Women-Centered Diaspora in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy

Scholars have been much concerned with Toni, Morrison’s portrayal of states of exile and displacement in A Mercy (2008). However, most critics discuss the characters’ diaspora in terms of race and ethnicity, focus on how their racial and ethnic backgrounds contribute to their orphanhood, and overlook Morrison’s depictions of women’s specific diasporic experiences compared to men’s. The lack of a distinctly feminist viewpoint leads critics to ignore not only the specificity of women’s diaspora but also the liberating potential that diasporic experiences may generate. Existing discussions mostly treat the characters’ diaspora in A Mercy negatively and examine both how the characters are victimized by their dislocation and how they at the same time employ their wits to counteract the side effects of their dislodgement. As a result, critics tend to overlook how diaspora per se may also generate a liberating space for women where women can free themselves from a rigid patriarchy. Different from men who may lose masculine privileges in becoming diasporic subjects, women in diaspora are usually viewed from two opposite perspectives: on the one hand, diaspora may provide them with opportunities to transcend national boundaries and escape from the strict gender norms that are imposed on them; on the other hand, it may also assist in reproducing those norms and even increase women’s sufferings due to the intersection of oppressions due to gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality in the precarious space of diaspora. As Nadje Al-Ali writes, “one underlying issue which has interested feminist scholars of different disciplinary backgrounds is the question of whether diasporas provide enabling contexts in which previous gender norms can be challenged or whether they reproduce and possibly even harden existing gender ideologies and relations” (119). Given women’s special diasporic experiences, this article proposes to read Morrison’s A Mercy as a story of multiethnic women’s diaspora and analyze