Abstract

The study probes into the historical and familial inherited trauma of being black in Toni Morrison’s latest novel - God Help the Child. It illustrates how African American children, in Morrison’s novels, learn about white culture, black communities, and their own self-worth through the legacy of racial discrimination. Childhood experience becomes knowledge and remembering in the hands, in the body, and in the cultivation and habit, functions as a site of endless exchange, intervention and re-intervention, passes from one generation to another, and eventually becomes the whole nation’s collective memory. Such insight offers new angles from which to look at African Americans whilst showing the relevance of the issues these characters deal with to the contemporary American society.

Key words: God Help the Child, childhood trauma, body, memory.