This project examines how black women writers, specifically by writing scenes of violence, explore the sociopolitical, racial, economic, and gender exploitation through the abuse of black women within their texts. Part of the goal of this project is to reclaim the literature of black women from the clutches of a black masculinist understanding and reject these superficial readings in an effort to make sense of the black-on-black violence documented in the works of black women authors. To be more specific, the intent of this study is to investigate the ways in which collective emotional trauma and individual physical and sexual abuses against black women exist as power performances. These violences enacted against black women in black women’s writing serve as a way for socially, economically, and culturally disempowered bodies to claim power by overpowering a body even more marginalized. The extensive pattern in the work of black women writers who write about the violence experienced by black women prompts a series of questions: Why do texts written by these black women overwhelmingly contain scenes of emotional, physical and sexual abuse? What purposes do black women authors have in constructing these scenes of abuse predominantly at the hands of black men? How complicit do these authors suggest that the black community is in allowing acts of violence to occur? How effective are these texts in breaking the silence of abuse beyond any fictional realm, and what kind of power does this attainment of voice give African American women readers of these texts? Can we read these texts’ exposure of violence against black women as resistance narratives? What is lost or gained through such a reading?
Scenes of emotional trauma and of physical and sexual abuse proliferate in each of the primary texts chosen for this study: Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose, Gayl Jones’ Corregidora and Eva’s Man, Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Sapphire’s Push, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. These black women authors attempt to break the silences inherent to abuse, silences accentuated by the subordinated position of racial minority in order to expose the terror inflicted on black women and girls because of their marginalized place in society. These women not only indict the individual action of abusers, but examine the larger social implications of power relations in this country where the marginalization of black skin and female sex are systemically and politically maintained and reproduced. Ultimately, the texts used in this study depict black women victims of violence to implicate the role abuse plays in exposing and manifesting the multiple oppressions inherent to the position of double jeopardy black women occupy, indict the role that black women play as scapegoats for the anger black men feel as a result of their societal emasculation, reject the invisibility of the abused black female body, and resist the “soul murder” of black male patriarchy (King 16).