Memória, linguagem e construção de identidade em Song of Solomon e Beloved, de Toni Morrison

• Autor(a) principal: Flávia Maurício da Rocha Fontes
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFMG
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/39468
• topic: Toni Morrison; Beloved; Song of Solomon; Memory; Language; Healing; Resistance; Morrison, Toni. – Crítica e interpretação; Morrison, Toni. – Beloved – Crítica e interpretação; Memória na literatura; Negros na literatura; Escravidão na literatura; Ficção americana – História e crítica

In this thesis, I analyze Morrison’s novels Song of Solomon and Beloved, focusing on how the characters are affected by the cultural trauma of slavery and how memory and language are essential elements that provide resistance to the oppression they face while promoting healing to this collective wound. This research concentrates on the collective aspects of the trauma of slavery, as I discuss how even the characters who did not experience it directly are still affected, losing their sense of identity, and, consequently, becoming alienated, unable to identify with the group and excluded by the community. In this sense, I argue that Morrison uses language to represent how the maintenance of an oral tradition and the use of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) can be forms of resistance to the erasure of black people’s narratives, as they become weapons to fight the silencing imposed on them by the dominant society. Additionally, I claim that the rescue of memory through the use of language and cultural manifestations—in the form of stories, songs, myths, rituals and the use of African American Vernacular English—is essential to form bonds that unite black people as a community, restoring the characters’ fragmented sense of self as they finally reconcile with both sides of their identity: African and American. In the novels, healing is only possible when they acknowledge their collective memory, accepting their history and understanding their place in the group as they become ready to move forward.