Geeta Bindal

Suffering and Salvation: a Study of Selected Novels of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison Geeta Bindal

Afro American women writers Alice Walker and Toni Morrison tell the tragic tales of black people caught in the maze of oppressive forces of racism, sexism and classism. The traumatic torture of racism and sexism are allied and have a parallel existence. The white master dehumanized his slave, made him quantifiable and sold him in market as a commodity. The black women faced the reality of double discrimination of both race and sex. She was burdened,doubly jeopardized person. The obsolete and repressive cultural practices chocked their bodies and spirit. The black woman was seen as an evil incarnate, robbing white women of their men and corrupting a whole way of life. The fiction of Walker and Morrison explores not only the physical, psychological and spiritual damage of slavery but also the therapeutic possibilities. The cooperative self healing of a community of survivors through communal interaction the individual proceeds from repressive isolation to a developed sense of self. Thus the facelessness and anonymity imposed by the dominant white culture on the Black communities in America is resisted and turned into the spiritual survival, the survival whole of Black people.