Communal Trauma: Healing and Reconciliation in Toni Morrison s Beloved through the Lens of Trauma Criticism

This paper aims to explore how the communal trauma in Tony Morrison’s famous novel Beloved conditions the subjective healing and the reconciliation in the communities within the work of trauma theory. The collective trauma inflicted by systems affects the group of people of any size and stir up collective sentiment, often resulting in a shift in that society s culture and mass actions for generations to come. Trans-generational trauma of large scales such as the trail of tears, and the slavery can be potent fuel for the eruption of violence and frustration in present communities. Focusing on historical collective trauma Toni Morrison attempts to re-conceptualize the traumatic events through reliance on narrative elements such as characters, actions, places, and time to redefine the history and the collective memory in a reconstructive process. Toni Morrison’s works constitute texts in which through the characters’ interaction with the color, and memory the trauma is brought out to societal level which is crucial for personal and communal healing for preventing traumatic identities to transfer into future generations. Collective trauma can be alleviated through cohesive and collective efforts such as recognition, remembrance, solidarity, communal therapy and massive cooperation and this is what Morrison does in Beloved.

کلیدواژه ها:

Collective trauma ، collective memory ، communal trauma ، healing ، recovery.