A Mercy- A Rendezvous with Histories and Memories

Authors

  • Dr. Gigy J.Alex Reader, Dept of Humanities, Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, Dept of Space. Valiamala. Trivandrum

Keywords:

Black America, Self Centered, Narration, Anxiety

Abstract

Toni Morrison’s speaks about the untold tales of slavery in America. It is the story of Florence and Jacob Vaark. Morrison speaks about the causes of racism, dissecting its early roots. It is a touching testimony of the Black American motherhood and speaks about freedom, mercy and kindness. This novella expresses the experience of mercies felt by the characters. Morrison breaks the syntactic rules of the masters’ discourse. Here Morrison inscribes the forgotten histories though the erased memories. Her humbling language reinforces the fact that her characters’ strength lies in their memories and in voicing those memories. Rather than the Eurocentric concepts of linearity and subjective self-centered narrative tropes, Morrison concentrates more on an open ended circular narration where we come across a common good for all, where community matters more than the individual. This beautiful prose-poem, blends history (personal as well as political), psychological anxieties, and biblical re-readings.

References

Durrant, S. Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning: J. M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and Toni Morrison (2004), Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004.

King, Nicola. Memory, Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000.

Le Clair, Thomas. “The Language must not Sweat: A Conversation with Toni Morrison” New Republic. 184. 21 March 1981.

McLeod, John. The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 2008.

Morrison, Toni. A Mercy. London: Vintage Books, 2009.

Morrison, Toni & Carolyn C. Denard. What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction. United States of America Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2008.

Ryan, Michael. Cultural Studies Reader. An Anthology. USA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008.

Tate, Claudia. “Toni Morrison.” Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983.

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications, London and Tanzanian Publishing House, Dar-Es-Salaam 1973, Transcript from 6th reprint, 1983; http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney walter/how-europe/ch04.htm#s1

Transcribed: by Joaquin Arriola.http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1993/Morrison

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Published

01.04.2015

How to Cite

Gigy J.Alex. (2015). A Mercy- A Rendezvous with Histories and Memories. Journal of Teaching and Research in English Literature, 6(4), 16–23. Retrieved from https://journals.eltai.in/index.php/jtrel/article/view/JTREL060404

Issue

Vol. 6 No. 4 (2015): April

Section

Research Articles

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