Writing/Reading Slavery as Trauma: Othering, Resistance, and the Haunting Use of Voice in Toni Morrison s A Mercy.

Abstract

For the first time since Beloved, Toni Morrison returns to slavery in A Mercy (2008): the slave trade is allegorized as a pox upon the initially utopian Vaark farm. Though in the face of systematic discourses of oth-ering, each oppressed character puts up strategies of resistance, the dialec-tic of love, loss, and alienation in Florens s story permeates the entire nov-el. But Florens s voice offers resistance and empowerment as well: the house that Jacob built and that Florens haunts is, in a mise en abyme of the house of fiction reclaimed by Toni Morrison, a black repossession of the house that slavery built.