Communal Trauma: Healing and Reconciliation in Toni Morrison`s Song of Solomon

As an outstanding African-American author who has got fame for her tragic novel, Toni Morrison is well-known for her depiction of black experiences as slaves or the after-affect of African-American`s traumatic suffering under white dominance. This black community has to bear the heavy burden of rejection, oppression, racism and white dominance, so they are burdened with a wounded psyche and body that causes pain and which constantly reminds them of their past situation. Morrison`s major novels, The Bluest Eye, Beloved and Song of Solomon focus on traumatic events of the black community; these novels represent the communal and personal trauma of black community who struggle with pressures pressing them down from upward and inward. As Eyerman discusses in his Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the formation of African-American identity, “cultural trauma refers to a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the social fabric, affecting a group of people that has achieved some degree of cohesion; in this sense, the trauma need not necessarily be felt by everyone in a community or experienced directly by any or all” (2).This thesis aims to study the cultural trauma that the black characters are haunted with and the after effect of this trauma within trauma theory; it further intends to analyze how this trauma condition`s the characters` life and focus on their difficulty dealing with the problems that weigh down their shoulders. Moreover, this study intends to deal with the issue of recovery and reconciliation among the black characters, whether they could pass the stages of recovery or rather they are pulled down with the heavy weight of their trauma.

Keywords:

cultural or communal trauma , personal trauma , healing or recovery