THE WOUNDS THAT SPEAK: TRAUMATIC CHILDHOOD AND ITS LASTING IMPACT IN THE NOVELS OF TONI MORRISON AND ALICE WALKER
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.29121/JISSI.v1.i1.2025.97Keywords:
Childhood Trauma, Racialized Shame, Memory, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Testimony, Intergenerational InjuryAbstract
Most of the time childhood injury in Toni Morrison and Alice Walker never remains consigned to the recollection of an event. It slots in the sense of beauty that lives within a character, the vocabulary for love, a particular set up for home, how expectations are handed down from one generation to another. This article study Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Beloved and God Help the Child along with Walker's The Color Purple and Possessing the Secret of Joy. And it does not diagnose fictional children, nor set trauma in a standardized scroll. Rather, it inquires as to how the novels give voice to wounds when the child was disbelieved or lacked language or inherited an experience no grown-up would narrate. Blue eyes, a haunted house and Denver's life there, cultivated blackness and a Bride, Celie's letters -gravel in her mouth- Tashi's scar: these responses vary with each history. At the level of transmission, their comparison makes sense: shame runs through family to receive its language, provided by racial and patriarchal institutions wherein it can sound normal. They have it all over Morrison and Walker, who deploy transmission through broken chronology, repeated scenes, withheld testimony (what we do not hear), false names or no names oftentimes the audience of one initially skirted by the original listener. In his novels recovery neither forgets nor creates an unbroken child, which is interesting. It is the indeterminate seizing of interpretive authority - in which one claims a historical place for an injury, contests its meaning imposed from before and sometimes speaks where silence used to hold virtue to the person who caused harm.
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