OTHERHOOD, DEATH AND THE REMAKING OF AN IDENTITY IN TONI MORRISON’S “UNBALANCED” WORLDS
OTHERHOOD, DEATH AND THE REMAKING OF AN IDENTITY IN TONI MORRISON’S “UNBALANCED” WORLDS

Summary/Abstract: Toni Morrison conjured, “There was something so valuable about what happened when one became a mother. For me it was the most liberating thing that ever happened to me. . . . Liberating because the demands that children make are not the demands of a normal «other.».”1 It is the force demonstration of a writing which explores burdens and suffering, the dark hallow of an inner turmoil sometimes bordering insanity, sometimes bordering selfdissolution, but also, sometimes giving birth to higher worldviews, reshaping the unknowable through death and living. The precarious balance between living with guilt and the guilt of living takes Morrison’s female “explorers” beyond themselves, in order to become sacrifices of their own determination. The multiple expressions of motherhood and womanhood are therefore dangerously juxtaposed in Beloved, Sula, Song of Solomon, A Mercy, and Paradise, declining the chanced appeal to the silence of the mind. The constructs against which Morrison’s heroines are defined are enrooted in African myths and human sacrifices reasoning for the breaking of the chains or the engulfing mysteries of insanity

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