Exploring the deep layers of black motherhood in Beloved by Toni Morrison and The Long Song by Andrea Levy

Abstract

This article aims to explore the deep layers of motherhood in the literary masterpieces Beloved by Toni Morrison and The Long Song by Andrea Levy. It is a comparative analysis of the selected novels that share a common background; the history of slavery. The trauma of slavery has an impact both on the literature and on the transfer of cultural memory. African American and Black British women's writings are connected to the malfunctioning results of slavery in their past which also haunts their present. Using certain narrative forms, their neo-slave narratives reflect the trauma of slavery and cultural memory. It uncovers the centrality of motherhood to cultural memory in African American and Black British women’s neo-slave narratives. This article engages with the transfer of cultural memory in black women’s neo-slave narratives through motherhood. It aims to encapsulate the relationships between colonization, historical injustices, slavery, and gender discrimination to investigate motherhood. Black women are recognized as bearers of cultural memory; therefore, the relationship between a mother and a daughter is used to analyze cultural memory and the trauma of slavery. Morrison and Levy’s neo-slave narratives are seen as a means of struggle against forgetting. Despite sharing some features, African American and Black British women’s neo-slave narratives have differences. Reading these two neo-slave narratives in a comparative approach, this study presents a renewed point of view for cultural memory studies in literature through black mothering. It will contribute to debates about the importance of maternal ancestry upon black women to construct cultural memory.