Leyendo Beloved de Toni Morrison en Salvage the Bones y Sing, Unburied, Sing de Jesmyn Ward

Abstract

Drawing on Harold Bloom’s concept of factility or the unavoidable influence of texts that run through the cultural legacy of the African diaspora, this article examines the intertextual relationship between Morrison’s Beloved and Ward’s Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing. In Salvage the Bones, Ward engages with Beloved to retell the myth of Medea and to rethink black motherhood to keep on interrogating questions of self-definition and the sense of community aiming to offer a more nuanced understanding of black women’s reality under sundry layers of oppression. In Sing, Unburied, Sing Ward rereads Beloved to plunge into the importance of diasporic memory and its role in fostering familial bonds and healing. This is done by using the Morrisonian trope of the familial ghost(s) with the resulting traumatic wounds to exemplify the manifold ways in which collective memory has historically kept communities of African Americans together. This intertextual exercise exposes the way in which Ward’s novels continue to examine Morrison’s account of the violent legacy of slavery and its new practices on African American families and communities from past to present.