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A Mercy by Toni Morrison
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A Mercy (2008)
Toni Morrison
1931-2019
- American writer noted for her examination of Black experience (particularly Black female experience) within the Black community.
Toni Morrison
Awards
Presidential Medal of Freedom (2012)
Nobel Prize (1993)
Pulitzer Prize (1988)
Her work
Black American experience
In an unjust society, her characters struggle to find themselves and their cultural identity.
Her work
Her use of fantasy, her sinuous poetic style, and her rich interweaving of the mythic gave her stories great strength and texture.
Story
Jacob Vaark
Rebekka Vaark
Lina
Florens
Sorrow
1600's America
Aim:
Explore the voice given to multi-ethnic women in the fluid, male dominated society of America in the late seventeenth century in A Mercy (2008) in the light of Decolonial Feminism.
Aim
Florence
Slavery
FLORENCE
“My telling can’t hurt you in spite of what I have done and I promise to lie quietly in the dark- weeping perhaps or occasionally seeing the blood once more- but I will never again unfold my limbs to rise up and bare teeth. You can think what I tell you a confession, if you like, but one full of curiosities familiar only in dreams and during those moments when a dog’s profile plays in the steam of a kettle. Or when a corn-husk doll sitting on the shelf is soon splaying in the corner of a room and the wicked of how it got there is plain. You know. I know you know. One question is who is responsible? another is can you read?(...)”
Morrison (2008)
Submission
"quiet"
"dark"
Language
"never again bare teeth"
Language
“Recognizing the profound influence of racialization and gendering is essential to an adequate understanding of the past, to efforts to transform the present, and to strategies to envision and produce a different future.”
Disch y Hawkesworth (2016, Capítulo 5)
Language
"It was there I learned how I was not a person from my country, nor my families. I was negrita. Everything, Language, dress, gods, dance, habits, decoration, song, all of it cooked together in the color of my skin"
Morrison (2008)
Identity
"I walk alone except for the eyes that join me on my journey. Eyes that do not recognize me, eyes that examine me for a tail, and extra teat, a man's whip"
Morrison (2008)
"A likely woman who has had small pox and measles... A likely Negro about 9 years... Girl or woman that is handy in the kitchen"
Morrison (2008)
Lina
Lina
“It was their destiny to chew up the world and spit out a horribleness that would destroy all its primary peoples.”
"They named her Mesalina"
"She learned that bathing naked in the river was a sin, that plucking cherries from an tree burdened with them was a theft"
Morrison (2008)
Colonization
"(they) scorned native men who simply fished and and hunted like gentry (...) since they owned nothing, certainly not the land they slept on, preferring to live as entitled paupers "
Morrison (2008)
Hierarchization
Resistance
Hibridity
“ she decided to fortify herself by piecing together scraps of what her mother had taught her before dying in agony. Relying on the memory and her own resources, she cobbled together neglected rites, merged Europe medicine with native, scripture with lore, and recalled or invented the hidden meaning of things. Found in other words, a way to be in this world.”
Morrison (2008)
Rebekka
“Wretched as was the space they crouched in, it was nevertheless blank where a past did not haunt nor a future beckon. Women of and for en, in those few moments they were neither”
Morrison (2008)
Rebekka
"Although they had nothing in common with the views of each other, they had everything in common with one thing; the promise and threat of men"
Morrison (2008)
Jacob
Colonizer
Jacob
"Jacob joined the men at a table and listened to Downes' mesmerizing tales ending with a hilarious description of the size of women's breasts in Barbados.
'I once thought of settling there,' said Jacob
'Besides bossoms, what is it like?
'Like a whore. Lush and deadly,' said Downes.
'Meaning?'
Downes wiped his lips with his sleeve. Meaning all is plentiful and ripe except life. That is scarce and short. Six months, eigtheen and--' he waved goodbye fingers"
Morrison (2008)
Conclusion
"There is no protection. To be a female in this place is to be an open wound that cannot heal"
Morrison (2008)
Disch, L. J., & Hawkesworth, M. E. (2016). The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory. Oxford University Press.
Lugones, M. “Colonialidad y género”. Tabula Rasa. Bogotá - Colombia, No.9: 73-101, julio-diciembre 2008. https://www.revistatabularasa.org/numero-9/05lugones.pdf
Morrison, T. (2008). A mercy. Vintage.