ANALYSIS ON A MERCY 4.1 Construction of Female Identity in A Mercy…………………………….66 4.1.1 “The Beginning Begins with Shoes”: A Study of the Metaphor of Shoe in A Mercy…………………………………………………………………………67 4.1.2 “To be Female in this Place is an Open Wound that cannot Heal”: Race and Patriarchal influence on Female Identity Construction in A Mercy………….72 4.1.3 Female Solidarity in A Mercy…………………………………………..85 CHAPTER FIVE 5.0 Comparison between Beloved and A Mercy……………………………..88 CHAPTER SIX: CONCLUSION 6.1 Findings and Conclusion………………………………………………….99 6.2 Recommendations for Further Studies……………………………………104 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………….105 vii University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1.0 Introduction This chapter introduces the study and provides the background by presenting a discussion on what identity and neo-slave narratives are. It also gives a justification for the study, biography of the author, synopsis of the two texts, statement of problem and the purpose of study. Finally, it presents the research questions that will guide the study, the theoretical framework and the methodology. 1.1 Background to the Study Identity is created through the collection of features that apply to our inner and outer selves, such as skin colour, gender, profession, sexual preferences, religion, language, etc. The combination of these features then distinguishes us from other people. It is also possible for a group of people to collect features that distinguish them from other groups. Identity can be defined as the traits and characteristics, social relations, roles and social group memberships that define who one is. Karen Cerulo (1997:1) indicates that identity represents “ideas, ideologies and ways of seeing the world around us”. Some key parts of identity are “gender, social class, age, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity” and these aspects of identity have important roles in deciding how one understands people and experiences the world. Cerulo (1997:2) goes on to say that “the study of identity forms a critical cornerstone of modern sociological thought; that is, identity studies have evolved and grown central to current sociological discourse.” Sociologists have “focused primarily on the formation of the “me”, exploring the ways in which interpersonal interactions moulds an individual’s sense of self” (3). 1 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh The identity of the female is the focal point of feminist criticism and the latter, as one of the most important issues, deals with the concept of female identity as it (female identity) appears in numerous literary, sociological, anthropological and political studies; it represents a border issue in several fields of study. Female identity can be regarded as the traits and characteristics, social relations, roles and social group memberships that characterises who the female is. Andrea Puskas (2013) adds a critical dimension to the study of female identity, she discusses various approaches that highlight the concept of female identity. In agreement with Puskas, it can be said that these varied views, when collected and amalgamated into a whole, can create a “colourful patchwork” embracing all the aspects and perspectives of womanhood. As mentioned by Puskas, the first approach in understanding female identity is the “historical perspective” and this is best articulated by the likes of Virginia Woolf, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar: They stress that women can be on the right path towards comprehending their identity and position only if they go back to the past and have a look at what happened to their mothers and grandmothers. (Puskas 2013:11) Personal historical analysis can be considered as a tool that has an impact on self-knowledge and the acumen to change the position of a person in the society. This approach is largely dependent on the fact that an essential part of the identity of the female is history. Thus, it indicates that women have absorbed certain historical models, past social roles taught and dominated by the perpetrators of patriarchy. The second approach that is discussed pertains to solving “the inferiority complex”. The approach of a feminist in defining identity foregrounds the power of a female sense or feeling of inferiority. Female writers whose works reflect this approach are African American writers 2 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. In their literary works, they are involved in showing the impact of the dominant racist and patriarchy on women: Their objectives probably root in their own experience of subordination in society and culture and they presumably aim at changing this unfair condition through a better understanding of female identity, which leads to the creation of more self-aware, determined and independent women (Puskas 2013: 12) This approach helps in appreciating female identity from the perspective that it indicates the dichotomy that lies between the way male and female see the world where the most typical characteristics of the female world which is regarded as a “minority group” are marked by oppression. Therefore, the female self-expression is always decided by a woman’s relationship with the dominant, that is, the male society. This leads to the discovery of female identity which can only be achieved through emancipating women from this inferiority complex which protests against what Puskas (2013:14) calls the “prevailing modes of the dominant tradition”, and eventually defeating the dominant standards and values. Also, identity as a “social construct” is third approach or a mode of highlighting female identity which is championed by Simone de Beauvoir. She shares the convictions of Virginia Woolf, Woolf believes that society should provide equal chances for women in order to be able to live in their full capacity. Simone de Beauvoir, however, suggests a further and broader approach to Woolf’s stance. Her highly recognised work, The Second Sex (1949), was published twenty years after Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929). In her work, Simone de Beauvoir foregrounds how female identity is socially constructed by examining the position of women in literature and she concludes that the definition of ‘woman’ is done in relation to ‘man’, and not as an independent, separate entity. 3 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh The fourth approach in highlighting female identity construction is the “collective identity and female imagination”. Explaining identity through applying and closely analysing “female imagination” is one of the most complex approaches to female identity. Several critics of feminism accentuate the significance of “female consciousness”. An example of such feminist critic is Elaine Showalter. She claims that, the “female imagination cannot be treated by literary historians as a romantic or Freudian abstraction”: It is the product of a delicate network of influences operating in time, and it must be analysed as it expresses itself, in language and in a fixed arrangement of words on a page, a form that itself is subject to a network of influences and conventions, including the operations of the marketplace” (Showalter 1987: 15). Showalter argues that the identity of the woman is not portrayed only by her relation to a male world and a male literary tradition. She deems it necessary to indicate a difference between individual and collective identity, and her idea of “female imagination” seems to be in favour of the second, expressing that individual female identity stems from the collective common female identity and experience. The focus of this study is on the Black female identity, specifically Black females of the African American variety. Black female identity captures the definition and perception of the African American woman. In this respect, authoritative scholars like Carole Boyce Davies have communicated perspectives on Black female identity. She is of the view that Black women have multiple identities and she validates her view using the “visitor’s theory”, theorising “migrancy”. The visitor’s theory refers to the “way Black women have used and negotiated other established theories such as feminism, postmodernism, nationalism, Marxism and others, to map their experiences, identities and critique” Boyce Davies (1994: 46). 4 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh The development of the identity of Black women (especially during the era of slavery) often suffered setbacks as the broader society did not give them much to work with. For instance, Radford-Hill (2002:3) explains that “history hands Black women, identities built on racist stereotypes like mammy, auntie, prissy, jezebel, sapphire, bitch, video hoe, and welfare queen”. Even today, a lot of Black women experience discrimination and disrespect in their attempt to chalk socio-economic successes. Influenced by ground-breaking works by Toni Cade Bambara, Ntozake Shange, Angela Davis, Toni Morrison, June Jordan, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde and other Black women who "broke the silence", during the period of 1980s and 1990s, African American women were able to develop a self-defining voice and a collective Black women’s perspective about themselves and their womanhood (Hill Collins 1996:1). They were able to use their standpoint to question Black women’s stereotypical representations in dominant discourses. Consequently, their ideas, convictions and experiences have garnered attention unthinkable in the past; these paved the way for young Black women to make the effort to build images of themselves that free their spirit and spark their creativity. In delving into the concept of Black female identity, it is important to consider that identity is usually predicated to determine what Black women are motivated to do, how they think and make sense of themselves and others. In most American writings, the Black female has not been depicted in her full potential or complexity. In view of this, writers like Lorraine Hansberry, Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed and Toni Cade Bambara depict the strength of Black females in their works. 1.2 Neo-slave Narratives Slave narratives refer to stories and accounts of slavery experience; they are narratives by the survivors of slavery. Gates & Mckay (1997) is of the view that slave narratives as a classical canon achieved its apex during the mid-period of the nineteenth century in the United States. 5 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Gates & Mckay (1997) go on to indicate that as each slave author wrote concerning his or her personal experiences as a slave, at the same time, he or she wrote on behalf of “the millions of silent slaves who were still held captive throughout the South”. Mostly, they (slave narratives) are from an autobiographical perspective and were about Black slaves. Examples of slave narratives are Frederick Douglas’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave written in the year 1845, William Wells Brown’s Narrative of William Wells Brown (1847), Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853) and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) written by Harriet Ann Jacobs. Slave narratives describe the physical, emotional, and spiritual suffering that the slaves went through during the period of slavery which caused them (writers of slave narratives) to resist slavery and yearn for freedom in every way possible way. The main objective of the slave narrative was to make known to all, the gripping horrors of a slave's earthly condition. As time went on and circumstances changed, the abolition of physical slavery eventually removed the necessity for slave narratives. In contrast to Classical Slave Narratives, Neo-slave Narratives refer to contemporary fictional stories of accounts of slavery. They are fictional; therefore, instead of being written from personal experience, the stories are developed by authors who combine historical information through research and a measure of fictional imagination (Lewis 2014:1). Neo-slave narratives sprang up in the 1970s and ’80s as an important form of Black-authored writing offering new dimensions on knowledge about slavery. The writers of neo-slave narratives develop the structure of their fictional works based on oral histories and existing slave narratives to make sure the stories reflect the true events in historical sense. The most obvious difference between slave narratives and neo-slave narratives is that they are from different time periods; this is to say that slave narratives were written during the period of slavery while neo-slave narratives were written much later, after the abolishment of slavery. Also, with respect to 6 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh authorship, people who wrote slave narratives were the ones who had experienced slavery themselves but neo-slave narratives were written by people who had not traditionally experienced it but they are descendants or people who felt the impact of it. Moreover, they have diverse narrators and audiences. Kalenda Eaton (2012) states that while the purpose of “the nineteenth-century slave narratives was primarily to educate a White audience about slavery, provoking and recruiting their opposition to it, the audience for neo-slave narratives includes contemporary Black readers who must come to terms with their own personal and familial histories of slavery”. Unlike earlier slave narratives written by authors such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, writers of neo-slave narratives do not focus on the abolition of slavery but on the amelioration of the traumatic wounds it left behind (Eaton 2012:2). Furthermore, it is necessary to mention that though neo-slave narratives are largely African American oriented, they (neo-slave narratives) can be found in the literature of other countries such as Britain. Examples are Caryl Phillips’ Cambridge (1991) and Bernardine Evaristo’s Blonde Roots (2008). Neo-slave narrative works such as Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose (1986), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), A Mercy (2008), Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage (1990), Thylias Moss’ Slave Moth (2004) and Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes (2007), draw on the tradition of the slave narrative but the authors revise it to satisfy the needs of a new community of readers who realise that freedom from slavery was not enough to change the experience of African Americans but constituted only the first step in the journey to full personhood. Writers of neo-slave narratives emphasise the continued haunting presence of the past, and use their works to confront readers with the antebellum period of slavery as an active part of the present (Varsam, 2014). 7 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 1.3 Justification of Study This study focuses on Toni Morrison’s neo-slave narratives, Beloved and A Mercy. Morrison was chosen because of the researcher’s growing interest in her literary works since the days of undergraduate education. Morrison frequently makes references to history in order to be able to provide background information about the time period in which the novels take place. The historical roots add more depth to the stories and make them seem more realistic. Also, this study adds fresh insights to the larger body of African American literature and the subject of female identity. The interesting thing about doing a comparative study of both books is the fact that A Mercy, which was written much later than Beloved has a time setting which predates that of Beloved. 1.4 Biographical Sketch of Toni Morrison Toni Morrison was born as Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio and she is an African American novelist, editor and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. Morrison has 11 novels to her credit: The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), Paradise (1997) Love (2003), A Mercy (2008), Home (2012) and God Help the Child (2015). These novels explore various themes pertaining to African American world and experience. During the era of racial discrimination in America, both her grandparents and her parents migrated from the South to the Northern cities where they left everything behind and built up an entirely new life. At that point in time, the passing on of the black cultural heritage to the next generation was something Morrison’s grandparents and parents found extremely important. Her parents were gifted story-tellers who used to teach their children about the family history and this provided some sort of inspiration to Morrison’s work of fiction. 8 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Morrison’s novels portray a blend of feelings, experiences and voices of people who are subject to racism in contemporary America (Albrecht-Crane 2003: 58). Several of Toni Morrison's novels such as The Bluest Eye present African American female protagonists who lose the struggle against the “double bind identity”, that is, the oppression of gender and race. The focus of Morrison's literary works is to provide a voice to the voiceless and to speak the unspeakable. In her works, the Black woman gains access to the ways of expressing her pain and releasing her painful past through the telling of her story. In Toni Morrison's novels, there is the examination and revelation of the “historical fictions and controlling myths” which create negative identities and images around Black people especially women. Morrison develops her characters in accordance to history where they operate within the limiting constructs of class, race, gender and sexuality: Her writing articulates the survival and destruction of black female subjects within a racist and patriarchal culture. She explores constructions of femininity, maternity, masculinity and sexuality in racist discourse. She also uses the themes of belonging and order, naming and memory, myth and re- memory in an exploration of African American cultural identity. (Madden 1995:4) In line with the aforementioned quote, Madden (1995: 5) indicates that “Black women have been subjected to a political, cultural and economic process of negation in racist patriarchy.” Africans and their descendants struggled to define their place in America since being forcibly taken to the New World as slaves. An essential aspect of this on-going historical struggle has been a debate over the significance of Africa in defining or understanding the identity of African Americans. Throughout the course of this debate over identity, varied political or social factions in the United States have ignored, rejected, or embraced Africa as a core element of identity for African Americans. 9 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh The evolution of the Black female identity is one that Toni Morrison holds in esteem, hence, she writes to examine and reveal “the historical fictions and controlling myths which have formed the burden of layers of negative identities and images constructed around Black women” (Madden 1995:3). The identity of Black females has always been threatened as they labour under the heavy weight of “othering” and have nothing to fall back on (12). Ghasemi (2010:1) states that “historically, the portrayal of Black woman has been limited to their maternal role and this role has been imposed on them, by the society, as their sole source of identity.” The depiction of Black women even during the aftermath of the abolition of slavery continued not to extend the horizons of the aspirations of Black women beyond their motherhood, thus, this left a lot of Black women without any sense of urgency or concern to construct their own individuality and selves. 1.5 Synopsis of Beloved and A Mercy Beloved is Morrison’s fourth novel and it was written in 1987. The setting of this text is the period immediately after the American Civil War (1861-1865). The story is inspired by the life experience of the African American slave, Margaret Garner, who was able to escape from slavery in Kentucky during late January 1865 by fleeing to the free state, Ohio. Sethe, the protagonist in the novel, is a slave who escapes from slavery by fleeing to Cincinnati, Ohio. After tasting twenty-eight days of freedom, a posse arrives to retrieve her based on the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which gave slave owners the right to pursue slaves across state borders. Sethe rather murders her daughter, who was two years at that time, than to allow her to be captured again and taken back to her slave plantation, Sweet Home. A woman presumed to be her daughter called Beloved comes back to haunt Sethe’s home at 124 Bluestone Road, Cincinnati, Ohio. 10 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Beloved is largely developed around the theme of "re-memory". Re-memory involves the remembering of memories (when a memory is revisited) and it captures the emotional and mental scars of the legacy of slavery. Re-memory highlights the characters’ search for an understanding of themselves and this describes most clearly how identities are constructed through history and through the personal interaction of histories between characters. For the slaves in Beloved, liberation from slavery involves giving “themselves back to themselves” through the process of re-claiming and naming. A Mercy is Toni Morrison’s ninth novel and it was published in 2008. It is a work of fiction that centres on the lives of slaves and slave owners. In this text, the protagonist, Florens is a sixteen year old girl who lives as a slave in the home of the Vaark family. Florens embarks on a journey to look for a blacksmith who is a skilled healer, when Jacob Vaark dies and his wife Rebekka falls ill. She falls in love with the blacksmith but their relationship has a sad end. In A Mercy, The writer presents a group of women who struggle with the affirmation of a sense of self that seeks to transcend all kinds of boundaries. A Mercy provides fresh insights into the ways in which gender and racial categories were influential at the very onset of American history. The most essential and significant two novels, among Morrison’s works, which addresses slavery directly are Beloved and A Mercy. Beloved was written before A Mercy but it covers the cessation period of slavery and the Reconstruction era. A Mercy which was written later on deals with the dawn of slavery. Nevertheless, they analyse the same subject: how slavery has had an impact on the identity of the female. According to Morrison, there were two reasons why the nineteenth-century slave narratives were written: to recount a personal, historical life that also represents the traumatic experience of the Black race, and to persuade the reader that Black people are human beings, 11 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh so slavery in all its dimensions should be abandoned. To this effect, Morrison addresses the physical and mental imprisonment of African slaves and how it still affects Black American values, identities and ideologies in her neo-slave narratives. Undeniably, the racial identity of the African American is related to the history of slavery and the effects of racial inferiority and the subordinate caste status in contemporary America. Morrison develops her characters into a web of history where they operate within the construction of class, race, gender and sexuality. Her writing shows the survival and destruction of Black female and male subjects within a racist and patriarchal culture. Madden (1995: 4) explains that “Morrison explores the constructions of femininity, maternity, masculinity and sexuality in racist discourse; she also uses the themes of belonging and order, naming and memory, myth and re-memory” in an examination of the cultural identity of African Americans. This study does a comparative study of how female identity is constructed in Toni Morrison’s neo-slave narratives, Beloved and A Mercy. The study explores the textual representations of race, class, gender and sexuality and how these representations speak to the stereotypes of African American female identity prevalent. The study does the analysis on the patterns of race and patriarchy. It examines how all these patterns in both texts highlight the construction of identity of the African American female. From the readings of both texts, it is realised that the body of the black woman is perceived as or associated with “primitiveness, savagery and sexual deviancy” inviting to both sexual (gender) and racial/ colonial conquest. The body of the African American woman is a symbolic representation of social injustice within the neo- slave narratives and it serves as the sufferer of the slave’s horrible experience of persecution under slavery. The novels bring to fore physical and psychological trauma of the Black woman as her body is considered the property of the White slave master. 12 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Four female characters namely, Florens, Lina, Sorrow and Rebekka from A Mercy and four female characters, Sethe, Denver, Beloved and Baby Suggs from Beloved are carefully studied in arriving at the outcome of the study. These characters are chosen from the texts because they are pivotal in bringing to fore how the female identity is constructed in the texts. 1.6 Statement of Problem Many renowned African American female writers have been applauded for their ability to present issues, concerning women in their works. One of such writers is Toni Morrison. In the neo-slave narratives, Beloved and A Mercy, Morrison presents thematic issues pertaining to how the identity of the female is constructed. Through some key female characters, one gets to see how some women develop individuality and selfhood for themselves against societal constructed stereotypical images of the Black woman. A number of scholars have conducted studies on both novels from diverse perspectives. However, despite the variety of opinions and responses already formed, some aspects of the novels remain under explored. This means that the debate can still be extended on different levels. Hence, this study does a comparative study of how the female identity is constructed in Morrison’s neo-slave narratives, Beloved and A Mercy. 1.7 Objectives The objectives of this study are to: 1. Discuss the construction of female identity in Beloved and A Mercy. 2. Do a comparative study of how the female identity is constructed in Beloved and A Mercy. 13 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 1.8 Research Questions In carrying out the study, the following research questions are focused on: 1. How is the identity of the female constructed in Beloved and A Mercy? 2. How is the identity of the female constructed in Beloved different from A Mercy? 1.9 Significance of Study This study is relevant because it provides fresh insights generally to the field of African American studies and specifically, the concept and dynamics of the identity (image) of the African American woman in the neo-slave narrative. Also, it provides highlights on how gender and race relations influence the construction of female identity. Finally, it makes significant contribution to the already existing stock of scholarship of revisions and analysis on the works of Toni Morrison. 1.10 Theoretical Framework The theory that is applied in the analysis of the work is the Black Feminist theory; this is because it is relevant to the study and provides the necessary methodologies in analysing the texts. Black feminism was developed as a response to feminist theories and “White (bourgeois) women's movements” that failed to include the critical discussion of racism and the general concerns of Black women and women of other race. According to Smith (1977: 27-28), the approach of Black feminist in literature “embodies the realization that the politics of sex as well as the politics of race and class are crucially interlocking factors in the works of Black women writers and this is an absolute necessity”. This is why applying the theory to 14 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh my work is crucial. It would provide further clarifications to the dynamics of the Black female’s identity in Toni Morrison’s two neo-slave narratives. To commence the discussion of the theory of Black Feminism, it is necessary to mention that it is the third wave with respect to the history of feminist politics and theory. The first wave feminism is associated with the suffrage movements of women during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This wave generally focused on the inequalities between men and women, such as the legal barring of women from voting, property rights, employment, equal rights in marriage, and positions of political power and authority. First wave theorists such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Susan B. Anthony were significant for their focus on how women’s lack of legal rights contributed to their social demotion, exclusion, and suffering. Second- wave feminism championed the cause of the liberation movements of women during the period of the 1960s and 1970s. The difference between the first and the second wave is that the second wave concentrated on fewer barriers to gender equality by addressing issues like sexuality, reproductive rights, women’s roles and labour in the home, and patriarchal culture. Theorists like Betty Friedan and Andrea Dworkin in the second wave were influential for their emphasis on women’s sexuality, reproduction, and the social consequences of living in a patriarchal culture. Lastly, third wave feminism is generally associated with feminist politics and movements that began in the 1980s till today. Third wave feminism emerged out of a critique of the politics and ideals of the second wave. Third wave theorists included Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak and these women among others were relevant for challenging the idea of a universal experience of womanhood and drawing attention to the sexually, economically, and racially excluded. Such feminists were of the view that earlier generational crop of feminists had focused, beyond justified limits, on the experiences of White, middle- class, heterosexual women, suppressing the issues concerning Black women, women from the non-Western world and LGBT women. 15 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh The theory of Black feminism is part of the third wave feminist theory and it captures class, oppression, racism and gender imbalance. They (class, oppression, racism and gender imbalance) are inextricably bound together and the way these concepts are related is referred to as “intersectionality”. The term, intersectionality, was first coined by Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989. She coined the term as part of her work in anti-discrimination law, an attempt to describe the effects of compound discrimination against Black women. According to her, each concept should be independently examined while including the interactions that frequently reinforce each other. The issue of intersectionality is often overlooked. Angela Davies, a cultural critic, activist and a scholar, was one of the forerunners who discussed intersectionality in Women, Race and Class (1981). Intersectionality can be considered as a matrix where there are multiple systems of oppressions which work together at the same time to marginalize the Black woman. The Black Feminist theory was propounded as an effort to aid in addressing the needs of Black woman. The Black Feminist theory as a revisionist theory was purposed to establish a theory which could effectively give attention to how race, gender and class were related in the life of a Black woman and to proffer solutions to curb this. Leading scholars of the theory such as Kimberle Williams, Patricia Hill Collins, Alice Walker and Angela Davies are noted for influencing the significant surge in the focus on matters regarding Black women. These theorists argue that the position of the Black woman within structures of power differs fundamentally from how White women are positioned and this dichotomy created the tag “White feminist”. This tag was used to criticize feminists who did not acknowledge intersectionality. Taylor (1998:2) opines that “the chief goal of Black feminism is to develop a political movement that seeks to build institutions to protect Black women’s minds and bodies.” Few (2007:4) also believes that Black feminist theory is a “standpoint theory” which examines the 16 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh politics of identity and the politics of location in the lives of Black women and their sense of belonging in the society. Identity is a significant issue in Black feminism because Black women wade into identity politics out of the necessity for survival. Black Feminists recognise the historical struggle of the Black woman against multiple oppressions of the intersections of race, gender imbalance, class and ethnicity in trying to reject the negative images of her womanhood. This is why Black Feminists include an activist perspective in their beliefs and ideals with the purpose of improving the image of the Black woman and empowering her. One relevant theory that was developed out of Black feminism is Alice Walker’s “Womanism” and this theory aided in an increased focus on Black women. Womanism refers to a type of feminism that recognises the abilities and contributions of Black women. As Alice Walker’s literary frontiers gained maturity and expansion, she become a matured writer and political activist. So she thought there would be the need for a movement which would differ from the general idea of feminism and would give Black women the liberty to develop their own beliefs. Walker called it Womanism .Womanism mainly deals with the concern for Black women and their responsibilities in their immediate community and global space. Walker defines a womanist as a “Black feminist or feminist of color” who has absolute love for other women and/or men sexually and/or nonsexually, she is able to appreciate and prefer the culture, emotional flexibility and strength of a woman and “is committed to the survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female” (Walker, 2003:1). Critics of Black feminism argue that racial divisions deflate the strength of the overall feminist movement. I do not subscribe to this criticism because feminist movement is supposed to address the issues of women by considering women from every colour and race. Unfortunately, issues regarding White women were over-generalised and took the front seat ignoring women from other race. This is why I believe it is not out of order that the theory 17 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh and movement of third wave feminism specifically, Black feminism, was birthed to provide some light for women of colour. 1.11 Methodology This study uses the qualitative research design as its research paradigm. Through textual analysis, the researcher seeks to answer the research questions by doing a comparative study of the construction of female identity in both texts. It examines the physical, psychological and social influence and effects of the patterns identified in the construction of identity of the female. Four female characters namely, Florens, Lina, Sorrow and Rebekka from A Mercy and four female characters, Sethe, Denver, Beloved and Baby Suggs from Beloved will be studied. These characters are chosen from the texts because through a thorough reading of the texts, the researcher believes that Morrison develops these characters to highlight the construction of female identity during the commencement of slavery and its aftermath. The language (dialogues), action, encounters and experiences of the characters chosen, that foregrounds the construction of female identity, will be carefully studied in arriving at the outcome of the study. Also, materials like research articles and reviews, which are of relevance to this study are extensively used because this affords the researcher the opportunity to be abreast of what has been done already in this domain of research and the usage of research materials helps in promoting scholarly communication. This research approach or method aids the researcher to effectively synthesise, analyse and evaluate the accumulated data and also to ensure whether the research questions have been answered in the analysis. 18 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 1.12 Conclusion This chapter introduced the study. It discussed and outlined the various segments that highlight the focus of the study. 19 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW 2.0 Introduction This chapter reviews literature on Toni Morrison’s two texts, Beloved and A Mercy, relevant to the focus of this research. The literature review will serve as a theoretical gloss in bolstering scholarly works on Toni Morrison’s neo-slave narratives. The researcher believes that the review will create a gap for the current study. How Black women are represented throughout history has affected the way Black people as well as White American society value, identify and idealize Black women in general. Toni Morrison’s writings express the personal, familial, social, historical and cultural trauma of African Americans, and ethnic Americans in general, during and after colonial America. She exposes the racist and patriarchal system by creating a detailed view or picture of the experience of the African American female during the era of slavery. Over the years, various scholars have contributed to the scope of knowledge with regards to Toni Morrison’s neo-slave narratives, Beloved and A Mercy. They have done studies from diverse perspectives on these two texts and some of these studies are reviewed below. 2.1 Black Female Identity Identity is a significant part of the existence of a human being. The features of the identity of a man or woman are dynamic and open to external influences. Identity refers to the traits and characteristics, social relations, roles and social group memberships that characterise who one is. In “Identity Against Culture” (1994) Kwame Anthony Appiah tackles identity from the perspective of multiculturalism by emphasising on the maintenance of “pluralistic culture of many identities and sub-cultures while retaining the civil and political practices that sustain national life in the classic sense” (1994:2). He probes into the semantic implication of culture 20 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh and goes on to mention that “culture” and identity may certainly conflict in the emergence of the individual. Using America as a case study, he mentions that: To speak of American society as multicultural in this sense, as composed of groups of people with distinct cultures, might seem to be, at best, confusing, at worst, actually contradictory: the American state can be multicultural; but unless Americans also share a culture, there is no American society. Such problems as flow from the coexistence of the many cultures within the boundaries of the American state are the consequence of the yoking together of societies, groups of people with a common culture and common institutions, within a single set of political institutions and in a shared social space (5). He maintains that there should be an inclusive cultural education for a pluralistic society than teaching culture only to those who belong to a particular community. He suggests that we must make the effort to achieve the difficult goal of having “a common set of institutions and a common culture in addition to the pluralistic identities of an open society” (28). In addition, in Appiah’s In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1992), he explores the nature of the racial identity phenomena in Western society; he attempts to explain the concept of race in hopes of understanding its journey into the American vernacular and societal consciousness. Karen Cerulo (1997:1) believes that “identity is characterised by ideas, ideologies and ways of seeing the world around us.” With respect to the focus of this study, a lot of scholars have made discussions on the identity development of the Black female. For instance, Boyce Davies (1994) offers harsh criticism on scholars who are of the view that in the normative context of the male identity, the tragedy of Black women’s lives and experience is that they do not have an identity. She contends that Black women have multiple identities and she validates her view using the “visitor’s theory”, theorising “migrancy”. The visitor’s theory refers to the “way Black women have used and negotiated other established theories such as 21 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh feminism, postmodernism, nationalism, Marxism and others, to map their experiences, identities and critique” (p. 46). I believe that it is a no-brainer that it is often considered that Black women have been brought (over the years) up to portray the perceived feminine qualities of compliance. And as some were able to break their shell and walk out of their forced perception, they found themselves undermined and continually on the defensive. According to Boyce Davies, such situation clouds their ability to communicate their case; in a sense that they are misdirected from the real issues at hand and cannot act decisively without criticism (while they may deal with personal and emotional conflict internally). In their attempt to publicly display such ability, they are perceived as aggressive or viewed as angry Black women. In Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature, Harris (2001) explores the late twentieth-century fictional depiction of Black women especially in movies. He emphasises that the Black woman has tolerated a barrage of violent misrepresentation “on the page, stage and screen”. In accordance to Harris (2001), one can say that it is apparent that Black women are identified as unpleasant, and aggressive, this is to say that they have not been depicted in their full potential or complexity. Harris (2001) adds that in four decades of Black literature, the Black female has been represented as “a strong Black woman” in the works of writers like Lorrain Hansberry, Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed and Toni Cade Bambara. Also, in her contribution to the conversation on the Black female identity, Ruiz (2012) focuses on the perception of the Black female’s body. She suggests that the body of the Black woman is the repository of memory thus; it becomes a cardinal aspect in rewriting Black women’s history. The body of the Black female is conventionally perceived “as strong reproductive bodies suitable for the hard work on plantations, representing the opposite of the 22 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh weakness and delicacy of the White female body (7).” At the same time, Black female bodies (during and post slavery) were connected with primitiveness, savagery and sexual deviancy, inviting to “both sexual and colonial conquest.” (8). Going further, one can agree that their bodies served as the tools for the reproduction of the slavery system and colonization 2.2 Review of Literature on Beloved and A Mercy Yuan Wang (2015) discusses the Black feminist discourse in A Mercy. From the study, the writer attempts a summary of Morrison’s Black feminism and examines its thematic significance in the novel. The kind of society constructed in the text induced the female characters to depend on themselves in order to construct their own identity. In view of this, Morrison advances to reconstruct the African American’s history and highlight the significance of constructing female identity. Wang’s work is relevant to this study because his study provides further understanding of the dynamics of gender and racial inequalities. In Wang’s study, he examines how narration, theme and language contribute to the exploration of the discourse of Black feminism in A Mercy. According to him, Morrison adopts multiple narratives in the novel and the protagonist, Florens narrates part of the text from the first person’s point of view and the rest of the narration are done by characters on the farm from the third-person point of view. The last chapter is narrated by Florens’ mother. From a personal view, I deem it that the significant quality of this narrative technique as realised from reading of the text is that the result (effect) is revealed first, and then the cause (truth) is shown layer by layer aiding in filling in the crucial backstory. Wang singles out “exploration of the real origin of enslavement” as the theme of the text. Also, almost at the end of the novel, most parts of the story are narrated by Florens; Wang analyses language use in the text from the perspective of Florens’ narration. An instance is given as she engraves her words on the wall of a secret room in Jacob’s new house and the words are her 23 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh explanation to the blacksmith after their quarrel; this act enhances the understanding of the beginning of the novel. Wang explains this instance as “her, writing or engraving was a kind of relief because of no one to confide in and she also knew no one listened to her. Though no one listened and no one understood, she needed to project her voice. This is the way for Black women to find freedom and their true selves.” Nevertheless, the limitation with his study is that it not extensive enough to cover how narration, theme and language influence the identity of the female. Jennifer Terry (2014) examines the Toni Morrison’s “preoccupation with, and reimagining of, the landscape of the so-called New World” (1). Based on scholarship that has assessed the “dominant discourses about freedom, bounty, and possibility located within the Americas”, the study identifies various counter narratives in Morrison’s fiction, tracing these through her earlier works such as Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby 1981), and Beloved (1987), but argues primarily for their centrality to A Mercy (2008). The setting of A Mercy as the seventeenth-century North America unveils colonial relations to place and examines African American experiences of the natural world. In particular, A Mercy is considered to have developed definitions of “wilderness with a sharpened sensitivity to the position of women and the racially othered” (2). This can be found in instances like the dynamics between the views regarding the environment of Anglo-Dutch farmer and trader, Jacob Vaark and Native American orphan and servant, Lina. The above notwithstanding, it is important to examine Terry’s work regarding the fact that as “a revisionary preoccupation which can be traced through novels such as Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), and Beloved (1987)” (3), A Mercy (2008) is set on the colonial eastern seaboard, it is emphasised as a main concern and forms a significant aspect of the author’s “imaginative engagement” with early America. This means that the significance of 24 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh the continent for African Americans has been scarcely explored because they were brought to America against their will and subsequently did not have access to equal forms of “belonging, ownership, and security” (4). In Terry’s study, one can argue that with a narrative presence of the seventeenth century, and encompassing the memories of characters of various gender, ethnic, and class backgrounds, Morrison develops A Mercy to offer a range of encounters with the colonial-era New World. In view of this, readers are made aware of the multiple and competing experiences of place, nature, and wilderness. In addition, the key to the text’s resolution is “the first hand inscription of the story of the slave girl Florens into the walls of Jacob’s house, “careful words” that may in the future “flavor the soil of the earth”” (Morrison, 2008:161). In connection with the protagonist, Florens’ experiences of the landscape of America are the interlocked discourses of wildness and freedom. In an attempt to understand and define freedom for herself, the African American girl (Florens) “associates it with an awe-inspiring vision of nature and choice”: I have a memory . . . To my left is a hill . . . Climbing over it all, up up, are scarlet flowers I never see before . . . The scent is sweet. I put my hand in to gather a few blossoms. I hear something behind me and turn to see a stag moving up the rock side. He is great. And grand. Standing there between the beckoning wall of perfume and the stag I wonder what else the world may show me. It is as though I am loose to do what I choose, the stag, the wall of flowers. I am a little scare of this looseness. Is that how free feels? (Morrison, 2008: 69-70). Terry does well to relate the outcome of her study to Beloved and here, one realises that through Paul D’s journey as a slave who has escaped and is living as a pauper during reconstruction period, Morrison delves into the sights of a pastoral environment and the welcome shelter it offers the refugee. Terry indicates that A Mercy draws attention to an intraracial gendered dynamics and foregrounds on “the connection between discourses of wildness and New World imperial fantasies and colonization” (16). To exemplify this, an 25 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh earlier experience of dehumanization during Florens’s journey sets up the confrontation with the blacksmith in which she is named “wild”. Although Florens is given shelter in the home of a widow and her daughter, she is met with suspicion from others within their Quaker community. Due to her physical “racial” difference, the villagers are afraid of and hostile towards her, and associate her with “animality” as well as evil: “I have never seen any human this black” (Morrison, 2008:111). Another point of this paper is that in A Mercy, Morrison highlights the “various interactions with the natural environment and revisits myths of the American landscape, extending and developing preoccupations” introduced in Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, and Beloved. It is in the nature of the young African American woman Florens that one finds the author’s most powerful reimagining of the New World encounters. “Florens’s solitary journey recalls aspects of the pioneer struggle; her experience of nature, sometimes terrifying, sometimes inspiring. Morrison rewrites those narratives of self-actualization tied to dominant racial ideologies and masculinity”. In an instance where Florens names herself wilderness, Morrison shows “how discourses of the wild have been employed in othering and subjugating certain peoples” (18). In a study on Beloved, Jodaki, Abdol Husein & Vajdi Asrin (2014) examine the text from a post- colonial theoretical angle. The critics consider the text as “a novel of ambivalence and resistance which questions the established boundaries between Self and Other” (1). In the research, there is an attempt to examine the novel based on theories by Homi K. Bhabha, poststructuralist theorist who disagrees with the “notions of fixed identities, undermines the binary opposition between oppressed and oppressor” (1) and highlights the role of language in constructing identities. To make a case point, Jodaki et al focus on “the unhomely nature of the colonial world and the ambivalent nature of colonial relationships in the text”, and to this, they posit that this leads to resistance on the part of the colonized. Undeniably, Homi Bhabha 26 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh is one of the key theorists in postcolonial criticism who has propounded a set of concepts, such as: “Hybridity, Mimicry, Ambivalence, the Uncanny, the Nation, Otherness, etc. to postcolonial theory”. All these concepts illuminate how the colonised people fought against the unsecured power of the coloniser. Against this background, Jodaki et al consider Morrison’s Beloved as a deconstructive reply to western canonical texts. Beloved presents a historical setting of unhomeliness as experienced by the slaves. The imprisonment or settlement of slaves is a consequence of willing or unwilling movement from a known place to an unknown location. With reference to the ambivalent nature of resistance, Ambivalence simply refers to having two opposing feelings at the same time, or being uncertain about how one feels. To further explain, it is the “fluctuation between one thing and wanting its opposite” (2). To buttress this point, Jodaki et el give an instance of the ambivalent nature of rebellion and resistance as seen in Sixo’s resistance, first in physical resistance and then in a song. It is also seen in Sethe and the Sweet Home’s men’s attempt to escape and Sethe’s infanticide. To this effect, “the coloniser’s superiority is disrupted by both the ambivalent nature of colonial relationship and resistance” (3). Inasmuch as Jodaki et al conduct a significant reading of Beloved by using Homi Bhabha’s post-colonial concepts such as ambivalence and unhomeliness, his exposition with respect to the text, in the discussion/analysis, (which is supposed to be the chief thing in the study), is considerably little compared to the discussion of the background and concepts of Homi Bhabha. Examples of critics who actually give general hints of the image of the female are Parvin Ghasemi & Rasool Hajizadeh (2012). They are of the view that history shows that “the portrayal of Black women has been basically depicted in terms of their maternal role and this defined role which has been imposed on them became their sole source of identity carved by the society” (1) . The motherhood of Black women has been culturally and historically 27 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh mythologised. Such myths define Black mothers as matriarchs who are “selfless, all embracing, demanding nothing or little, and totally self-sacrificing creatures whose identities” (1) cannot be separated from their nurturing services. Nonetheless, the mother figures in Morrison's works tend to undermine these assumptions dictated by the society. The majority of the mothers in her novels are often “independent, strong, determined (to a degree that they are sometimes abusive), and self-seeking” (2). While Toni Morrison considers motherhood as an essential experience for women, she is of the view that the roles of women in the society should not be limited to motherhood, nor does she restrict motherhood to biological maternity. Gang Xu (2014) explores the strategies of Morrison in the construction of Black subjectivity and a new history in Beloved. He applies the “New Historicism” theory to examine the way in which Morrison unveils the traumatic history of Black Americans and “the cracks in colonialism and hegemony in Beloved, thus, subverting the master discourse and breaking down the Black people’s identity which is marginalized, and finally reconstructing African American’s culture and their subjectivity” (1). In Beloved, the historical past and the present living condition of the African Americans are the cardinal issues in. To this effect, Morrison, according to Xu, uses her literary discourse “to reproduce a new history” which Xu reckons that Morrison considers the new history constructed in Beloved as a true reflection of the Black American history that was once camouflaged or concealed by the mainstream society of Whites in America. The significance of Xu’s study is that one is able to comprehend the historical underpinnings of Morrison’s Beloved and how this facilitates the cure for the psychological trauma of the Black folks and a call on her people to find their lost cultural roots in order to rebuild their “ethnic consciousness” (2). 28 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh In the same vein, Xu examines the effects of slavery, “both on the psychology of individuals and on the larger patterns of culture and history” (3). In an attempt to apply New Historicism to the analysis of the construction of history and Black subjectivity in Beloved, Xu considers the effect of loss of language among the African Americans. For instance, Sethe was culturally familiar with the language used at that time, unfortunately, after several years passed, she was not able to remember her native language. “The loss of language is a representation of the kind of cultural devastation experienced by the slaves”, therefore, one can see that “colonialist cultural strategy results in Black slaves’ amnesia concerning African native language and traditional culture” (5). In another dimension, Xu reiterates the issue of selling Black people to America and the fact that slavery facilitated their loss of African names. For instance, the brothers in Beloved, Paul A, Paul F and Paul D have their names suffixed by only an initial for differentiation. This marks them as the property of another, hence, “slaves who have lost their African names cannot be accepted by the Whites and this makes them lose connection with their own culture” (3). In light of this, it is normal for descendants of slaves to want to not remember that slavery ever existed. Also, he is of the view that Morrison coins a word “rememory” in Beloved, which is often used by Sethe to show her feelings regarding the past. According to the study, rememory can be defined as “the recurrence of the activities of the past and in the process of rememory, each character begins to realize who is doing what”. With regards to Morrison, the concept of rememory has a semantic implication which is beyond the personal. In deconstructing history, Black people question the disremembered past because the past endured by them is based on the absence of self-determination. With respect to the text, Xu articulates that “through remembering and interrogating the disremembered past, former slaves develop some fresh understandings of the long history of slavery’s destruction; therefore, these understandings are essential for them to claim ownership of that freed self” 29 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh (10). Again, Xu maintains that Morrison’s aim is to reconstruct the slave history and culture of the African Americans from the slaves’ perspective and to provide a voice for the Black people whose stories are silenced. In this way, Black Americans in these contemporary times will be able to “confront the history of slavery in order to address its legacy, which manifests itself in on-going racial discriminations and discords” (11). Parvin Ghasemi & Rasool Hajizadeh (2012) indicate that Morrison revises the concept of Black motherhood to reflect a bigger picture of womanhood and this becomes a defining major step towards correcting the historical records concerning black maternity. (1) Examples of such revisions are found in the likes of Mrs. McTeer (Their Bluest Eye), Eva, Helene, Hannah, Nel (Sula), Pilate, Ruth (Song of Solomon), Baby Suggs and Sethe (Beloved). They attest to the uniqueness and individuality of mothers. However, Morrison insists that what makes these women remarkable individuals rather than stereotypes are “their actions and reactions during the time of adversity” (2). Forced by an oppressive social system which considers them only as “the nurturer, protector, and servant of their children, they go to any length to perform their motherly duties” (2). Developing female characters from mere stereotypes of matriarchy to self-proclaimed individuals shows that Morrison's maternal figures do not confine themselves in the stereotypical ideology of Black matriarchy which accept certain characteristics attached to Black females; characteristics which provide justification for oppression and submission. Black female characters in Morrison's literary works try “to maintain their own identities in spite of the socially defined notions of conventional motherhood” (3). Ghasemi & Hajizadeh’s study does well to explain the fact that as Morrison’s women challenge the patriarchal stereotyping of women, they defy the social and economic oppression which forced them into submission since slavery and made serious attempts at recreating their own distinct individualities and destinies. 30 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Moreover, according to Rennet Samson & C. L Shilaja (2012)’s study, one can reckon that based on Morrison’s Beloved and A Mercy, she writes novels to construct a communal memory for her readers and characters. Communal memory forms an integral part of the two novels and it is necessary for the provision of historical and cultural context, but also for reversing the shame and stigma which the system of slavery has inflicted on African- Americans. In this respect, sharing stories and exchanging experiences through interactions with one another prove to be a source of enrichment and healing, as we find in the neo-slave narratives, Beloved and A Mercy. Morrison’s opinion of communal memory can be considered as something which is “entirely cross-cultural; it is a culture which is built from integrated and mutually influencing African and American cultural strands, which together create a new and distinct culture” (5). Samson & Shilaja also focus on how healing is experienced through communal memory by bearing witness to the lives of slaves which have remained untold or unremembered. They contend that the plots of Beloved and A Mercy explore the various ways in which story sharing facilitates the restoration of healing. Therefore, small stories are shared to the extent that they collectively construct subject positions for themselves. Samson et al (2011) also emphasize that healing is attained through the characters sharing their past experiences with one another; thus, the characters experience a collective healing by expressing their pain and learning to realize and cope with it. Communal memory is exposed in Beloved and A Mercy through the protagonists who unravel the untold histories through sharing the stories. The lack of knowledge about family and communal histories leaves the two young protagonists, Denver and Florens in Beloved and in A Mercy respectively, spiritually lost and detached from either the Black or White communities. To this effect, both girls are forcibly isolated from their past without understanding the reason for their isolation. Nevertheless, with the companionship of others, Denver and Florens are 31 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh encouraged to visit their painful past. Denver pieces her history together by learning it from grandmother Baby Suggs and Sethe. The pieces of the story must be carefully pieced together by the reader and at the same time, the impact of Morrison’s fiction becomes the communal work both of the reader and the author. Similarly, Florens, the protagonist in A Mercy, isolated from her mother, is bereft of any history. In addition, Maxine L. Montgomery (2011) undertakes a study of Toni Morrison’s A Mercy with respect to “its engagement with tropes of migration, exile and home” (1). From the research paper, one can see that it is a build-up on the scholarship of critics such as Paul Gilroy, Homi Bhabha, and Carol Boyce Davies in respect to the argument that A Mercy re- echoes the “essentialist model of double consciousness”. According to Montgomery, Morrison’s novel considers “tropes of migration, exile and home in ways that encourages a re-examination of the seventeenth century journey to America (the period of slavery)” (1). In A Mercy, as Florens goes on a journey in search of the blacksmith who is also a healer, Lina, who serves as a mother figure to Florens, offers her a pair of Vaark’s boots and puts a letter from Rebekka Vaark inside the shoes. Lina’s kind gesture is supposed to facilitate Florens’s journey. Montgomery considers Florens’ evolvement in the perilous journey as symbolic of ways that inspires a rethinking of colonial inscriptions of time, space, and identity. In view of this, Morrison’s novel sets “the foundation for a fuller and more nuanced reading of America’s national history and its diverse citizenry” (2). The themes of migration, exile and home are cardinal ideas in the concept of double consciousness. As the African slaves are made to experience forced migration and exile, America becomes their new home. These slaves already have a cultural consciousness of their own, however; they have no choice than to adapt to their (Whites) culture in diaspora. This creates ambivalence in their consciousness. 32 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Geneva Cobb (2011) considers Morrison’s A Mercy as a demonic parody. A parody refers to a satirical or humorous imitation of a serious piece of literature or writing. Through the adoption of the essential narrative device of parody in A Mercy, Morrison addresses the early colonial experience in Virginia and Maryland. In her "visionary force" of excavating the past like an archaeologist, recreating and teaching the often disregarded reality of the minority American experience, Morrison depends on the ancient genre of parody which is a derivative of the Greek term "parodia”, This term found its earliest expression in Aristotle's Poetics. Cobb indicates that in the aftermath of postmodernism, parody and deconstruction became the literary tool with which writers like Morrison armed themselves with to delve into the past and recreate history, and then questioned the legitimacy of established “truths” of the master discourse on race and class, as seen in A Mercy. Cobb backs this statement with Robert Phiddian (1997)’s assertion that in reconstructing and deconstructing American history as it pertains to the lives of the subjugated other, “Morrison lifts parody from the "dust-bins" of literary history, and the genre re-emerges as the secret sharer of deconstruction”. Parody is often politically motivated because it questions the “accepted and conservative borders of authority, debunking artificial boundaries, and unmasking false constructions of race, class, and gender identity, as that which occurs in A Mercy” (3). In A Mercy, through the presentation and debunking of established truths of the master discourse, parody keeps the memory of the experience alive; “this is because it is constantly before us to recall, to remember, so that we will not repeat history and its trauma” (3). In spite of the interesting dimension of parody that Cobb adds, her study concentrates largely on the aesthetic use of parody by Morrison and includes little on how the usage of parody is significant in the portraying issues concerning the experience of the female. Cantiello (2011) adds an interesting twist to the interpretation of A Mercy; she does a reading and reviewing of the text in the age of Obama. A Mercy was published in America on 33 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh November 11, 2008, one week after Barack Obama's election, According to Cantiello, A Mercy has become connected with the election of Obama through reviews, commentaries, interviews, and public "conversations" that Morrison gave in some of the major cities in America. This phenomenon is to some extent, not surprising, particularly because of Morrison's role as a highly recognised intellectual figure and her endorsement of Barack Obama in January 2008. Cantiello describes A Mercy as a “pre-racial text” and this means that the setting of the novel takes place before “slavery and race were inextricably linked and racism got institutionalised” (1). This can be explained that Morrison's characters are all raced, nonetheless, the semantic implication of these identities is different from what they would mean in 1850 or in 2008. Cantiello also adds that Morrison unveils the socio-historical construction of racial categories. Through Florens, Morrison treats how “visual markers of race, particularly color, became the primary organizing principle of human difference in the late seventeenth century” (2). Simultaneously, Sorrow reflects the presence of “multi-racial” people in North America since the period of colonization, “a fact that concealed the development of the Black/White binary but one that also undermines it”. Sorrow’s “amorphous identity within the text and in the reviews illustrates that racial categorization is unstable and shifting, as is the concept of itself” (7). Regarding the text, Morrison articulates that she developed the plot of the text to not reflect the relationship between slavery and African Americans and to reveal that there was a time in which anyone from any race could experience slavery. Morrison does this by inserting some characters “whose economic and slave statuses disrupt conventional alignments between racial location and relative freedom” (7). Also, “Morrison does not just dislodge the alignment between race and slavery; she also inserts the possibility of a myriad of different labour arrangements in this ad hoc America” (8) 34 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Fatma Taher (2011) examines the psychological trauma of the repression that women experienced during the early days of the slave trade in the United States. The writer adopts a feminist approach as the study attempts an analysis on “how far the notion of sisterhood, motherhood and mutual female support help in solving female psychological and social dilemmas and how far it helps in their actualization and survival” (1). Firstly, based on Henry Louis Gates’ assertion on Morrison’s usage of the American experience as the basis for a representation of humanity, Taher makes a significant statement worthy of intellectual consideration; according to her, Morrison’s works should be not be limited to the area of the Black experience, they should rather be considered form a more “universal perspective to encompass humanity in general and the female experience in particular”. It can be said that the assertion highlights the fact that her (Morrison) works are a simulacrum of the shared human condition which engages with and transcends the lines of gender, race and class. A number of studies conducted have approached Morrison’s works from a post-colonial perspective. Nevertheless, feminism seems to fit more as an approach, since almost all of her books deal with liberating women from oppression regardless of their colour or race. Morrison has shown great concern throughout all her works with the study of women’s lives, sufferings, and achievements. In affinity with Cobb (2011), Taher also expresses that instead of creating women that fit into a specific setting, or stand as an archetype for a specific purpose, Morrison presents her readers with realistic women who embody “the essence of the Black female experience as a member in the Black community” (2). Morrison adopts two major feminist concepts: sisterhood and motherhood, to develop her vision of how they would survive this physical and psychological trauma. At first, they resort to sisterhood as a medium through which they share each other’s pain and sufferings and it is sisterhood rather than friendship that was significant in maintaining their relationship. In A Mercy, Florens, Rebekka, Lina and Sorrow 35 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh are the women in Vaark’s household and each of them carries a hidden tragedy and represents a side of the psychological trauma. It is very difficult for them to escape their past no matter how many times, or how hard they try. The four women feel the need to support one another, as well as to make crucial decisions on how they would survive. These female characters in A Mercy invest much time, energy and passion in the formation of “women centered” relationships. They did so to oppose the deprivation that in their own ways, each and every one of them experienced in a patriarchal society where Vaark is the center to which they all hold and the nucleus around whom they revolve. When Lina, Rebekka, Florens, and Sorrow support each other in different ways, they establish solidarity that makes them more capable of moving on in life. With respect to motherhood, mothers’ love direct the events, mothers take painful decisions. Obviously, it was a mother’s decision to give up her daughter (Florens) as partial payment of a debt, before the beginning of A Mercy, and this eventually forms the girl’s future and destiny. She protects her from what she has been through as much as she liberates her own mind from the dominating fear and apprehension for her daughter’s future. Similarly, this love also drives Sethe in Beloved to take the life of her daughter to protect her from slavery. Therefore, in an attempt to find a way out of the mortifying feeling of deprivation and abandonment, Florens develops a daughter-mother relationship with Lina. This bond highlights the duality in the motherhood experience in A Mercy as much as in the African American culture in general. Additionally, this shows that a mother is not only the one who gives birth. Every woman can be any child’s mother, and “if anything binds women together, it is the mothering of a child, each other, and consequently the community” (8) To add, nothing is more refreshing in A Mercy than Sorrow’s motherhood experience. Overwhelmed by the blows life dealt her, Sorrow rebaptizes herself “Complete” when she gives birth to a daughter. Her story is about the tragedies that shaped her past. The clearest, most important, and most significant is 36 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Florens’s attainment of change, fulfillment, and the identity and individuality at the end of the novel. Her emotional reunion with her mother shapes her new self. Her self-fulfilment reflects the African American cultural code that women are only empowered by and through motherhood. Taher’s study of A Mercy from a feminist point of view and examination comes in handy to this study because she foregrounds the notions of motherhood and sisterhood concerning the understanding of women’s state. Sandy Alexandre (2011) analyses Beloved in the light of the “gender and iconography in the representations of violence” using “the tree”. Toni Morrison puts into perspective, Black men and women’s “provocative perceptions of each other in critical tension” (1). According to her, Morrison’s novel “capitalizes on the simultaneous gender neutrality and semantic multiplicity of the tree images associated with both forms of victimage” (1) in order to eschew any assumed hierarchy of Black oppression, which might “privilege riveting instances of male victimization as the emblem of that oppression over instances of female victimization often viewed as less noteworthy” (1). To explain this, Alexandre claims that in Beloved, Morrison draws on the historical fact that both male and female slaves experienced cruel punishment on trees, at trees, and on wooden derivatives of trees such as whipping posts. Tree imagery can be viewed as a means to express “the elusiveness or instability of gender in relation to the slave as property and the theoretic of terror in the racist imaginary.” (2). In other words, tree imagery symbolises “a male-female continuum between assaulted Black slave bodies.” The tree imagery in Morrison’s novel has garnered critical attention and the one which is largely examined is the tree on Sethe’s back. The scars of tree at her back are as a result of violence she experiences in the hands of schoolteacher. In Alexandre’s study, the only negative semantic import of the tree metaphor which is violence, is examined. This is where Lorie Watkins Fulton’s study (2005) becomes significant as she is able to examine the often neglected details of other tree images in the novel. Fulton argues that “trees 37 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh represent, alternately, positive and negative meanings throughout the course of the novel” and the reason can be explained that their (tree images) growth signals the inevitable changes which are both good and bad. Linda Krumholz (1992) examines historical recovery in Beloved. The study seems to suggest that in Beloved, Morrison redevelops American history through the lens of actions and “consciousness of African-American slaves rather than through the angle or perspective of the dominant white social class” (1). Morrison emphasises on how history-making facilitates “a healing process for the characters, reader and the author” (2). In Beloved, Morrison develops an affinity between “the individual processes of psychological recovery and a historical or national process” (3). This means that an individual’s success in psychological recovery is aided by history. In the novel, Sethe, the central character describes “the relationship between the individual and the historical unconscious”: If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place-the picture of it-stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened. (p. 36) The above quote clarifies the fact that “Sethe's individual memories exist in the world as fragments of a historical memory” (3). This shows that Sethe's journey to healing in Beloved and her learning process which come into terms with her past are models for the readers who must confront Sethe's past as part of their own past. In addition, Krumholz indicates that Morrison employs the “ritual” as a model for the healing process. Here, rituals function as “formal events in which symbolic representations such as dance, song, story, and other activities-are spiritually and communally endowed with the power to shape real relations in the world” (3). The important aspect of the ritual of healing, 38 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh which is Sethe's "rememory" of and confrontation with her past-and the reader's ritual of healing correspond to the three sections of the novel. In part one, the arrival first of Paul D then of Beloved, bludgeons Sethe to deal with her past in her roles as a slave and as a mother. The second part which consists of the movement from the period of fall of 1873 to winter explains Sethe's period of atonement, during which she is enveloped by the past and secluded in her house with Beloved, who forces her to go through suffering of all the pain and shame of the past over and over again. Therefore, Beloved manifests as the “repressed memories of slavery”, both for the characters and readers (5). Finally, the third part is Sethe's ritual "clearing," in which the women of the community aid her in casting out Beloved. In analysing historical recovery in Beloved, Krumholz considers the text as the Trickster of History. “The trickster tale has long been a part of African and African-American story- telling and the trickster has been evoked as a deconstructive force in culture and in texts; these tales are also employed in healing processes” (1). As Beloved (the eponymous character) becomes the trickster of history, she symbolises the past and catalysis of the future. She symbolises the affliction and guilt of the past and at the same time, the power and beauty of the past. The spirit of the past has taken on a personality in this novel and as it has been made apparent, the personality is Sethe’s child, Beloved. In view of this, “Morrison makes the writing of history a resurrection of ancestral spirits, the spirit of the long buried past” (2). Therefore, by situating Beloved in the tradition of trickster tales, one sees how “her narrative strategies derive from the multiculturalism of the American novel, as well as from the African-American storytelling tradition” (4). Krumholz’s study is essential in a sense that one sees how Morrison recreates our relationship to history and through the character Beloved, she leads the reader through a painful and emotional healing process which leaves the reader with a haunting sense of the depth of pain and shame suffered in slavery. She (Beloved) is the forgotten spirit of the past that must "beloved" even if it is unlovable and elusive. 39 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Studies as seen in the reviewed literature tend to generally focus on Morrison’s Beloved and A Mercy from varied perspectives over issues such as motherhood, migration and home, communal memory through storytelling as a way of healing and others. These tendencies create a huge gap because the foregoing review shows that comprehensive and exhaustive comparative study has not been done on the two texts from the perspective of the construction of female identity and how resistance and survival strategies were employed to ameliorate their situation of negative representation in Beloved and A Mercy. What I am presenting is a fresh insight to the on-going conversation about the female identity construction in African American Literature specifically, Toni Morrison’s neo-slave narratives. 2.3 Conclusion This chapter has reviewed some related works from various distinguished scholars regarding Black female identity. Other scholarly works done on Toni Morrison’s neo-slave narratives, Beloved and A Mercy, from different perspectives were also reviewed. 40 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh CHAPTER THREE: ANALYSIS OF CONSTRUCTION OF FEMALE IDENTITY IN BELOVED. The Odyssey of the African-American throughout the twentieth century has been one of loss and reclamation. It’s about reclaiming those things which were lost during slavery. August Wilson 3.0 Introduction The focus of this chapter is to examine the construction of female identity in Toni Morrison’s neo-slave narrative, Beloved. The analysis discusses the image and definition of the woman. It delves into the woman’s innate idea of who she is and what she is capable of versus how the society sees her. It foregrounds the textual representations of race, gender and sexuality and how these representations speak to the stereotypes of African American female identity prevalent. 3.1 Construction of Female Identity in Beloved. Morrison explores the traumatic history of the African Americans in Beloved. Xu (2014) reckons that Beloved is a combination of doses of history, ghost story and historical fiction. The novel conveys the comprehension of the effect of slavery both on the psychology of the individuals and on the larger patterns of culture and history. The interesting thing about this text is the critical attention it garnered and how scholars from diverse literary schools tried to give interpretation to it from varying perspectives. The core issue in her literary works is not to just retrieve the details of African American history but to choose which of the details of the past are beneficial or relevant to the community in the wrestle to build a liveable life in the present and future. In an interview with Time Magazine’s Bonnie Angelo during the year 41 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh of 1989, Morrison indicates the desire of her nation to not express the memory of slavery. She explains that the experience of slavery is something that no one wants to remember; nonetheless, Beloved jolts its readers to recognise the existence and conditions of slavery in a nation that would prefer to forget that such an atrocity was ever committed. Beloved and Sethe are considered as representations (of the past) to rememorise colonial past, which brings about the return of history. 3.1.1 “Definitions Belonged to the Definer not the Defined”: A Study of Metaphor and Rememory in Beloved. Language is the medium through which meaning is shared and one is able to make sense of his or her environment/surroundings. Language goes beyond simply spoken words; it captures visual images, bodily gestures or written words that are interpreted. In language, Hall (2003:1) indicates that “sounds and symbols are used to represent to others, our concepts, ideas and feelings; therefore, representation through language is essential to the processes by which meaning is produced”. Hall further explains that “we give objects, people and events meaning by the frameworks of interpretation which we bring to them” (1). The creative use of language is one of the reasons why Toni Morrison’s works are critically acclaimed especially when it comes to the use of metaphors. In Beloved, a number of metaphors are used to give a variety of symbolisms or representations but with respect to the context of this study, the metaphor of the tree will be discussed. The tree metaphor in the text is worthy of critical attention. After a careful reading, it can be said that the tree is an extended metaphor. An extended metaphor, which is also referred to as a conceit or sustained metaphor, is defined as the exploitation of a single metaphor at length throughout a story or a poem. Such metaphors are foregrounded in new ways hence, from the 42 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh researcher’s perspective, the tree metaphor is emphasised and deployed in different ways in the text. The tree metaphor is first mentioned in a conversation between Sethe and Paul D: Something in the house braced, and in the listening quiet that followed Sethe spoke. I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms (p.18). Whitegirl. That’s what she called it. I’ve never seen it and never will. But that’t what she said it looked like. A chokecherry tree. Trunk, branches, and even leaves. Tiny little chokecherry leaves. But that was eighteen years ago. Could have cherries too now for all you know (p. 19). As events unfold in the text, one gets to know that the white girl Sethe refers to is Amy Denver; a person whom Sethe names Denver after because of the help she gave during the birth of Denver: Ït’s a tree, Lu. A chokecherry tree. See, here’s the trunk- it’s red and split wide open, full of sap, and this here’s the parting for the branches. You got a mighty lot of branches. Leaves, too, look alike, and dern if these ain’t blossoms. Tina little cherry blossoms, just as white. Your back got a whole tree on it (p. 97) However, Paul D does not see the tree whatsoever: What tree on your back?... What tree on your back? Is something growing on your back? I don’t see nothing growing on your back (p. 19). Paul D refuses to see what Amy Denver saw and what Sethe had begun to believe she was carrying on her back for all of these years. His refusal may be as a result of the passage of time. With respect to this, Alexandre (2011:10) believes that Paul D’s refusal can be considered as “his aptitude for asserting his masculine presence by fighting and eradicating 43 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh the obstinate thorns in Sethe’s flesh.” Here, the “thorns” as Alexandre suggests, refer to the baby ghost and the dendritic scars on her back. Despite the fact that Amy Denver opts to see nature, a tree, when she looks at her (Sethe) whipped and bleeding back, she cannot help but acknowledge the artificial workings of a man who “planted” the tree: “whoever planted that tree beat Mr. Buddy by a mile” (pg. 98). The text reveals that the person who planted the tree was Schoolteacher. Schoolteacher was the caretaker of Sweet Home and he is described by Sethe as a “little man. Short. Always wore a collar, even in the fields” (pg. 45). The tree was “planted” as a result of an operation Schoolteacher performed on Sethe’s back in an effort to determine how much she resembled an animal. Hence, the image of the female is likened to an animal. For instance, in a narration by Sethe, she recalls an episode with Schoolteacher: Schoolteacher was standing over one of them with one hand behind his back. He licked a forefinger a couple of times and turned few pages. Slow. I was about to turn around and deep on my way to where the muslin was, when I heard him say, “No, no. That is not the way. I told you to put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right. And don’t forget to line them up” (p. 236) The metaphor of tree invokes the horrific forms of violence committed against Sethe as Sethe’s identity is reduced to that of an animal (because the tree was as a result of an operation Schoolteacher performed on Sethe’s back in an effort to determine how much she resembled an animal) when Schoolteacher continues to degrade her. In view of this, the tree which is in the form of a scar puts a label on the Black slave and this reflects a sign of ownership by the White master. This is to say that, the scar of tree is a form of mind and body control in order to reassert the dominance of the White masters and demoralize slaves like Sethe. Kirby (2014: 2) is of the view that the construction of a false animalistic image of Sethe echoes J. M Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). In Coetzee’s novel, the empire, a governmental entity which represents white supremacy, has captured barbarians 44 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh from a distant land. As they are brought up for public viewing, the colonel refers to them as barbaric enemies. The use of tree as a symbolism to explore and debate physical and sexual violence committed against women’s bodies is certainly not new especially since the urge to connect female imagery into the natural landscape has long been a literary trope. For instance, in the myth of Daphne and Apollo and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 AD), women are turned into trees in order to “deflect salacious attention and sexual violence from their bodies” (Alexander 2011:3). No wonder that Morrison, a student of Classics, would evoke this ancient use of tree symbolism for her feminist project. She invites her readers to appreciate the tree metaphor on Sethe’s back as a “filter through which we recognise and misrecognise” Black women (Mitchel 2002:175). This metaphor aids the reader to realise the abuse of Black women and its location on Sethe’s back encourages the reader to assess the value of discretion; of not making a spectacle of oneself in (especially in an age when black women were viewed as a spectacle). The Chokecherry tree at the back of Sethe serves as a metaphor for the physical and emotional and mental damages of slavery experienced by Sethe. A tree usually symbolises life. However, in this context, the tree on Sethe’s back is a metaphor for the haunting memory that can never be erased. It becomes part of her identity. She “carries” the tree on her back to express the pain “the other mothers and daughters bore through the history of the slavery” (Jodaki, & Vajdi: 2014); in other words, the tree serves as a generational bond between Sethe, Beloved, her mother and all of African American mothers. It is symbol of communality and transforms a story of pain and oppression into one of survival. This suggests that Sethe’s tree depicts the connection between her and her literal kin to her broader family, “the sixty million or more” (preface of Beloved); the tree can be considered as a relation of her immediate 45 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh community to the broader community. The concept of rememory in relation to the construction of identity will be discussed in the following paragraphs. The issue of rememory is very crucial when it comes to identity in Beloved because it is essential for former slaves to claim “the self that is no self” (Jodaki & Vajdi, 2014:4), that is, identity denied during the system of slavery and yet to be claimed during the post-slavery period. “Rememory” is a word coined by Morrison. Xu (2014) defines it as the recurrence of the activities of the past. While the past is being constructed, history is deconstructed, and in all these processes, African Americans are able to cross-examine the disremembered past because the past tolerated by them is based on the absence of self. For further clarification, Madden (1995:8-9) explains that rememory aids in depicting clearly how: Identities depend on and are constructed through history and through the personal interaction of histories between characters… The construction of a slave identity is challenged through rememory. This involves the regaining of the ability to construct meaning through language. The unspoken is spoken and so recreated. In Beloved, through a remembrance and cross-examination of the disremembered past, former slaves are able to develop some fresh comprehension of the long history of slavery’s deconstruction. The comprehension is crucial for them to be able to claim ownership of their freed selves. Through the memories of the past, these former slaves were able to develop a discourse of their own regarding what truly happened. Consequently, this enabled them to develop subjectivity. Rememory is used by Sethe to express her feeling about the past: 46 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Somethings go. Pass on. Somethings just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there (pg. 44). Sethe uses this term in a conversation with Denver: Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on, So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It’s never going away. Even if the whole farm- every tree and grass blade of it dies… So, Denver, you can’t never go there. Never. Because even though it’s all over-over and done with-it’s going to always be there waiting for you. That’s how come I had to get all my children out. No matter what (45). From the above extract, Sethe mentions the composition of rememory as she reluctantly recalls the past to Denver. Sethe is reluctant because, according to her, for the purpose of focusing on and building a future and gaining a selfhood, one would need to forget about the past: To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at a bay. The “better life” she believed she and Denver were living was simply not that other one. The fact that Paul D had come out of “that other one” into her bed was better too; and the notion of a future with him, or for that matter without him, was beginning to stroke her mind. As for Denver, the job Seth had of keeping her from the past that was still waiting for her was all that mattered (pg. 53). 47 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh I tend to disagree with Sethe because the past is crucial to the future. Rememory has the power to effect the healing of individuals and the African American community and also, aids them to strengthen their identity through the reconstruction of the past. Memory is a baffling concept that the writer captures through the complex layering and interweaving of her narrative structure. In this respect, rememory becomes a revisionary process of memory, that is, it enables one to see things for what they were and not for what they thought them to be at that time. In other words, it constitutes the processes of seeing things again through the lens of present circumstances and measuring the value of events of the past in order to build a foundation for living in both the present and the past simultaneously. With Beloved, Morrison believes that it is feasible to come back from the recess of history to exorcise one’s ghosts. Here, apart from Beloved being Sethe’s daughter, she is also the ghosts of those sixty million and more slaves who perished during the Middle Passage and slavery. It is worthy to note that the union of the past and present reflects the idea or quality of the “Sankofa bird” in the Akan language “which means returning to your roots, recuperating what you have lost, and moving forward” (Woolford 1994: 103). In effect, according to Morrison, it does not seem just a question of nostalgia for the past, but it is necessary to retrieve it in order to enable us comprehend our present better. In all these, one can aptly say that rememory is a method in which one can use to find his or her bearings and identity in a historical context. Nevertheless, Denver wants to remember the past in order to be transformed. She keeps asking Sethe to tell her stories of the past especially about her (Denver) birth: She told Denver that a something came up, out of the earth into her-like a freezing, but moving too, like jaws inside… And now the part Denver loved the best: 48 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Her name was Amy and she needed beef and pot liquor like nobody in this world… I am having a baby miss (pg. 39/40). In the extract, Sethe narrates to Denver how Amy Denver found her when it was time for her to give birth to her (Denver). It is one of Denver’s favourite narrations because she gets to hear of how the White girl she was named after, Amy Denver, finds Sethe and helps in the delivery of baby Denver. A careful examination of the character of Denver indicates that she successfully separates herself from Beloved’s identity by accepting what occurred in the past but Beloved is stuck in the past, eternally nursing grievances against Sethe, and so is banished from the present. This emphasises one of the most important lessons Morrison teaches, that we can only progress in life when we come to terms and accept all of who we have been and who we are. 3.1.2 “Freeing Yourself was One Thing, Claiming Ownership of that Freed Self was Another”: Naming and Renaming in Beloved. Naming in the construction of identity has always been a key subject in the African American tradition due to the fact that the act of naming is akin to the exercise of power. The slaves lost their African identities when they were enslaved and renamed with their masters’ identities upon their arrival in America. In her literary works, Morrison gives critical attention to how Africans lost their names through the institution of slavery, which in turn created “a loss of connection with their ancestry” (Beaulieu, 2003: 171). White people defined their (Black people) existence by giving them new names in order to reinforce oppression and ownership. As Black people were sold to work on American plantations as slaves, they were deprived of their African names. The slave owners often replaced their (slaves) original names with what can be termed as code names. For instance, in Beloved, Paul A Garner, Paul F Garner and Paul D Garner are brothers who bear their owner’s surname, “Garner”. They have the same 49 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh names but for differentiation sake, their first names are followed by different letters for each of them. On the issue of naming in the construction of identity, Neal (1999:52) asks: “Does the name determine the status or reality of a thing?” In other words, does a name have the power to create an identity? Through a critical lens, it can be concluded that based on some of the scenes in Beloved, Morrison believes that names do have the power to create an identity. Considering the slaves in Beloved, freedom from slavery includes “giving themselves back to themselves by process of reclaiming and naming” (Madden, 1995:9). Concurring with Madden, Bailey and Hall (1992:13) also state that “the struggle is not simply to recover ourselves in past histories but to produce ourselves as new subjects.” Just like Sorrow in A Mercy, Baby Suggs in Beloved is a character who believes that absolute freedom needs to be accompanied with an exchange of a slave name for a name that bespeaks or expresses a liberated self. When she gains freedom and Mr. Garner is taking her to the Bodwins, the subject of her name comes up in a conversation: Mr. Garner, she said, why you all call me Jenny? Cause that what’s on your sales ticket, gal. Ain’t that your name? What you call yourself? Nothing, she said. I don’t call myself nothing. Mr. Garner went red with laughter. When I took you out of Carolina, Whitlow called you Jenny and Jenny Whitlow is what his bill said. Didn’t he call you journey? (pg. 174/175) Baby Suggs felt it was absolutely necessary for her to bear the name her former husband gave her because the sign of true liberation came from her name change. However, Mr. Garner advises her to go by her white name, Jenny Whitlow: Well, said Mr. Garner, going pink again, if I was you I’d stick to Jenny Whitlow. Mrs. Baby Suggs ain’t no name for a freed Negro (pg. 175). 50 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Baby Suggs prefers to keep her name change, “maybe not, she thought, but Baby Suggs was all she had left of the husband she claimed” (pg. 175). Just like Baby Suggs, freed slaves deemed it unnecessary and inappropriate to still bear the names of their former owners, thus, a lot of them took other surnames and this was considered as the first sign of freedom (Benston 1990:152). The act of renaming facilitated the fight for liberation and identity of the Black Diaspora. Baby Suggs’s name is intertwined with her identity. Her name “Baby Suggs” becomes significant later in life for as it reflects on her taking care of so many babies such as Denver, Howard, Buglar and Beloved. In this respect, Jimenez (2002: 528) indicates that: Older women assumed the role of mother or mama to all the children under their care, biologically related or not… additionally, during slavery and the decades following, grandmothers were the family and community healers. Speight (2017: 6) further explains that her name “Baby Suggs” has effect on her being in a sense that “Baby” invokes her gentleness which she employs constantly to serve others. Sethe is fondly reminded of how Baby Suggs massaged her neck shortly after Denver’s birth and this makes her crave for her mother-in-law’s gentleness: Just let me feel your fingers again on the back of my neck and I will lay it all down, make a way out of this no way. Sethe bowed her head and sure enough- they were there. Lighter now, no more than the strokes of bird feather, but unmistakably caressing fingers (pg. 112). As her name reflects, her gentleness enabled Black characters like Sethe to let go some of their anger and emptiness in the face of an excruciating agony, and turn that energy to making “a way out of this no way”. This triggers a slow and gentle but significant healing process from physical and mental wounds. As a result, Sethe gains the confidence to be strong as she faces her free identity and the future life she will have to make for herself (Speight 2017:6). Baby Suggs is able to fulfil the responsibilities that come with being an African American grandmother. From Jimenez indication above, it is apparent that Baby 51 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Suggs performed such roles as well as unofficial preacher who preaches the message of self- love and she opposes the message of slavery which condemns the victims of slavery as less humans. She encourages the other members in her community to construct their own identity through self-love: “Here,” she said, “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ‘cause they don’t love either. You got to love it, you! And no, they ain’t in love with your mouth… No they don’t love your mouth. You got to love it. This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved (pg. 108). Baby Suggs and everyone within the walls of 124 feel alienated in the community. In the text, one realises that the inhabitants of 124 are ostracised for making an attempt to construct their own African American identity in tandem with denying the cultural inscription forced on them by the White society. This explains the fact that Baby Suggs and her community are resented for making the effort to become individuals rather than cultural lemmings. Moreover, what the act of renaming does is to allow the construction of a new identity and this act occurred among a large number of people from both the mainland of Africa and the diaspora. Mphande (2006:5) reckons that “renaming among African Americans started at the very dawn of American history”. In Mphande’s study, he comes up with some reasons why a lot of African Americans had to rename themselves; (a) some of the people who were repatriated to Africa reclaimed African names (b) the movement of Pan Africanism urged people to adopt African names in order to identify more closely with African culture (c) there 52 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh was also the reason of African American cultural nationalism and the rise of the cultural activism and institutional outfits such as “Kwanza” and “June Teen”. The most apparent outburst of the reclamation of African names happened with the Civil Right movement in the 1960s, this was during a period where Black activism was at its peak. It is worth mentioning that the large number of high profiled personalities who engaged in this activity made the process a prestigious one. Examples of such high profile people are as follows: Ntozake Shange Nguni (formerly Paulette Williams), Cade Toni Bambara (formerly Miltona Mirkin), Kwame Toure (formerly Stokley Carmichael), Afeni Shakur (formerly Alice Faye Williams), Malcom X/ El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (formerly Malcolm Little), and from Africa, Johnstone Kamau became Jomo Kenyatta. The case of Malcolm X is quite peculiar as not only did renaming afford him a distance from the identity of slavery which his birth name denoted but also, through it (renaming), he also took on the identity of the Moslem faith. The life of Malcolm X is a story of identity transformation. Peckham (2009:4) believes that the most significant part of Malcom’s identity is his decision to change his surname from “Little” to the variable “X”. As explained in The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965): Your slave master, he brought you over here, and of your past everything was destroyed. Today, you do not even know your true language. What tribe are you from? You would not recognize your tribe’s name if you heard it. You don’t know nothing about your true culture. You don’t even know your family’s real name. You are wearing a white man’s name! (Autobiography 258) Malcolm gets rid of the White man’s name “Little” and replaces it with “X”. In view of this, the “X” unnames the colonial representation located in the cultural identity that narrates “the Black subject” as the “other”. Nevertheless, the act of renaming is something that W.E.B Du 53 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Bois seems not to be a fan of. In 1928, he gave a reply to a the young Roland Barton who had written a letter expressing his satisfaction and support of the effort within the African American community intended to shed off the term “Negro”. In From Black to African American: A New Social Representation (1999: 76), Gina Philogene explains that Du Bois’ criticism of renaming stems from the fact that he believes that name changing cannot be a replacement for the real action that needs to be put in Black activism. Du Bois writes: Suppose now we could change name. Suppose we arose tomorrow morning and lo! Instead of being “Negroes,” all the world called us “Cheiropolidi”— Do you really think this would make a vast and momentous difference to you and to me? Would the Negro problem be suddenly and eternally settled? Would you be any less ashamed of being descended from a black man, or would your schoolmates feel any less superior to you? The feeling of inferiority is in you, not in any name. The name merely evokes what is already there . . . a Negro by any other name will be just as black and just as white; just as ashamed of himself and just as shamed by others, as today. It is not the name—it’s the Thing that counts. (76) A lot of scholars have criticised Du Bois’ response for missing the point. For instance, in Blue Veins and Kinky Hair: Naming and Colour Consciousness in African America (2003) Obiagele Lake opines that the intention behind renaming is not to make African Americans appear less despicable or inferior to the Whites but to facilitate a collective consciousness. To explain further, name changing is aimed at revising how African Americans see themselves and not how others see them. In Beloved, Beloved is not given any opportunity to name or rename herself. “Beloved is a mysterious woman who arrives at 124. She goes through a variety of identities as an infant, a sister and a lover” Jodaki, & Vajdi (2014: 25). According to Jodaki & Vajdi, in The Location of Culture (1994), Homi Bhabha examines Beloved’s character as: 54 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh A daughter who returns to Sethe so that her mind will be homeless no more; she is the sister that returns to Denver, and brings hope of her father's return, the fugitive who died in his escape, and she is the daughter made of murderous love who returns to love and hate and free herself. Her words are broken, like the lynched people with broken necks; disembodied, like the dead children who lost their ribbons. Milne (2012) suggests that Beloved’s inability to have a specific name: Gestures back to the impossibility of language to truly capture all that Beloved represents gestures back to the impossibility of language to truly capture all that Beloved represents——-the agony of the Middle Passage, the grief for children prematurely lost to slavery and death, and the “too thick” love of a mother who learns through Baby Suggs “that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children” (194, 28). The abstractness of Beloved is seen in her first physical encounter, as she mentions no name given to her at birth but the name bought for her tombstone through Sethe’s humiliation: What might your name be? Beloved, she said, and her voice was so low and rough each one looked at the other two. They heard the voice first- later the name. Beloved. You use a last name, Beloved? Paul D asked her. Last? She seemed puzzled. Then “No,” and she spelled it for them, slowly as though the letters were being formed as she spoke them (pg.64). Milne (2012:6) further suggests that the depiction of Beloved is “necessarily dense and intricate because of the weight of representation placed upon the character.” Even though her name which is at the same time a noun and adjective, title and epitaph, the opening of a prayer and, as the book’s last word, a goodbye, Beloved refuses easy categorisation because the loss that her whole being and name represents cannot be retrieved. 55 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh A particular female character worth considering in the text whose name reminds the reader of the impact of stereotypical discourse in the colonial world is Sethe’s mother. She is identified by a circle with a cross burned beneath her breast. This makes a physical and psychological mark on her. The significance of this mark is to identify and brand the slaves as the possession of their slave masters. Her (Sethe) mark and other marks on the bodies of the slave can be considered as both signified and signifier. They are the signifier because the marks announce to other slave owners that these people are their properties. Nevertheless these scars and marks mean more than the ownership they signify; the scars on Sethe’s body, her mother and other slaves show that the writing on the bodies of Blacks is a signifier of construction of identity. In this respect, explaining further, Jodaki & Vajdi: 2014 indicate that since “the identification of the “other” is also an identification of the self, the writing on the bodies of Black people is not considered only the construction of the Black identity but also the creation of White identity which is clearly demonstrated in the character of Mr. Garner. In the text, Mr. Garner refers to the Sweet Home’s males as men: The restraint they had exercised possible only because they Sweet Home men- the ones Mr. Garner bragged about while other farmers shook their heads in warning at the phrase. “Y’all got boys,” he told them. “Young boys, old boys, picky boys, stroppin boys. Now at Sweet Home, my niggers is men every one of em. Bought em thataway, raised em thataway. Men everyone.” “Beg to differ, Garner. Ain’t no nigger men.” “Not if you scared, they ain’t.” Garner smile was wide. “But if you a man yourself, you’ll want your niggers to be men too” (pg. 12/13) The extract above together with receiving marks from the other slaver owners signifies the process of identification. Durkin (2009: 178) explains that “the crucial point here is that in 56 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh constructing the Other’s identity, Mr. Garner is constructing his own identity and his ability to develop his identity is also severely limited as long as he continues to call Sweet Home males men.” Therefore, this label is his “oddity” among his contemporary Whites; it distinguishes him, thus, Garner remains a "marked" man. 3.1.3 Female Solidarity in Beloved Female solidarity aids women to take countermeasures against and counteract the effects of gender and racial discriminations. In enjoying female solidarity with one another, Black women develop bond for the purposes of comfort, security and the capacity to turn to her own gender for love and support. Black women who practise female solidarity are able to leave together in harmony, interact effectively with each other in order to know more about themselves and their identities in the world around them. The idea of female solidarity among Black women is part of the process of redefining the Black woman’s place within the society and culture and this redefinition has been the focus of many Black female writers such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange and Zora Neale Hurston. These writers are involved in fighting cultural stereotypes of Black female experience; they discredit these stereotypes by developing new alternative images in the attempt to intensify the Black female consciousness. In line with female solidarity, Alice Walker as a womanist shows female characters in the context of the fight against patriarchy to promote identity. As a Black writer, she depicts what it is to be a Black woman in a male dominated world. The issue is being a Black woman means to be exposed to the oppression of a racist society and the dominance of her own race. In effect, considering the lives of Black women, Tanritanir & Takva (2017:2) maintain that to be a Black woman is more difficult than to be a woman. Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) details the defiance and survival of females through strong female solidarity. In the text, Celie 57 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh is in close solidarity with other females and through this, she acquires freedom and strength to own her real identity. Celie, Shug and Sofia portray a firm solidarity to aid them to overcome the impediment of feminine capability. Just like The Color Purple, Morrison’s Sula (1973) and Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place (1982) are significant examples of feminist writing that voices how female solidarity facilitates the self-actualization of women and help them regain their identities as independent women. The Black women in The Women of Brewster Place support each other by sharing stories and experiences. Also, Nel Wright and Sula Peace in Sula develop a strong friendship that enables them to construct their identities. Also, Adjei (2008) discusses female solidarity in Amma Darko’s works. According to Adjei, Darko through her “narrative postures and significations” carves negative identities for men by depicting them as irresponsible, crass, drunkards, rapists, worthless and wicked in order to shake the patriarchal status quo (3). In view of this, Adjei (2008) opines that Amma Darko bashes her male characters with the intention of highlighting the subjective female viewpoint which eventually translates into female solidarity. Just like in A Mercy, Beloved also captures the issue of women reclaiming their lost reconnections by framing new bonds with other women around them. The significance of female solidarity is that it is a way of ameliorating how they (women) are negatively perceived in the world they live in. In Beloved, female solidarity is largely achieved through mother and daughter relationships. The mother-daughter relationship between Sethe and Beloved forms the nucleus of the novel but there are also other cases of female bonding and solidarity such as the relationship between Sethe and her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and the bond between her (Sethe) and her other daughter, Denver. In addition, in the end, the community of women who help Sethe’s family activate consideration in terms of female solidarity. 58 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh As Morrison captures the damaging effects of the institution of slavery on the identities of these females, she also shows how connections formed by the females promote survival and healing among them. At this point, one can reflect on these thought-provoking arguments; firstly, how slavery can deny one’s human status through negative definitions and secondly, how the lasting impact of slavery still ruins one’s inner self-hood and limits freedom even when the external factor or force has disappeared. These two essential points can be clarified through Sethe. This is to say that years after the abolition of slavery, Sethe strives hard to separate herself and family from the wider society in order to protect her children from the damage which it could bring to them. The separation from the society affects the personality of her daughter, Denver, a lot. She grows up to be troubled and lonely: But Denver was shaking now and sobbing so she could not speak. The tears she had not shed for nine years wetting her far too womanly breasts. I can’t no more. I can’t no more. Can’t what? What can’t you? I can’t live here. I don’t know where to go or what to do, but I can’t live here. No body speaks to us. Nobody comes by. Boys don’t like me. Girls don’t either (pg. 18) This is why she was happy with Beloved’s arrival. Denver felt that with Beloved’s arrival, she had found someone who would understand and share a bond with her. Hence, Denver did everything possible to please her: Four days she slept, waking and sitting up only for water. Denver tended her, watched her sound sleep, listened to her labored breathing and, out of love and a breakneck possessiveness that charged her, hid like a personal blemish Beloved’s incontinence (pg. 67) “Come in my room,” said Denver. “I can watch out for you up there.” No moment could have been better. Denver had worried herself sick trying to think of a way to get Beloved to share her room (pg. 83). 59 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Just like Florens’ mother in A Mercy, Sethe is chained to the events of her past and this is why she probably tries hard not to talk about or remember the past. Florens’ mother and Beloved’s mother gave up their daughters for sale and death respectively in order to save them. However, these unpleasant decisions by both mothers leave them (Florens and Beloved) with a damaged perception of their identities and self-worth. The critical perspectives coalesced in my discussion regarding the significance of female solidarity in the construction of female identity explores varied aspects of mother-daughter relationships and their interactions with their community. In view of this, with respect to Sethe being the main subject, it necessitates a comprehension of her dual identity as a daughter and a mother. Lilvis (2013: 4) reckons that: Sethe does not only intertwine her sense of self with the identities of her children; her real and imagined relationships with her mother additionally shape her past, present and future. With respect to Sethe’s background, not many aspects of her family background are revealed; her parents are not named. Sethe has vague memories of her mother and she was nursed by another woman on the plantation where she was born. By being a mother to her children, Sethe makes the attempt to bring into her present reality, the physically and emotionally fulfilling mother-child relationship she never experienced (especially with Beloved) during her early life due to slavery. Sethe remembers her biological mother who was simply known as “Ma’am”. As she shares stories of her childhood with Beloved and Denver, she highlights on the physical and maternal disconnection between she (Sethe) and her mother: I didn’t see her but a few times out in the fields and once when she was working indigo. By the time I woke up in the morning, she was in line. If the moon was bright they worked by its light. Sunday she slept like a stick. She must of nursed me two three weeks- that’s the way the others did. Then she went back in rice and I sucked from another woman whose job it was. 60 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh So to answer you, no. I reckon not. She never fixed my hair nor nothing. She didn’t even sleep in the same cabin most nights I remember. Too far from the line up, I guess (pg. 75/76). From the extract, it is apparent that Sethe’s mother did not give her any physical, emotional and maternal support as expected of her. Sethe only remembers her nurse, Nan, who provided the much needed maternal bond when she was a baby. As a mother who defines herself through her maternal bonds, when these bonds are tested and pushed to their limits, Sethe makes difficult choices. Sethe chooses to demonstrate her motherly love to Beloved by killing her in order to prevent her from experiencing the trauma of slavery. The trauma of slavery is so devastating that Sethe never wants her children to suffer the same fate, hence, Beloved’s death. One gets petrified of the damaging effects of slavery especially on mothers, as seen in Sethe’s narration to Paul D: “After I left you, those boys came in there and took my milk. That’s what they came in there for. Held me down and took it.” “They used cowhide on your?” “And they took my milk” “They beat you and you was pregnant?” “And they took my milk!” (pg. 20). In the instance above, Sethe recounts how she was deprived of the milk meant for her baby. Schoolteacher’s boys stole her milk and Sethe was affected by the trauma so much that it was difficult for her to overcome it. At this point, Sethe’s milk symbolises her motherhood. Among the trauma she has been through as a slave, she losing her milk is the event that seems to shatter her the most; from this point, the relationship between Sethe and her daughter is broken. This is because, generally, mothers are able to develop maternal bonds with their babies largely through breast milk. Not only does milk helps a mother to transfer affection to a baby, also, it symbolically transfers identity and culture. Therefore, losing her 61 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh milk breaches her identity as a mother and the mother-daughter relationship she tries to establish. To explain further, the interpretation of milk can be connected to identity construction and the legacy of the nurturing of female solidarity. Sethe is unable to properly articulate a justification to the intensity and “pure intentions” of her love for Beloved. Hence, when language becomes inadequate in clarifying the unspeakable pain behind the choice she made, she chooses to tell stories: It became a way to feed her. Just as Denver discovered and relied on the delightful effect sweet things had on Beloved, Sethe learned the profound satisfaction Beloved got from storytelling. It amazed Sethe (as much as it pleased Beloved) because every mention of her past life hurt. Everything in it was painful or lost. She and Baby Suggs agreed without saying so that it was unspeakable; to Denver’s inquiries Sethe gave short replies or rambling incomplete reveries. Even with Paul D, who had shared some of it and to whom she could talk with at least a measure of calm, the hurt was always there- like a tender place in the corner of her mouth that the bit left. But, as she began telling about the earrings, she found herself wanting to, liking it. Perharps it was Beloved’s distance from the events itself, or her thirst for hearing it- in any case it was an unexpected pleasure (pg. 72/73). In view of the extract above, the legacies of these stories and the choices influence the consciousness of the children left in their wake. For instance, at some point in the text, there is a reversal of roles; Denver ends up mothering Sethe after Sethe’s attempt to provide an intense “maternal love” for Beloved: Beloved You are my sister You are my daughter You are my face; you are me I have found you again; you have come back to me; you have come back to me You are my Beloved You are mine You are mine 62 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh You are mine I have your milk I have your smile I will take care of you (pg. 266/267) The extract is part of a poetic structure in the text. The poetic structure details a conversation between Sethe and Beloved, as Sethe attempts to hold on to the last shreds of sanity with regards to justifying what happened in the past; she tries to give reasons for her brutal but love-driven choices. Going on, it seems Sethe rewrites her history by imagining how the future would have been with Beloved. She tries to rekindle a maternal bond with Beloved. However, the “maternal bond” turns out to be toxic as Beloved drains Sethe’s physical, mental and emotionally energy, and almost kills her: Then the mood changed and the arguments began. Slowly at first. A complaint from Beloved, an apology from Sethe. A reduction of pleasure at some special effort the older woman made (pg. 296). In any case she substituted a snarl or a tooth-suck for waving a poker around and 124 was quiet. Listless and sleepy was hunger Denver saw the flesh between her mother’s forefinger and thumb fade. Saw Sethe’s eyes bright but dead. Alert but vacant, paying attention to everything about Beloved- her lineless palms, her forehead, the smile under her jaw, crooked and much too long- everything except her basket-fat stomach. She also saw the sleeves of her own carnival shirtwaist cover her fingers; hems that once showed her ankles now swept the floor (pg. 298) Consequently, Denver leaves 124 and her mother behind in order to rescue her. In the process of her rescue attempt, Denver discovers a community of mothers: Denver knew it was on her. She would have to leave the yard; step off the edge of the world, leave the two behind and go and ask somebody for help (pg. 29). 63 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Denver’s development regarding recognising her selfhood begins with her relationship with her mother, Sethe. Denver stepping in to rescue her mother from Beloved becomes a point where she is challenged to be responsible for her family and this indicates a transformation from being a girl to becoming a woman. What’s more, as a Black mother, Baby Suggs, has eight children with six fathers. She is not given the opportunity to say goodbye to two of her children as they are sold into slavery whiles they were still young. She has to deal with the sexual desires of a White man in order to be able to keep her third child, who is taken away from her eventually. In this respect, it is realised that the female is identified by a paradox which is part of her image or definition. The paradox is that the African American woman’s body is despised and considered as ugly but at the same time sexually desired. Inasmuch as both African American men and women suffered the same violence (with respect to their bodies) during the period of slavery nonetheless, the body of the African American woman suffered worse, especially sexual exploitation. Like Baby Suggs, a lot of black females during the period of slavery, suffered from the loss of their children as they were sold as commodities. The portrayal of the separation and destruction of familial bonds influences female solidarity as mothers, daughters, sisters and grand-mothers with shared experiences come together to ameliorate their wounds and resist their negative identities. 3.2 Conclusion From the discussion in this chapter, one can see that in Beloved, female identity is constructed through the use of the tree metaphor, rememory, naming and renaming, and female solidarity. Toni Morrison develops her female characters from mere stereotypes of maternal force to self-proclaimed individuals and this shows that Morrison's female figures do not restrict themselves by blindly following the ideology of Black womanhood which 64 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh assumes certain features attached to Black women, features which are used to justify oppression and promote submission. 65 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh CHAPTER FOUR: ANALYSIS OF CONSTRUCTION OF FEMALE IDENTITY IN A MERCY I have seen hundreds of escaped slaves, but I never saw one who was willing to go back and be a slave. Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world. Harriet Tubman 4.0 Introduction The search for female identity, self and voice goes back to the images of Black women in America when the first slaves were brought to America in 1619. Black females were brought as slaves to America to perform specifically female roles and to work on fields. The Black female was regarded as inferior even less than her Black male. Without voice and subjectivity, others judge her solely based on her motherhood and work on plantation. Contemporary female writers highlight more on the theme of self largely because of the way Black women have been conceptualised by both Black and White society. The focus of this chapter is to explore the construction of female identity in Toni Morrison’s neo-slave narrative A Mercy. 4.1 Construction of Female Identity in A Mercy As a Black woman herself, Morrison is able to succinctly portray the Black experience, specifically, the vicissitudes of women’s lives. Due to the fact that Black women have been often regarded as objects (instead of subjects), the journey from being an object to a subject has been an arduous one because most “stable cultures require things to stay in their appointed place” (Hall, 2003:236). Jewell (1993: 12) indicates that cultural images of African American women have long been based on stereotypes, hence, it can be said that this 66 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh situation is at the very foundation of the problem of African American women’s limited access to societal resources and institutions. The story of A Mercy is located in colonial Virginia in May 1690. The text deals with the dichotomies of racial superiority and inferiority and, humanness and subhumanness. This neo-slave narrative challenges contemporary readers to historicize the racialised political momentum that ushered them into perpetual servitude based on non-whiteness. 4.1.1 “The Beginning Begins with Shoes”: A Study of the Metaphor of Shoe in A Mercy A Mercy is an African American neo-slave narrative which reminds us of the early period of slavery; it is often considered as a prequel to Morrison’s other neo-slave narrative, Beloved. A Mercy is a narrative which combines historical facts and doses of creativity and fiction, which unveils the reality of slavery during that significant period of the history of America. The whole story is presented in a polyphonic narrative. Taher (2011:2) defines a polyphonic “as a feature of a narrative which includes a diversity of points of view and voices”. This part of the analysis examines the metaphor of shoe in the text and how it significantly highlights the construction of female identity, specifically that of Florens. In A Mercy, Florens seems attached to shoes. This is evident in the first instance of shoes: The beginning begins with the shoes. When a child I am never able to abide being barefoot and always beg for shoes, even on the hottest days. My mother, a minha máe, is frowning, is angry at what she says are prettify ways. Only bad women wear high heels. I am dangerous, she says, and wild but she relents and lets me wear the throwaway shoes from Senhora’s house, pointy-toe, one raised heel broke, the other worn and a buckle on top (p.4). The opening sentence “the beginning begins with shoes” indicates Florens’ strong love for shoes which becomes part of who she is. Here, it is clear from the start that Morrison makes 67 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh the shoes a key motif in this story. Florens gets D’Ortega’s wife’s broken heels in Maryland, as her first pair of shoes. The fact that she is given Mrs. D’Ortega’s broken heels which are in bad condition portrays the sad reality of her social situation as a young Black girl, who struggles with her servile status in the societal hierarchy. In the instance above, Florens holds a strong love for shoes and she dislikes walking barefooted. Florens embraces the blossoming nature of her young womanhood when she first discovers her attraction to high-heeled shoes. In spite of her mother’s caution of her “prettify ways”, Florens sticks to her wants and obtains a pair of throwaway heels, which are “pointy, worn, and buckled with one raised heel broken”. This desire for allure and adornments, despite any present deterioration, highlights Florens’ adolescent curiosity for an adult maturity. In one strand, her strong need for shoes indicates her desire to protect her feet from physical obstacles from the environment and this symbolises her desire for emotional covering or protection to guard her against the harsh calamities of life. Also, when Florens arrives at the Vaarks’ farm, Lina makes her a pair of soft skin boots. When Rebekka sends Florens on a voyage to find the Blacksmith, she is made to wear Jacob Vaark’s boots: As a result, Lina says, my feet are useless, will always be too tender for life and never have the stron thatg soles, tougher than leather that life requires… So when I set out to find you, she and Mistress give me Sir’s boots that fit a man not a girl (p.4). In another breadth, the significance of Florens’s shoes, which changes several times over the course of the novel, serves as a way to anchor the reader in the book, which plays with many different narrators and timelines. Thus, with respect to the identity construction of the female, a careful examination of the “shoe” suggests the sexualised image of the female. A number of studies focused on the developmental growth and change of the protagonist. However, only a few critics have mentioned the significance of the shoe motif in the novel, among them is 68 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh John Tally (2011). Tally points out that “the major trope of the novel is Florens’ obsession with shoes.” (Tally 2011: 64). With respect to the context of identity, the shoe symbolises the sexual image of Florens. This encompasses her sexual desire and it is further heightened by her situation with the blacksmith. To provide further clarification to this, it is necessary to read William Rossi’s The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe (1976). Rossi is a chiropodist (a person whose job is to treat problems and diseases of people’s feet) who did an investigation on “the natural erotogenic character of the foot” (Rossi, 1976:5). According to him: We wear shoes chiefly for sex-attraction purposes—to send out sex signals, consciously or subconsciously. And we select particular styles of shoes to convey particular kinds of sex messages. (69). With regard to children’s desire to wear the shoes for adults (just as Florens desires), Rossi is of the view that early fashion awareness in footwear is akin to the earlier age of sexual maturity. In view of this, some young children use their shoes to establish their sexual identity and signify their readiness to launch into amorous relationship (18). As indicated, Florens’ desire for shoes contributes to her sexual identity as a woman. This indication is exemplified in an instance such as her sexual desire for the blacksmith. The blacksmith is a free man who comes to Jacob Vaark’s household to help in the construction of his new house. Lina becomes worried about Florens’ fascination with the blacksmith: So Lina knew she was the only one alert to the breakdown stealing toward them. The only one who foresaw the disruption, the shattering a free black man would cause. He had already ruined Florens, since she refused to see that she hankered after a man that had not troubled to tell her goodbye. When Lina tried to enlighten her, saying, “You are one leaf on his tree,” 69 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Florens shook her head, closed her eyes and replied, “No. I am his tree.” A sea change that Lina could only hope was not final (pg. 61). As seen from above, Lina tries to convince Florens’ from pursuing her interest in the blacksmith: “You are one leaf on his tree”. Lina means that Florens would not be any special to the blacksmith; she is just one of many others. However, Florens replies that, “No. I am his tree.” She is certain that she is the blacksmith’s world. As time goes on, Florens loses her shoes. This loss of shoes is very significant in the text as it marks a change in her. The commencement and realisation of her new self and identity finally begins when she arrives at the blacksmith’s house and finds a boy named Malaik there. She begins to doubt the blacksmith’s love for her as the blacksmith showers more attention on Malaik than Florens. Florens feels that the days of emptiness and the scars formed by her separation from her mother at an early age change her into a very vulnerable character. She can easily rely on anyone to enter into an emotionally fulfilling relationship. This is the reason why she attaches quickly to the blacksmith. Her journey and her bitter knowledge of her relations with the blacksmith prove emotionally very damaging as she is rejected by the blacksmith. The blacksmith seems not to give her the attention she desires: I worry as the boy steps closer to you. How you offer and he owns you forefinger. As if he is in your future. Not me. I am not liking how his eyes go when you send him to play in the yard (pg. 140) During the next morning, Florens realises that her boots are missing: First I notice Sir’s boots are gone. I look all around, stepping through the cabin, the forge, in cinder and in pain of my tender feet. Bits of metal score and bite them. I look and see the curl of a garden snake edging toward the threshold (p. 139). 70 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Florens realises that Maliak is the one responsible for the missing shoes and reacting to this, she seizes his doll and puts it far from him. In this situation, the blacksmith rushes to Maliak’s side and this awakens Florens to the fact that the blacksmith choses him over her: He drops into fainting just as I hear you shout. I don’t hear your horse only your shout and know I am lost because your shout is not my name. Not me. Him. Malaik you shout. Malaik (pg. 140). The loss of Florens’ shoes affects her identity and make-up. This is to say that she becomes barefooted and as she faces rejection from the blacksmith, she becomes free from everything that oppressed her with respect to the obsession of wearing the shoes to express her sexual desire and to assimilate to a “civilized” society. She finally succeeds in acquiring her new self, and returning to the wilderness, she decides to survive in the world alone. The soles of her feet eventually become “hard as cypress”, which is likened to the soul of her newfound identity. The ruined high heels from earlier now demonstrate Florens’ broken personality: “wounded but callous”. The youthful and innocent protection the shoes once provided for her naïve soul has been invaded upon and like the worn-out and broken shoes she had earlier possessed, Florens is now “worn, broken and bitter”. At the end of the novel, Florens’ identity is referred to as wilderness, to which she confirms: “You say I am wilderness. I am” (pg.157). With respect to Florens’ wilderness, Mueller (2014:13) explains that even the indentured servants, Willard and Scully, who have long known Florens as an obedient and eager-to-please-everyone slave girl, were amazed at the fact that “The docile creature they knew had turned feral and wild.” She has no choice than to embrace the bewilderment of life and all of its inevitable difficulties because her physical journey has made her more emotionally resilient and by the end of the story, Florens has developed the art of reading the world and she gains literacy to an even fuller degree to the extent that she becomes aware that 71 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh to be a slave, to be treated as a piece of property, to be perceived as a mere body, means to be silenced. 4.1.2 “To be Female in this Place is an Open Wound that cannot Heal”: Race and Patriarchal influence on Female Identity Construction in A Mercy The narrative form of A Mercy is a fragmented one which jumps from one incident to another and connects the life stories together; this enables the author to express the ruins of the colonial era which reflects the havoc of the colonial era and the early effects of slavery’s classification of the human race. In A Mercy, patriarchy is undoubtedly prevalent within Rebekka’s marriage to Vaark and in how men exercise control over female subjects in the text. The writer presents a group of women who struggle with the affirmation of a sense of self that seeks to transcend all kinds of boundaries. According to Morrison, she wrote A Mercy with the intention “to separate race from slavery to see what it was like, what it might have been like to be a slave but without being raced” Yuan (2015). Nonetheless, one does not fail to notice the dynamics of racism in the text and this cannot be overlooked. Morrison develops the plot of the novel out of the historical understanding that America's coupling of slavery and racism had not been an inherent ideology of colonial society at America's founding. A Mercy provides fresh insights into the ways, in which gender and racial categories were influential at the very outset of American history. For many years, the four female characters (Rebekka, Florens, Lina and Sorrow), in A Mercy, invest much time, energy and passion in the formation of “women centered” relationships. They do so to counter the deprivation that, in their own ways, each one of them experienced in the man-centered, male-focused society where Vaark is the center and the nucleus around which they revolve. They were trying to 72 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh form a peaceful society where their search for and dependence on man would be less urgent. It is realised in the text that the forging of the image of the female is related to gender and racial relations (double bind identity). The analysis digs into the patriarchal and racial limitations to which these women are subjected to. At the same time, it throws light on the survival and resistance strategies deployed by these women both individually and collectively. The issue of race is something which cannot be overemphasised by readers of A Mercy because it floods the novel alongside other social determiners. The novel is a record of the tale of the journey of a Dutch trader, Jacob Vark, who has moved to the New World in search of wealthy prospects. At the centre of attention is the story of an abandoned daughter, Florens, who is an African- American slave of Jacob Vaark’s household. She joins Lina, a Native American girl, and stays as another female servant in the Vaark household. Sorrow is the third character and she is a girl who is an epitome of pity and grief and lives without any identifiable heritage. Apart from these three female slaves, Jacob’s wife, Rebekka, also plays a major role in the story. Rebekka is brought to the New World with the other people of her community due to some social problems in her community and for the prospects of settlement; she is ready to marry a man whom she has never seen in her life. However, she has no possibility of happiness later in her life as a mother, because her three sons die after their birth. Her only child who survives for a short period of time is her daughter, Patrician, who also dies by a horse kick. In the text, women are used by slave masters to lay off debts and a defining incident which is found in the text that even influences the title of the text is one concerning the protagonist, Florens. The story of this instance is traced from D’Ortega’s debt to Jacob Vaark. In order to 73 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh cancel part of the debt, D’Ortega offers slaves but Jacob refuses initially, “Flesh was not his commodity” (p. 22). Vaark later accepts Florens as an exchange for the debt: They wrote new papers. Agreeing that the girl was worth twenty pieces of eight, considering the number of years agreed of her and reducing the balance by three hogsheads of tobacco or fifteen English pounds, the latter preferred (p. 27). The exchange can be considered as an act of mercy, hence the title, A Mercy. Florens’ mother experiences grave physical and mental confining contradictions that limit a Black mother’s role and periphery. Both mother and daughter belong to D’Ortega. “He saw a woman standing in the doorway with two children. One on her hip; one holding behind her skirts. She looked healthy enough, better fed than the others. On a whim, mostly to silence him and fairly sure, D’ Ortega would refuse, he said, ‘Her. That one. I’ll take her” (23). But D’ Ortega is reluctant to offer her and says: “Ah, No. Impossible. My wife can’t stay longer without her” (p. 24). Here, it becomes clear that as a slave woman, Florens’ mother is sexually abused by him and so the owner is not ready to trade her. During that period, the identity of women was reduced to sexual symbolism, they were sexually exploited. So in order to avoid her daughter being sexually abused, she gives up Florens. In view of this, it is realised that the voice of Florens’ mother echoes the concern of many other Black mothers who are unable to provide a safe zone for their daughters: Please Senhor. Not me. Take her. Take my daughter. (p. 27) I know it is true because I see it forever and ever. Me watching, my mother listening, her baby boy on her hip. Senhor is not paying the whole amount he owes to Sir. Sir saying he will take instead the woman and the girl, not the baby boy and the debt is gone. A minha máe says no. Her baby boy is still at her breast. Take the girl, she says, my daughter, she says. Me. Me (p. 7). I sleep then wake to any sound. Then I am dreaming cherry trees walking toward me. Then I am dreaming cherry trees walking toward me. I know it 74 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh is dreaming because they are full in leaves and fruit. I don’t know what they want. To look? One bends down and I wake with a little scream in my mouth. Nothing is nearer to me. I quiet down. This is a better dream than minha mae standing near with her little boy. In those dreams she is always wanting to tell me something. Is stretching her eyes. Is working her mouth. I look away from her. My next sleeping is deep (p.101). As depicted in the text, the image of the woman carved as a sexual tool is a recurring theme in the novels of Morrison. Soon after her purchase by the Senhor D’Ortega, Florens’ mother is taken to a curing shed with other two slave women: I don’t know who is your father. It was too dark to see any of them. They came at night and took we three including Bess to a curing shed. Shadows of men sat on barrels, then stood. They said they were told to break in. There is no protection. To be female in this place is to be an open wound that cannot heal. Even if scars from, the festering is ever below” (163). After the “breaking in”, the chief gives an orange to each woman and the men feel sorry as they are ordered to do the act. In effect, the outcomes of her repeated sexual abuse are Florens and her brother. Her mother accepts her inevitable fate as a slave woman. However, such relationship does not offer any firm ground to the fundamental relation of mother- daughter as the mother is devoid of any hope to provide a secure life for her children. The loss of a mother also shapes Florens’ identity to a great extent. This argument is made due to the reason that she is separated from her biological mother at an early age but is continuously trapped in her memories. Even after her association with Lina who becomes a mother figure to her, Florens is unable to construct a positive subjectivity of her own. She faces difficulty in comprehending and piecing together the loose threads of her memories and cannot weave them into a meaningful story: Other signs need more time to understand. Often there are too many signs, or a bright omen clouds up too fast. I sort them and try to recall, yet I am 75 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh missing much, like not reading the garden snake crawling up to the door saddle to die. Let me start with what I know for certain (pg. 4). She is too immature to clear her perception about the nature of her loss. She has firm and unshakable feelings about her mother and is greatly hurt when she is taken away by Jacob. Morrison affords Florens’ mother the opportunity to explain why she had to give up her daughter to be taken to Vaark’s house: There was no protection. None. Certainly not with your vice for shoes. It was as though you were hurrying up your breasts and hurrying also the lips of an old married couple. Understand me. There was no protection and nothing in the catechism to tell them no (pg. 162/163). In this instance, Florens’ mother, Minha mae (literally means “my mother” in Portuguese), speaks as the first-person narrator and the implication of this technique is to give a platform to Black women to speak their thoughts that have been silenced, that cannot be explained or understood in the wake of slavery. Nonetheless, Florens’ mother is assured of the justifications that she can give to her daughter by articulating to her (Florens) the realities of the horrible consequences of staying with her. Although Florens’ mother wants to keep her daughter with herself and nurture her, she has doubts about her daughter’s security as she notices the lust in her master’s eyes for her daughter: But you wanted the shoes of a loose woman, and a cloth around your chest did no good. You caught Senhor’s eye. After the tall man dined and joined Senhor on a walk through the quarters, I was singing at the pump. A song about the green bird fighting then dying when the monkey steals her eggs. I heard their voices and gathered you and your brother to stand in their eyes (pg. 166). 76 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh She is not willing to let her daughter suffer the same sexual abuse as a slave. If she allows Florens to stay back, she (Florens) will suffer the same life like her mother and other countless Black slave women. Like Beloved and Sula, A Mercy adduces the portrayal of a mother who decides to distance herself from her daughter in the hope of providing a comparatively better life for her child. In her narration at the end of the novel, Minha mae is not only a victim of male oppression but she is also portrayed as a member of a racially homogenized group. In her vulnerable position against the pressures of patriarchy and racial oppression, she makes frail attempts to find some peace in religion: I began to tell Reverend Father but shame made my words nonsense. He did not understand or he did not believe. He told me not to despair or be faint of heart but to love God and Jesus Christ with all my soul; to pray for the deliverance that would be mine at judgement; that no matter what others may say, I was not a soulless animal, a curse; the Protestants were in error, in, and if I remained innocent in mind and deed I would be welcomed beyond the valley of this woeful life into an everlasting one, amen (pg. 166). However, nothing can ameliorate her anxiety and fears about her daughter’s unsafe future. As a silenced subject and a mother who is unable to do anything about the situation, she weakly tries to articulate her fear indirectly. She sings a song near the hand pump when Jacob and Senhor walk to the shed after they decide to take her daughter. The song is about a green bird that is killed while guarding her children. The bird symbolically refers to Florens’ mother who does not suffer a literal but a metaphorical death in her attempt to save her daughter because she has to bring to an extinct, her motherly augur to demean her image as a mother by “cowardly” offering her daughter as a slave in place of herself and her son. To this effect, it is natural for Florens to internalise her own sense of her mother’s rejection and this often gets reflected in negative behaviour, showing in her bouts of violence 77 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh displayed by her against her new rivals later in life. Minhae’s plight can be compared to Sethe’s pain in Beloved. However, Florens’ mother is able to endure her misery unlike the intense play of powerful emotions of Sethe. Florens’ mother is only separated from her child but Sethe is not even given the slightest chance to see her child live or justify her actions. In Beloved, Sethe has never felt blessed as a mother because she is not able to experience the growth of Beloved but Florens was at least with her mother during early years of her life. Her mother has decided something for her benefit. But, her decision is not so unacceptable. Also, Sorrow is a young woman and an orphan who works on the Vaarks’ farm. Several times in the text, some characters suggest that she is either possessed by evil spirits or suffers from mental illness. Her exact origins are not known. A sawyer found Sorrow half-drowned on a beach and took her to his wife. The sawyer’s wife named her Sorrow because she refused to say anything about her prior life: He brought one girl to womanhood and saved the life of another. Sorrow. Vixen-eyed Sorrow with black teeth and a head of never groomed woolly hair the color of a setting sun. Accepted, not brought, by Sir, she joined the household after Lina but before Florens and still had no memory of her past life except dragged ashore by whales… Not then, not ever, had she spoken of how she got there or where she had been. The sawyer’s wife named her Sorrow, for good reason, thought Lina… (p. 51) Sorrow ended up on the Vaarks’ farm because the sawyer sold her to Jacob after she was deemed unable to complete simple tasks. Sorrow’s character depicts a different part of motherhood which is significant in conferring new meanings to the idea of motherhood. From the text, it is noticed that she is the second character after Rebekka whose identity is aligned with the archetypal imagery of a mother in fictional representations. Morrison shows Sorrow’s journey from a slave girl to a mother and the dynamics of her character is defined 78 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh by intense grief and misery. Sorrow realises that her identity is defined by her sense of self through the trope of motherhood. According to Downie (2009:2), she is reminiscent of Pecola, the schizophrenic protagonist of Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye. Sorrow’s survival becomes so difficult that in order to release her thoughts and share her feelings, she hallucinates and invents an imaginary character Twin to relieve her psychological burden of slavery. According to her, Twin is the only person whom she can trust as a friend: Sometimes it was the housewife or the sawyer or the sons who needed her; other times Twin wanted company to talk or walk or play. Having two names was convenient since Twin couldn’t be seen by anybody else (pg. 116). After searching for survivors and food, fingering spilt molasses from the deck straight into her mouth, nights listening to cold wind and lapping sea, Twin joined her under the hammock and they have been together ever since. Both skinned down and broken mast and started walking a rocky shoreline (pg. 117) Sorrow concentrated on mealtimes and the art of escape for short walks with Twin, playtimes between or instead of her tasks (pg. 1119). Sorrow creates Twin when they meet “beneath the hammock in the ship”; she creates Twin in order to assuage her loneliness. Twin becomes her place of escape for safety and happiness. They often go on walks and spend time together. Sorrow is a victim of racial abuse. She is reduced to nothing but a sex symbol. There are various hints in the novel which indicates that she is sexually abused. During her stay at the Sawyer’s house it is revealed that: On occasion she had secret company other than Twin, but not better than Twin, who was her safety, her entertainment, her guide (pg. 119). The quote above suggests that she was secretly abused sexually by the Sawyers. She is not aware that her sexual abuse is another form of subjugation because she only remembers her 79 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh life as an oppressed slave woman who has always suffered domination, oppression and exploitation at the hands of the white racist society. The next instance is that of her experience of her menstruation: The housewife told her it was monthly blood; that all females suffered it and Sorrow believed her until the next month and the next and the next when it did not return. Twin and she talked about it, about whether it was instead the result of the goings that took place behind the stack of clapboard… (pg. 119) The instance above shows that Sorrow waited for her monthly blood but it never came after the first one. This indicates that she will be giving birth to an illegitimate child after being sexually abused, which is a common fate usually suffered by slave women. In the text, Sorrow’s life changes completely after being a mother: … she was convinced that this time she had done something, something important, by herself. Twin’s absence was hardly noticed as she concentrated on her daughter. Instantly, she knew what to name her. Knew also what to name herself (pg. 133). Her imaginary companion Twin, whose existence was as a result of her hallucinations, also withdraws because Sorrow has a daughter now. Her maternal role has not only given birth to new relations or developed her emotional sensibility towards other people around her, but has also given her the confidence to discover her new self and identity. Initially, Sorrow was considered as a lowly and dirty female but she used motherhood as a tool to liberate herself from her world of isolation and gloom, which is reflected in the change of her name. Her life changes entirely when she becomes a mother. She builds a maternal bond with her baby and metamorphoses into a new person; she becomes more organised, independent and powerful. Sorrow is one significant female character in the text who shifts from depending on the attachment to male authority to feminine power found in the hunt for completeness. She becomes aware of the rewards of her own self-defined gender and motherhood. It is essential 80 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh to note that Sorrow’s sense of completeness (as a result of her experience of motherhood) is akin to Sethe being proud about the fact that she was able to save her babies from slavery in Beloved : I did it. I got us all out. Without Halle too. Up till then it was the only thing I ever did on my own. Decided. And it came off right, like it was supposed to. We was here. Each and every one of my babies and me too. I birthed them and I got em out 198 and it wasn’t no accident. I did that. I had help, of course, lots of that, but still it was me doing it (Morrison 1987:72). The potent transformation in her identity is seen in the new name which she gives to herself after birthing her child; she names herself, “Complete”: Sorrow’s wandering stopped too. Now she attended routine duties, organizing them around her infant’s needs, impervious to complaints of others. She had looked into her daughter’s eyes; saw in them the gray glisten of a winter sea while a ship sailed by-the-lee. “I am your mother, she said. My name is Complete” (pg. 134). To the world, she is identified as Sorrow but she calls herself Complete. After giving birth to her daughter, she changes her name because she devises this new name as a resistance and survival strategy against her negative image of low self-esteem and the oppression and sexual exploitation she suffers. According to Goldberg (2016), “Sorrow is repairing a world perceived through the trauma of loss through her reconceived identity as Complete following childbirth”. Her new name becomes the means to step out of this incompleteness with her new outlook towards her life in reconstructing and renaming it. Her self-conscious re-baptism helps one to comprehend the fact that naming has always been a cardinal issue in the tradition of the African Americans due to the fact that the act of naming is connected to “the exercise of power.” The reason is that from their earliest experiences, African Americans have been awakened to the fact that those who name control and those who are named are subjugated. 81 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh King (1990:2) adds that slaves were made to lose their African identities when they were enslaved and were renamed with the identities of their masters upon their arrival in America. Sorrow’s name change goes on to reinforce the fact that, for the African American, “self- creation and reformation of a fragmented familial past” are endlessly interwoven as naming is an inevitably genealogical revisionism (Benston, 1990:152). In most narratives regarding slavery, one finds it essential to engage in the act of renaming to reflect a liberated self. For instance, as discussed in Booker T Washington’s Up From Slavery (1902), in the narratives of Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, the taste of absolute freedom was crowned with a ceremonious exchange of a slave surname for a name that reflects or befits a liberated self. As indicated in Beloved, the freed slaves felt it was absolutely unnecessary for them to bear the surname of their former owners and as they changed their surnames, this act was regarded as the first sign of freedom. Renaming bespeaks self-creation and as indicated above, former slaves got rid of their masters’ names and created new names for themselves. Self-creation indicated the birth of a new self. Sorrow’s name change to Complete is not aimed at revising how others see her but how she sees herself. This is to say that by changing her name, Sorrow attempts to step out of the defined and stereotypical negative image of slave women and reach the pinnacle of her authority and power as a mother, by setting new definitions of herself as a complete woman. As a result, it reflects her ability to positively rename her identity in a world which offers her little to no scope of fulfilling relationships. Furthermore, the domination of a woman by patriarchy shows its worst face in the Black women as they are marginalised. The Black female is oppressed by both White and Black men, the typical double-bind predicament. The claws of slavery chopped both female and male slaves from their parental, marital relations and uprooted them from their family 82 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh structures and cultural roots. However, the female suffered these and more; she became a victim of both racial and gender activities. The effect of patriarchy on the Black women during the time of slavery was very common. However, in A Mercy, Morrison separates race from this issue. In the text, one finds that the white female and madam of Vaark’s household, Rebekka, become a victim of patriarchal domination. One realises that Morrison’s novel A Mercy puts the weak white womanhood side by side with the strong black motherhood. This is shown in the fact that Rebekka fails and crumbles in the end after her husband’s death because she is governed by the controlling forces of patriarchy. Her subjugated personality is more defined by her position as the mistress of the Vaark household: Already sixteen, she knew her father would have shipped her off to anyone who would book her passage and relive him of feeding her… Rebekka’s mother objected to the “sale”- she called it that because the prospective groom had stressed “reimbursement” for clothing, expenses and a few supplies-not for love or need of her daughter, but because the husband-to-be was a heathen living among savages (p.74) Rebekka becomes a victim of her father’s patriarchal selfishness. He “sells” his daughter to Jacob Vaark in order to be relieved off his responsibilities towards her. Rebekka's limited gender “prospects” to become a “wife” stems from the fact that her father does not have funds to pay her passage to America and to supply her with a dowry. In short, Rebekka's father sells her to a man (Jacob Vaark) in an unknown far-away land who will reimburse him for any expenses incurred in handling "middle passage" voyage to America. In Vaark’s household, she is the mistress and not the authoritative member of her family. Here, it can be argued that Rebekka’s role as a wife weakens her womanly powers as a mother because her position and role as a wife makes her secondary in a patriarchal culture. 83 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh The motherhood of Rebekka in A Mercy is different from that of Baby Suggs or Sethe in Beloved. Baby Suggs and Sethe define or identify themselves as mothers more, or rather, than wives. In effect, they are able to step outside the boundaries created by patriarchy. The demeaning position and emotional weakness of Rebekka are as a result of her socio-cultural set up and its demands that negatively affect the woman’s identity and its gender-specific roles. In this text, one realises that Morrison reverses the position of the Black and White woman where the marginalised (Black woman) emerges as the one who is able to survive patriarchal oppression and the powerful (White woman as represented by Rebekka) is lowered down to the position of powerless. Rebekka proves to be a weak woman who is recognised for her inability to cement her emotional strength in any such paradigms of love and attachment. Unlike other Black women in the text, she is unable to redefine her subjectivity with a new perspective on life. She is in a pitiful condition and her weakness further diminishes her mental strength after the death of her husband, Jacob. This is even shown in her behaviour with the three slave women, Lina, Florens and Sorrow which changes from polite to cruel and her total personality crumbles under isolation and loneliness. Rebekka’s frustration is released on her women slaves who are powerless, yet strong and proud of their valour. The three black women devise a new world of maternal bonds. In comparing Rebekka to Sorrow, Florens, Lina, the latter characters shape their subjectivity and identity in accordance with their relations with and positions as mothers or daughters. Lina, Sorrow and Florens suffer their inevitable fate because of their destiny as slaves and they are either rejected or separated from their lineage through devastating socio-cultural forces. 84 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 4.1.3 Female Solidarity in A Mercy Female solidarity enables women mitigate the effects of gender and racial discriminations. As Black women turn to each other for comfort, love and support, they are able to experience effective interaction regarding themselves and their identities. A number of Black female writers both in the diaspora (such as Toni Morrison and Ntozake Shange) and in Africa (such as Amma Darko, Mariama Ba and Buchi Emecheta) have emphasised female solidarity in their literary works; this shows, to a large extent, the significance of female solidarity in the process of redefining the Black woman’s place within the society and culture. These writers expend energy in fighting cultural stereotypes of Black female experience, for instance, Amma Darko does this by discrediting her male characters and presenting them in order to boost female consciousness. Adjei (2008) reckons that Darko gives prominence to the story of the female by employing an appreciable level of fierce subjective female viewpoint to oppose male dominance. To achieve this: She creates female characters who are repositories of knowledge and wisdom and who act as commentators and counsellors expressing the female viewpoint; female counter-forces based on group solidarity; and through authorial intrusion in terms of sympathy and empathy (3). Morrison drops glimpses of survival and redemption for women through their solidarity. For instance, Lina is the one whom Rebekka can bare her soul to without question. It can be seen that the extent of trust Rebekka shows towards Lina and, in return, the safety and security that Lina provides for Rebekka, deserves attention. Lina can be considered as the embodiment of healing and solidarity among women that recurs in Morrison’s fiction. Unfortunately, they lose their intimacy when Jacob dies. In spite of the relationship between Rebekka and Lina turning from intimate to sour, their shared times and vision, reflect the potential of female solidarity. This is critical for surviving negative identities. In addition, the author shows how 85 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh female solidarity is influenced by how they are perceived or placed in societal roles and beliefs of the era. The bondage of the women and their ownership by Jacob is noteworthy at this point because in the text, he is portrayed as a man who sees women as commodities, thus, trades them for money or goods; he purchases Lina, and Rebekka from her parents and takes Florens as a form of exchange in reimbursement of a debt. In addition, on one hand, whereas Florens, Lina and Sorrow succeed in transforming their identities from weaklings, sex symbols and marginalised females to strong, confident women, through their stance as mothers and daughter, on the other hand, Rebekka is unable to gather the fragments of her ruined self as a woman. In the text, Rebekka loses all her children leaving her childless till the end. A careful examination suggests that the significance of Morrison developing Rebekka, the mistress of Jacob Vaark’s household, as a childless mother till the end challenges the structural make-up of the conventional narratives of American literature in which the Eurocentric patterns dominate the Africanist presence. This emphasises the reality of the plight of a woman, irrespective of her ethnicity and race. In a racist and patriarchal culture that lowers the self- regard of Black children, it is important for mothers to instil in their children, a sense of self-worth and self-esteem so that they can locate their lost place and identity in society. Ghasemi & Hajizadeh (2012:3) indicate that with respect to history, “the characterization of Black women has been basically depicted in terms of their maternal role, a defined role which has been imposed on women as their sole source of identity by the society”. Morrison sees motherhood as an important experience for women, nonetheless, she does not limit women's roles and identity in the society to motherhood, nor does she restrict motherhood to biological maternity. In Morrison’s novels, mothers are foremost human beings with distinct identities, individuals who can have the 86 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh potentials in favourable circumstances to realize that motherhood and individuality are not mutually exclusive. 4.2 Conclusion Women characters in Morrison's fiction seek to maintain their own identity in spite of the socially defined notions of womanhood. One gathers from the discussion that female slaves’ chattel status, sex, race combined to create a complicated set of myths about the image of the black woman. These constructed ideologies were used as a justification for the dehumanisation and violence against the enslaved women. The study has contemporary relevance because it adds to the on-going discussion about how the black woman arrived at where she is, how she became who she is and the reason why she is perceived as who she is. 87 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh CHAPTER FIVE: COMPARISON BETWEEN BELOVED AND A MERCY I had crossed the line. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land. Harriet Tubman 5.0 Introduction The construction of identity is a never-ending process in the life of a human being. Identity construction is not only influenced by the person’s self, but also, by the boundaries and limitations set up by the society with regards to such things as race, gender and class. Both texts highlight the impact of slavery on the identity and psychology of individuals (especially females) and on the larger patterns of the culture and history of affected societies. This chapter draws a comparison between Beloved and A Mercy, in terms of construction of female identity in the Neo-slave narrative. 5.1 Construction of Female Identity in the Neo-slave Narrative: A Comparison between Beloved and A Mercy Firstly, both Beloved and A Mercy offer Morrison’s readers a work of historical fiction set at a critical point in the history of America. Kadel (2015) notes that on one hand, Beloved portrays the devastating aftermath of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and on the other hand, A Mercy depicts the role of the 1676 Bacon’s Rebellion in the nascent American colonies. Kirkby (2014:1) explains that, as Morrison is well aware of the pain that is intertwined with the history of the African Americans, she recounts with incredible detail, the “debilitating physical and psychological strain of prejudices and discriminations (as a result of slavery) placed on African Americans.” As Morrison depicts the historical story of enslavement and Black culture, she communicates the personal tales of a few strong female slaves. Both 88 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh novels’ focus is on mainly the female characters. The voices of black women which were historically denied are used by Morrison to recreate history. In light of all that have been discussed so far in the study, this chapter draws a comparison of how the identity of the female is constructed in both neo-slave narratives. The similarities will be considered first, then the differences will follow. Firstly, Morrison foregrounds the significance of voice and perspective which points to the essence of renaming and re-inscribing through language in both texts. This is to say that, in both texts, the act of naming and renaming plays a key role in the process of constructing the identity of the female. Naming is tied to the identity of an individual, thus, to have a name is tantamount to having the means of location, extension and preservation of one’s self in the human community. King (1990) emphasises that “the titles of many critical works, such as Black Boy (1945), Invisible Man (1952), and Nobody Knows My Name (1961) indicate their authors' awareness of the correspondence between namelessness and lack of power”. This goes on to throw light on Ralph Ellison’s statement in "Hidden Name and Complex Fate" which stresses that "our names, being the gift of others, must be made our own" (Ellison, 1964: 147). The self-conscious re-baptism of Baby Suggs in Beloved and Sorrow in A Mercy attests to the importance of naming in the African American tradition. During the period of slavery, white people defined the existence of the Black people by giving them their surnames in order to reinforce ownership and oppression. The name change from Sorrow to Complete and Jenny Whitlow to Baby Suggs clearly evidences Benston (1990:152)’s point that “for the African American, self-creation and reformation of a fragmented familial past are endlessly interwoven as naming is an inevitably genealogical revisionism”. This point provides a further clarification to the fact that in most narratives concerning slavery, it is crucial to engage in the act of renaming as it reflects a true sense of a liberated self. Hence, it was 89 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh totally unnecessary for freed slaves to still bear the names of their former owners. According to King (1990), esteemed scholars such as Walter Ong indicates that “for primarily oral cultures, such as the early slave communities, naming conveyed a power over things, for without learning a vast store of names, one was simply powerless to understand” (33). Therefore, “this sense of powerlessness could extend beyond the individual to include an entire community of unnamed people”. Renaming is an act of self-creation which heralds the birth of a new self and identity. In view of this, the name change of Sorrow and Baby Suggs aims at revising how they see themselves rather than how others see them. Especially for Sorrow because renaming herself to Complete is a giant stride in the attempt to step out of the defined and stereotypical negative image of slave women and reach the pinnacle of her authority and power as a mother, by setting new definitions of herself as a complete woman. It is worthy to note that Sorrow depicts a different sense of motherhood which is important in conferring new meanings to the idea of motherhood. Sorrow’s character represents the varied forms of maternal relationships in a social, cultural and racial context. Hence, to an extent, her character is akin to that of Sethe in Beloved; both women situate themselves in the circle of maternal responsibilities and regard their motherhood as a sacred duty to live or die for their children. Sorrow realises that her identity defines her sense of self through the trope of motherhood. As Sorrow experiences a shift in her identity, her motherhood does not only influence an emotional sensibility towards others around, also, she is equipped with the confidence to discover her new self. She is the second character (after Rebekka) whose identity is affiliated to the archetypal image of a mother in fictional representations. With respect to Beloved, Baby Suggs, as her name reflects, her gentleness enabled Black characters like Sethe to let go some of their anger and emptiness in the face of excruciating agony, and turn that energy to making “a way out of this no way”. This triggers a slow and gentle but significant healing process from physical and 90 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh mental wounds. Taking on new names becomes the strongest transformation in the process of identity construction of Sorrow and Baby Suggs. The act of naming depicts the individual’s awareness and knowledge of his or her identity and self-worth. Both Sorrow and Baby Suggs step out of the defined and confined space of slave woman and set new definitions for themselves by renaming their subjectivity. They begin to build an understanding as individuals who can live by their own desires and requirements. This transformation influences their decision to step out of incompleteness with a new outlook towards through a reconstruction themselves. Sorrow and Baby Suggs are able to positively construct their own identities in a world which offers little to no scope of a fulfilling image of the female. Also, in both texts, metaphors are used in constructing the identity of the female. For instance, in Beloved, the Chokecherry tree found at the back of Sethe symbolises the physical, emotional and mental damages of slavery experienced by Sethe. The scar of trees on Sethe’s back is a metaphor for the haunting memory that can never be erased. It becomes part of her identity. She carries the tree on her back as a symbol of the pain other mothers and daughters bore through the history of the slavery. The tree was the outcome of an operation Schoolteacher performed on Sethe’s back in an effort to determine how much she resembled an animal. Hence, the image of the female is likened to an animal. The metaphor of tree invokes the horrific forms of violence committed against Sethe. Sethe’s identity is reduced to that of an animal as Schoolteacher continues to dehumanise her. In A Mercy, a critical examination of the shoe suggests the sexualised image of Florens and it is exemplified in an instance such as her sexual desire for the blacksmith. Florens losing her shoes shakes her identity and make-up. She becomes barefooted as she is rejected by the blacksmith. The loss of shoes indicates her freedom from oppression with regards to her obsession of wearing shoes to express her sexual desire and to assimilate into a “civilised” 91 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh society. Florens is able to acquire a new self and return to the wilderness where she decides to survive in the world alone. The soles of her feet eventually develop to be “hard as cypress”, much like the soul of her newfound identity. Moreover, the development of maternal bond with a child is critical to building a child’s identity and self-esteem, especially in a world where the racist and patriarchal surroundings deprive females of self-worth and self-love. This is the reason why Beloved in Beloved and Florens in A Mercy are both severely affected when they are not able to enjoy a maternal bond with their mothers. Florens and Beloved are not able to build a relationship with their mothers because the former is sold to the Vaark family and the latter is killed by her mother as a baby. In both texts, Morrison accentuates the abhorrence of the institution of slavery as it shatters identities by breaking the bond between a mother and her child. This is to say that the absence of a mother interrupts or impedes the formation of the infant’s subjectivity and they are unable to unfold or develop themselves. The terrible ramifications of the separation of a child from his or her mother lead to the loss of cultural identity and heritage. With respect to Florens’ issue, Minha mae’s intention of giving up her daughter was purely to protect her. Nonetheless, the reader and Florens assume the latter was rejected and sacrificed by her mother in order to keep her son. It is only at the end of the novel that Florens’ mother gains a voice to narrate her life story and justifies why she had to let Florens go. As she has experienced sexual abuse herself, she has no option than to send her daughter away when she sees the sexual desire in her master towards Florens. She is a hopeless woman who suffers racial and sexual oppression during the period of slavery, thus, she is bent on preventing her daughter from experiencing what she went through. This is akin to the story of Sethe and her daughter in Beloved where Sethe had to let go of her maternal affection in order to kill her daughter so that she will not experience the cruel, racist 92 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh and patriarchal world where black women are oppressed from all directions. The mother- daughter relationship between Florens and her mother, and Sethe and Beloved is broken due to the devastating force of slavery. Sethe’s act of infanticide reflects the agonising forces of slavery. She expresses her love for her child by slaying her; according to her, she does this in order to protect her from the gradual death of slavery. Both mothers may not be sure about the future that awaits their daughters that is why they “sacrifice” them. Wyatt (2012:8) adds a critical perspective to the issue between Florens and her mother. Florens makes one more addition to her mother's words: "Take the girl, she says, my daughter, she says. Me. Me. Sir agrees" (pg.7)”. Florens inserts a signifier of her own present-day identity "Me. Me" into the remembered statement. This suggests that despite the fact that her mother’s words are addressed to Vaark, they comprise an address to Florens too and that address is defining. To this, renowned psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche (1989:44) believes that "it is that aspect of the signifier which signifies to someone, which interpellates another. This foregrounding of ‘signifying to’ is extremely important". In view of this, Wyatt (2012) means that the words that Florens interjects into her quotation of the mother's words "Me. Me" suggest the mother's words have slipped from acting as signifiers of something and becoming "signifiers to" Florens which "interpellates" her into the social order as an unwanted daughter. Both Florens’ mother and Sethe offer explanations to their actions at some point in the texts. For instance, at a point, the text is written from Sethe’s perspective, just as we see with Florens’ mother. Florens’ mother is given the opportunity to speak as the first-person narrator: There was no protection. None. Certainly not with your vice for shoes. It was as though you were hurrying up your breasts and hurrying also the lips 93 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh of an old married couple. Understand me. There was no protection and nothing in the catechism to tell them no (pp. 162/163). The significance of this technique is to equip black women with the opportunity to be able to communicate their “unspeakable” thoughts that cannot be explained or understood in the wake of slavery. Nevertheless, the difference between the two offers of justification by the mothers is that Sethe desires and hopes to be forgiven: Do you forgive me? Will you stay? You safe here now I was going to help you but the clouds got in the way. There are no clouds here. If they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it away. Beloved I will make you a round basket. You’re back. You’re back. Will we smile at me? Can’t you see I’m smiling? I love your face (pp. 265-266) However, Florens’ mother is confident of her justifications explaining the possible abominable consequences of staying with her. She presents her argument by explaining that: But you wanted the shoes of a loose woman, and a cloth around your chest did no good. You caught Senhor’s eye. After the tall man dined and joined Senhor on a walk through the quarters, I was singing at the pump. A song about the green bird fighting then dying when the monkey steals her eggs. I heard their voices and gathered you and your brother to stand in their eyes (pg. 166). 94 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh She is not willing to see her daughter suffer the same sexual abuse she has experienced all her life. She is aware of the fact that Florens is fated to suffer same life as her mother and other countless black slave women. But to Florens’ mother: One chance, I thought. There is no protection but there is difference. You stood there in those shoes and the tall man laughed and said he would take me to close the debt. I knew Senhor would not allow it. I said you. Take you, my daughter. Because I saw the tall man see you as a human child, not pieces of eight. I knelt before him. Hoping for a miracle. He said yes (pg. 166) Here, she means that there is no safe or secure place. Nonetheless, the difference that could be made is that at least Florens could be saved from sexual abuse, if not from the agony of slavery. Due to the complexities that come with the experience of slavery, Florens cannot appreciate the semantic import of her mother’s words of justification. In view of this, she is unable to perceive the maternal love motivated intention behind her mother’s act. The analogy between Sethe and Minha mae proves the notion that Black women are the primary agents in the physical, mental and emotional well-being of their children. Furthermore, the multi-racial circles of women in both texts examined in the study highlight the structures and legacies of female solidarity. In the study, it is realised that both Beloved and A Mercy delve into the development of female solidarity and how women survive the perils of slavery and negative images of them through building bonds. Also, one can identify significant instances of female solidarity that go beyond racial or class difference. This happens because Morrison attempts to portray the relationships between females overcoming the dichotomies caused by slavery and social background. For instance, the bond between Rebekka and Lina transcends their different backgrounds. They support each other without a consideration of their skin colour. Lina can be considered as the embodiment of healing and solidarity among women that recurs in Morrison’s fiction and this is seen in her relationship 95 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh with Florens. The mother-daughter relationship that Florens lacks is compensated for, as she develops a growing bond with Lina. Lina provides for Florens, the cherished maternal bond she craves for. The relationship between Lina and Florens is such that the former fills a maternal gap in the life of Florens and the latter acts as a family, something Lina lost when she was much younger thus, it is apparent that they both compensate for the depravations in each other’s lives. Morrison shows how female solidarity is influenced by how they are perceived or placed in societal rules and beliefs of the era. In A Mercy, Florens, Lina and Sorrow succeed in transforming their identity as weaklings, sex symbols and marginalised females, through their stance as mothers and daughter. Unfortunately, Rebekka is unable to gather the fragments of her ruined self as a woman, thus, leaving her broken. Rebekka loses all her children leaving her childless till the end. A careful examination suggests that the significance of Morrison developing Rebekka, the mistress of Jacob Vaark’s household, as a childless mother till the end challenges the structural make-up of the conventional narratives of American literature in which the Eurocentric patterns dominate the Africanist presence. In Beloved, female solidarity is largely accomplished through mother and daughter relationships. In the study, critical perspectives coalesced with the discussion of the importance of female solidarity in the construction of female identity explores varied aspects of mother-daughter relationships and their interaction with their community. The mother- daughter relationship between Baby Suggs and Sethe may not be a biological one, yet, the latter enjoys maternal love, attention and comfort from Baby Suggs. During the twenty-eight day period, in which Sethe was temporary free (before she was captured again), Baby Suggs provides her shelter and healing, nursing her back to “sanity”. This act is what enables Sethe to heal from past memories, at least temporary before she is found by Schoolteacher. As 96 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Morrison captures the damaging effects of the institution of slavery on the identities of these females, she also shows how connections formed by the females promote survival and healing among them. In both texts, women develop solidarity of their own to support each other in order to survive the ruins of slavery, and negative identities bestowed on them. In spite of the on-going discussion on the similarities between Beloved and A Mercy, one striking difference pertains to the use of remomery in Beloved. What makes it all interesting is the use of what scholars term as “magical realism” in developing some aspects of the concept of rememory. There is a mixture of imagination and reality in Beloved. Thus, at the end of the novel one still wonders whether Beloved was a real person or a ghost. Beloved is a representation of the emotional, mental, physical, cultural and spiritual devastation that continues to haunt those characters who are former slaves even in freedom. The issue of rememory is significant when it comes to identity because as indicated in the analysis, it is crucial for identity denied during the period of slavery to be claimed during post-slavery. The word “rememory” was coined by Morrison. Rememory shows that as the past is being constructed, history is being deconstructed, and in all these processes, African Americans are able to cross-exami|ne the disremembered past because the past tolerated by them is based on the absence of self. It helps especially black females to bolster their identity through the remembrance and reconstruction of the past. This is the reason why Denver separates herself from Beloved’s identity by accepting what occurred in the past but Beloved is stuck in the past, eternally nursing grievances against Sethe. A rememory of the past enables black females like Denver to have some understanding of the long history of slavery and this is significant with respect to the ability to claim ownership of one’s self. Through the memories of the past, these former slaves were able to develop a discourse of their own regarding what truly happen and as a result, they are able to develop subjectivity. 97 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh 5.2 Conclusion Beloved and A Mercy highlight the need for one to understand that the main relevance of the fiction of Toni Morrison is to encourage Black females to construct an identity for themselves rather than being labelled by the society. They need to validate their own self-worth and identity in order to gain an authentic understanding of who they are and their relevance in the world. Both texts teach one to understand that the purpose of Morrison’s works is to reconstruct African American slave history and culture from the slaves’ subjective outlook and to be a symbolic voice for the black people whose stories have been censored or silenced. Consequently, Morrison is able to create a sense of belonging in the present for the Blacks. A main relevance of the fiction of African American women is to make an attempt to encourage Black females to name themselves, rather than being named by the society. In a time of introspection and self-affirmation, it is necessary for African-American females to hear themselves echoed and see themselves reflected in the world in order to validate their own identity and self-worth. Through African American fiction, Black female writers are able to contest social parameters and project the Black woman’s experience. This enables the African American female (especially girls growing up) to gain an authentic understanding of who she is and her space in the world. Through the lens of Black Feminist theory and an analysis of the works of African American females, one can show the representational languages and images to uproot the stem of domination. 98 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh CHAPTER SIX: CONCLUSION 6.0 Introduction This chapter of the study deals with the findings and overall impressions of the whole work. It also provides recommendations for further research. 6.1 Findings and Conclusion Revisiting the historical era of slavery, the neo-slave narrative reminds one of the origins of the African American literary tradition and the African Diaspora (Lima 2012:3). The neo- slave also participates in the evaluation of the complex subjectivity of the formerly enslaved and the effect of the legacy of slavery on the present day African Americans. Lewis (2014:2) indicates that the neo-slave narrative as a literary genre emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as an essential aspect of Black-authored writing which offered fresh perspectives on the knowledge on antebellum slavery. Neo-slave narratives reflect the negotiations and will to resist slavery. Neo-slave narratives such as Beloved and A Mercy engage the system of slavery and portray its legacies with the intention of highlighting its horrors and trauma. Neo-slave narratives such as the aforementioned reflect an interrogation on the terms under which the African American is recognised as a full human and not a subhuman in the American culture. The concept of identity is developed through the collection of features that apply to our inner and outer selves, such as skin colour, gender, profession, sexual preferences, religion, language and many more. The collection of these features sets a dichotomy between people. In view of this, Identity can be considered as the traits and characteristics, social relations, roles and social group memberships that define who one is. Also, identity is characterised by “ideas, ideologies and ways of seeing the world around us” (Karen Cerulo 1997:1). The focus of this study is the identity of the Black female and in this regard, it is said that the 99 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh development of the identity of Black women, especially during the era of slavery, often suffered setbacks as the broader society did not equip them much to work with. In view of this, Radford-Hill (2002:3) explains that “history hands Black women, identities built on racist stereotypes like mammy, auntie, prissy, jezebel, sapphire, bitch, video hoe, and welfare queen” The exploration of African American literature reveals the victories and defeats alongside great people who struggle for respect and freedom, and the attempt to carve identity. Drawing on influential and foundational literary works by female writers such as Ntozake Shange, Angela Davis, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, African American women were able to develop a self-defining voice and a collective Black women’s perspective about themselves and their womanhood in order to question their stereotypical representations in dominant discourses (Hill Collins 1996:1). The focus of the study necessitated the application of the theory of Black feminism. As indicated at the beginning of the study, the purpose of the development of Black feminism is to create institutions to protect Black women’s minds and bodies (Taylor 1998:2). Identity is a crucial issue in Black feminism that is why Black feminists provide an activist dimension in their beliefs and ideals with the intention of improving the image of the Black woman and empowering her. In view of this Black Feminists recognise the historical struggle of the Black woman against multiple oppressions of the intersections of race, gender imbalance, class and ethnicity in trying to reject the negative images of her womanhood. The analysis of the study explored the construction of female identity in Toni Morrison’s neo-slave narratives, Beloved and A Mercy. In doing the study, the analysis discussed the image and definition of the woman. It delved into the woman’s innate idea of who she is and what she is capable of versus how the society sees her. Without voice and subjectivity, others judge her solely based on her motherhood and work on plantation. Contemporary female 100 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh writers highlight more on the theme of self largely because of the way Black women have been conceptualised by both Black and White society. In Beloved, one of the ways in which the construction of female identity is done is through the use of metaphor. The use of the tree metaphor reflects the haunting memory of the pain of slavery that can never be erased; this becomes part of Sethe’s identity. She carrying the tree on her back depicts the symbol of pain and suffering experienced by Black women through the history of slavery. In A Mercy, a critical examination of the shoe metaphor suggests the sexualised image of Florens and it is exemplified in an instance such as her sexual desire for the blacksmith. Florens losing her shoes shakes her identity and make-up. She becomes barefooted as she is rejected by the blacksmith. The loss of shoes indicates her freedom from oppression with regards to her obsession of wearing shoes to express her sexual desire and to assimilate into a “civilised” society. Florens is able to acquire a new self and return to the wilderness where she decides to survive in the world alone. The soles of her feet eventually develop to be “hard as cypress”, much like the soul of her newfound identity. Also, remembrance and cross-examination of the disremembered past enable former slaves to develop some fresh comprehension of the long history of slavery’s deconstruction. The comprehension is significant for them to be able to claim ownership of their freed self. Although Sethe wants to forget the past because of the oppression, dehumanisation and pain she experienced during the period of slavery but Morrison believes that we need to remember what happened to aid in the development of a discourse of our own regarding what truly happened. This helps Black women especially, to try and develop their own subjectivity and voice. Denver wants to remember the past in order to be transformed in her identity through the reconstruction of the past. 101 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Construction of the female identity is also done through the act of renaming. In Beloved, Jenny Whitlow decides to change her name to Baby Suggs because she deemed it unnecessary and inappropriate to still bear the names of her former owners. The act of renaming by a freed slave, within the African American culture, was considered as an activity which marked true liberation. In the same way in A Mercy, Sorrow changes her name to Complete. As the women rename themselves, they emerge as strong individuals, who are aware of their identity and self-worth. Renaming then becomes the strongest transformation in the process of identity construction of Sorrow and Baby Suggs in which both women begin to build an understanding as individuals who can live by their own desires and requirements. This transformation influences their decision to step out of incompleteness with a new outlook towards through a reconstruction themselves. Sorrow and Baby Suggs are able to positively construct their own identities in a world which offers little to no scope of a fulfilling image of the female. Moreover, Morrison uses the concept of female solidarity to show how Black females thrived on solidarity to survive and resist such negative images of them. In Beloved, female solidarity is largely achieved through mother and daughter relationships. The text shows that the separation and destruction of familial bonds influences female solidarity as mothers, daughters, sisters and grand-mothers with shared experiences come together to ameliorate their wounds and resist their negative identities. In A Mercy, Florens is not able to build a relationship with her mother because she is sold to the Vaark family. In both texts, Morrison highlights the abhorrence of the institution of slavery as it shatters identities by breaking the bond between a mother and her child. This is to say that the absence of a mother interrupts or impedes the formation of the infant’s subjectivity and they are unable to unfold or develop themselves. Therefore, the terrible ramifications of the separation of a child from his or her mother lead to the loss of cultural identity and heritage. 102 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh From the comparison made between the two neo-slave narratives, it is evident that in spite of the different time/period settings, Morrison uses similar ways of constructing the identity of the female. In both texts, metaphors, renaming and female solidarity are employed to foreground the identity of the female in the neo-slave narrative. The difference observed is the use of rememory in Beloved as it is not found in A Mercy. Beloved and A Mercy can be considered as an examination of the paths that the Black woman takes in her journey to selfhood and self-affirmation. West (2001:3) believes that the leading causes of Black women’s trauma are strongly linked to the effects of the suppression and oppression of Black race and the Black female gender. These reinforce the validity of the struggle for mature Black female identity and self. Morrison’s literary works show clearly how Black females do not only suffer double oppression (they are sufferers of racism and victims of sexual atrocities at the hands of the White as well as the Black men) but she also explains that women are not able to fully exploit their potentials due to restrictions laid upon them by society such as access to adequate socio-economic resources. The female slaves’ chattel status, sex, race are combined to create a complicated set of myths about the image of the black woman. These constructed ideologies were used as a justification for the dehumanisation and violence against the enslaved women. Most African American female writers like Morrison write to re-possess, re-name and re-own. True freedom is equated with thinking for one’s self and celebrating one’s own existence. Morrison’s writing attempts to change the ways of dealing with literature especially in areas where African American women were concerned because traditionally, literature used to reflect racial and patriarchal ideologies (Rahmani, 2015; 1). She gives a voice to an entire community, which was rendered speechless, due to the power or dominant discourse in the place. African American women made giant strides in the struggle to overcome the conundrum of oppression in order to arrive at where they are today. Indeed, the role of 103 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh African American female novelists in this fight is worth remembering as they made significant discussions and responses to situation of the Black woman in America. A society which is a major culprit in carving negative identities for the Black woman, by allowing racial and gender discrimination, can never be promising. 6.2 Recommendations for Further Study Toni Morrison is an influential figure when it comes to African American literature. Findings from the research have pedagogical implications; that is, the contribution to teaching and learning. The findings may be used as an authentic supporting source of reference in academia and other related studies. Again, it can also be a source of reference for further research. This study was about the construction of the female identity in the neo-slave narrative: a comparative study of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and A Mercy. Since the study was limited to just Toni Morrison and her works, it is recommended a comparative study of the construction of female identity in the neo-slave narrative be done between two or more texts from different authors. 104 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Texts Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Random House, 1987. Print. Morrison, Toni. A Mercy. New York: Vintage, 2008. Print. Secondary Texts Adjei, Mawuli. “Male-bashing and Narrative Subjectivity in Amma Darko’s First Three Novels”, SKASE Journal of Literary Studies. 1.1 (2009): 47-61. Albrecht-Crane, C. “Becoming Minoritarian: Post-Identity in Toni Morrison’s ‘Jazz’”, Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 36.1 (2003):56-73. Alexandre, Sandy. “From the Same Tree: Gender and Iconography in Representations of Violence in Beloved”, Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30.4 (2011): 915-940. Allende, Isabel. “Carnalismo and Female Identity,” University of Mauritius Research Journal Vol 21 (2015) Appiah Kwame Anthony. In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Appiah Kwame Anthony. “Identity Against Culture”, Identity Against Culture: Understandings of Multiculturalism. Avenali Lecture (1994):1-31. Bailey, David A. & Hall, Stuart. “The Vertigo of Displacement: Shifts Within Black Documentary Practices”. Ten 8: Critical Decade 2.3 (1992). Baisnee, Valerie. “Bodies Revisited? Representations of the Embodied Self in Janet Frame and Lauris Edmond’s Autobiographies”, Women’s Identities and Bodies in Colonial and Postcolonial History and Literature, Ed. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. 105 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Benston, Kimberly W. “I yam what I am: the topos of un(naming) in Afro-American Literature”. In Black Literature and Literary Theory. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print. Beaulieu, Elizabeth Ann, Ed. The Toni Morrison Encyclopedia. London: Greenwood Publishing Group Inc, 2003. Print. Boyce Davies, Carole. Black Women, Writing and Migrations of the Subject. London and New York: Routledge, 1994, pp. 228. Cantiello, Jessica Wells. “From Pre-Racial to Post-Racial? Reading and Reviewing A Mercy in the Age of Obama”, MELUS. 36.2 (2011): 165-183. Carmean, K. Toni Morrison’s World of Fiction. New York: The Whitston Publishing Company Troy, 1993. Print. Cerulo. Karen. “Identity Construction: New Issues, New Directions”, Annual Reviews Inc Vol 23 (1997): 385-409. Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43.6 (1991): 1241-1299. Cobb, Geneva. “A Demonic Parody: Toni Morrison’s A Mercy”, Moore Source: The Southern Literary Journal. 44.1 (2011): 1-18. Daniels, Steve. V. “Putting His Story Next To Hers: Choice, Agency and The Structure of Beloved”. Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 44.4 (2012): 349-367. Dehon, Claire. “Women in Black African Novels Written in French,” NWSA Journal 8.1 (1996). Devab, Mohammad Shaaban Ahmad. “Cultural Hauntings in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987)”, English Language, Literature & Culture. 1.3, (2016), pp. 13-20. 106 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Durkin, A. “Object Written, Written Object; Slavery, Scaring, and Complications of Authorship in Beloved” Toni Morrison’s Beloved Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009. Eaton, Kalenda. “Diasporic Dialogues: The Role of Gender, Language and Revision in the Neo-slave Narrative,” Language Value 4.2 (2012): 1-22. Ferdinand, Renata. Remember Me: An Interlocking Narrative of Black Women’s Past and Present, Cultural Studies: Critical Methodologies. 18.1 (2018): 52-60. Few, April “Integrating Black Consciousness and Critical Race Feminism into Family Studies Research”, Journal of Family Issues. 28.4 (2007): 452-473 Fulton, Lorie Watkins. “Hiding fire and Brimstone in Lacy Groves: the Twinned trees of Beloved”, African American Review. 39.1/2 (2005). Gates, Henry Louis & Mckay, Nellie Y. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997. Ghasemi, Parvin. “Negotiating Black Motherhood in Toni Morrison’s Novels”, CLA Journal 53.3 (2010): 235-253. Ghasemi, Parvin & Hajizadeh, Rasool. “Demystifying the Myth of Motherhood: Toni Morrison’s Revision of African-American Mother Stereotypes”, International Journal of Social Science and Humanity. 2.6 (2012). Goldberg, Jesse A. “Slavery’s Ghosts and the Haunted Housing Crises: On Narrative Economy and CircumAtlantic Memory in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy”, MELUS. 41.4 (2016). Hamer, Jennifer & Neville, Helen. “Revolutionary Black Feminism: Toward a Theory of Unity and Liberation,” The Black Scholar 28.3/4 (1998): 22-29. Handley, William. “The House a Ghost Built: "Nommo," Allegory, and the Ethics of Reading in Toni Morrison's Beloved”, Contemporary Literature 36.4 (1995): 676-701. 107 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Harris, Trudier. Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Hill Collins, Patricia. “What's in a Name? Womanism, Black Feminism, and Beyond”, The Black Scholar. 26.1 (1996): 9-17. House, Elizabeth, B. “Toni Morrison’s Ghost: The Beloved is Not Beloved”, Studies in American Fiction 18.1 (1990) 17-26. Jewell, K. S. From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond: Cultural Images and the Shaping of US Social Policy. New York: Routledge. 1993. Jimenez, J. The History of Grandmothers in the African American Community, Social Service 76 (2002): 523-551 Jodaki, Abdol Husein & Vajdi Asrin. “Beloved in Search of an Identity: A Reading of Beloved by Toni Morrison, Based on Homi K. Bhabha’s Theories”, Jordan Journal of Modern Languages and Literature. 6.1 (2014): pp. 77-92. Johnson, Kelli Lyon. “The New Slave Narrative: Advocacy and Human Rights in Stories of Contemporary Slavery”, Journal of Human Rights Vol. 12 (2013): 242-258. Kella, Elizabeth. Beloved Communities: Solidarity and Difference in Fiction by Michael Ondaatje, Toni Morrison and Joy Kogawa. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2000. King, Deborah K. “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology,” SIGNS 14.1 (1988): 42-72. King, Sigrid. “Naming and Power in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes were Watching God”., Women Writers Issue, 24.4 (1990): 683-696. Kirby, Sean. “Naming and Identity in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Song of Solomon”, PG. 1/3 6.6 (2014). 108 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Krumholz, Linda. “The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved”, African American Review. 26. 3 (1992): 395-408. Lake, Obiagele. Blue Veins and Kinky Hair: Naming and Colour Consciousness in African America. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2003. Laplanche, Jean. New Foundations for Psychoanalysis. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Print. nd Leary, Mark & Tangney, June Price. Handbook of Self and Identity. 2 ed. New York: Guilford Press, 2012. Lewis, Christopher “Queering Personhood in the Neo-Slave Narrative: Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories”. African American Review. Volume 47 (2014): 447-459. Lillvis, Kristen. “Becoming Self and Mother: Posthuman Liminality in Toni Morrison’s Beloved”, Critique 54 (2013): 452-464. Lima, Maria Helena. “A Written Song: Andrea Levy’s Neo-Slave Narrative”, Entertext, “Special Issue on Andrea Levy” 9 (2012): 53-135. Madden, Mary. “Necessary Narratives: Toni Morrison and Literary Identities,” Women’s Studies International Forum 18.5/6 (1995): 585-594. Martin, K. Conjuring Moments in African American Literature. Basingstoke; Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Martins, Jose Endoenca. “Double-Consciousness and Double Bind: Identities, Tradition, Migration and Translation. The Case of Walker’s Everyday Use and Uso Diario,” International Journal of Language and Linguistics 3.1(2016). McDowell, Deborah. Introduction: Quicksand and Passing By Nella Larsen. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986. McPherson, Lionel K. & Shelby, Tommie. “Blackness and Blood: Interpreting AfricanAmerican Identity,” Philosophy & Public Affairs. 32.2 (2004): 171-192. 109 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Milne, Leah. Choosing Africa: The Importance of Naming in Beloved and the Poisonwood Bible, CLA Journal 55.4 (2012): 352-369. Mphande, Lupenga . “Naming and Linguistic Africanisms in African American Culture”. Selected Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference on African Linguistics Ed, John Mugane et al. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project (2006): 104- 113. Monk, Steve H. “What is the Literary Function of the Motherhood Motif in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy”, Vanderbilt University Board of Trust 9 (2013). Montgomery, Maxine L. “Got on My Travelling Shoes: Migration, Exile and Home in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy”, Journal of Black Studies. 42.4 (2011): 627-637. Mueller, Stefanie. “Standing Up To Words: Writing and Resistance in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy”, Black Studies Papers 1.1 (2014): 73–89. Munoz-Valdivieso, Sofia. “Neo-Slave Narratives in Cotemporary Black Fiction,” A Review of International English Literature 42.34 (2012): 43-59. Murphy, Laura T. “The New Slave Narrative and Illegibility of Modern Slavery,” A Journal of Slave and Post Slave Studies 36.2 (2015): 382-405. Murphy, Laura, T. “Blackface Abolition and the New Slave Narrative,” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry Vol. 2 (2015): 93-113. Mitchell, Angelyn. The Freedom to Remember: Narrative, Slavery and Gender in Contemporary Black Women Fiction. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Neal, Larry. “The Black Arts Movement”. Ed. Hazel Arnett Ervin”. African American Literary Criticism, 1773-2000. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1999. 110 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Oloruntoba-Oju, Omotayo & Oloruntoba-Oju, Taiwo. “Models in the Construction of Female Identity in Nigerian Postcolonial Literature,” Tydskrif Vir Letterkunde 50.2 (2013): 5-10. O’Reilly, Andrea. Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart. New York: State University of New York Press, 2004. Print. Peckham, Rachael. “Identity Anxiety and the Problem and Power of Naming in African American and Jewish American Literature”, Xavier Review 29.1 (2009): 30-47. Peterson, James Braxton. “Eco-critical Focal Points: Narrative Structure and Environmentalist Perspectives in Morrison’s A Mercy”. Toni Morrison’s A Mercy: Critical Approaches Ed. Shirley A. Stave and Justine Tally. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011: 9-21. Print. Philogene, Gina. From Black to African American: A New Social Representation. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 1999. Puskas, Andrea. “What is a Woman: Female Identity in the Mirror of Feminist Criticism”. Narrative Construction of Identity in Female Writing Ed, Zsofia Barczi & Gabriella Petres Csizmadia. Budapest: Equilibria, 2013. Putnam, Amanda. “Ferocious Female Resistance in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved and A Mercy”, Black Women, Gender, and Families 5.2 (2011): 25-43 Rahmani, Ayda. “Black Feminism: What Women of Colour Went Through in Toni Morrison’s Selected Novels”, International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature 4.3 (2015). Radford-Hill, Sheila. “Keepin’ It Real: A Generational Commentary on Kimberly Springer’s “Third Wave Black Feminism?”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 27.4 (2002). 111 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Robbins, Wendy & Sagawa, Jesie. “Resistor and Rebel Storytellers: Slave Narratives and Neo-slave Novels by, and/or about Women Connected to Canada”, Postcolonial Text 6.4 (2011). Rossi, William A. The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe. 1976. Florida: Krieger Publishing Company, 1993. Print. Roye, Susmita, “Toni Morrison's Disrupted Girls And Their Disturbed Girlhoods: The Bluest Eye and A Mercy”, Callaloo 35. 1 (2012): 212-227 Ruetenik, Tadd. “Animal Liberation or Human Redemption: Racism and Speciesism in Toni Morrison’s Beloved”, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 17.2 (2010). Ruiz Romero, Maria Isabel. “Re-writing Our Bodies and Our Identities”, Women’s Identities and Bodies in Colonial and Postcolonial History and Literature. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. Sadehi, Camelia Talebian. “Beloved and Julia Kristeva’s The Semiotic and The Symbolic”, Theory and Practice in Language Studies. 2.7 (2012): 1491-1497. Salvatore, Anne. “Toni Morrison’s New Bildungsroman: Paired Characters and Antithetical Form in The Bluest Eye, Sula and Beloved,” Journal of Narrative Theory 32.2 (2002): 154-178. Samson, Rennet & Shilaja, C. L. “Retrieving Communal Memory from Oblivion: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and A Mercy”, The International Journal of Humanities 9.11 (2011). Smith, Valerie. “Black Feminist Theory and the Representation of the Other”. African American Literary Theory: A Reader Ed Winston Napier. New York: New York University Press, 2000. 112 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Speight, Amelia. “What You Call Yourself? Nothingness, Naming, Abjection and Queer Failure in Toni Morrison’s Beloved”, Aisthesis Vol. 8. (2017). Suggs, Jon-Christian. “African American Literature and Legal History”, Law and Literature 22.2 (2010): 325-337. Tally, Justine. “Contextualizing Toni Morrison’s Ninth novel: What Mercy? Why Now?” Toni Morrison’s A Mercy: Critical Approaches Ed. Shirley A. Stave and Justine Tally. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. 63-84. Print. Taher, Fatma. “A Mercy: The Impact of Interpersonal Relationships on Female Identity Formation and Survival”, International Journal of the Humanities. 9.3 (2011). Taylor, Ula “Making Waves: The Theory and Practice of Black Feminism”, The Black Scholar 28.2 (1998): 18-28. Terry, Jennifer. “Breathing the Air of a World So New”: Rewriting the Landscape of America in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Journal of American Studies. 48 (2014): 125-147. Tanritanir, Bulent Cercis & Takva Serdar. “Female Solidarity in Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple”, International Journal of Social Science. 61.3 (2017): 117-123. Udoette, Monica S. “Female Consciousness in Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple”, International Journal on Studies in English Language and Literature (IJSELL) 2.5 (2014): 74-80. Varsam, Maria. “To Remember or Not to Remember: Traumatic Memory and the Legacy of Slavery in Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Toni Morrison’s Beloved”, Black Studies Papers 1.1 (2014): 125-141. Vint, Sherry. “Only by Experience: Embodiment and the Limitations of Realism in Neo-slave Narratives,” Science Fiction Studies 34.2 (2007): 241-261. 113 University of Ghana http://ugspace.ug.edu.gh Wang, Yuan. “Morrison’s Black Feminist Discourse in A Mercy”. Open Journal of Social Sciences. 3 (2015): 234-238. West, Cornel. Race Matters. New York: Vintage Books 2001. Woodard, Jennifer Bailey & Mastin, Teresa. “Black Womanhood: Essence and its Treatment of Stereotypical Image of Black Women”, Journal of Black Studies 36.2 (2005): 264-281. Woolford, Pamela. Filming Slavery: A Conversation with Haile Gerima. 1994. Wyatt, Jean. “Failed Messages, Maternal Loss and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy”. Modern Fiction Studies, 58.1 (2012): 128-151. X, Malcolm & Haley, Alex. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove Press, 1965. Print. Xu, Gang. “The New History in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the Construction of the Black’s Subjectivity”, English Language and Literature Studies. 4.4 (2014). Yu, Su-lin. “The Return of the Sister: Sisterhood and Black Female Subjectivity in Toni Morrison’s Beloved”, CLA Journal 51.4 (2008): 407-423. 114