Communal identity is an integral part necessary not only for the transcendence of society or for a single private self, but also to reverse the shame and stigma which the system of slavery has inflicted on the African Americans. Sharing stories and exchanging experience is therefore a source of enrichment and healing as we find in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and A Mercy. Morrison’s African American cultural perspective can be stated as entirely cross-cultural. It is of a culture which is constructed from integrated and mutually influencing African and American cultural strands which together create a new and distinct culture.

Morrison has often been regarded as the foremost American literary voice for both pre-slavery and post-slavery African American culture. In her works, she addresses the position of the African American person in the contemporary world. She is especially concerned with the way the African American individuals and communities are expressive or silenced within a dominant culture which historically has been intolerant of racial difference. For Morrison, to write “about race” is not a matter of parading her characterizations as a way to depict essential traits and universal experiences of African Americans as a unified people. It is admitting that race determines if not how one perceives the world, then at least how one is perceived by the world. For Morrison, race is inextricable from the question of what it means and how it feels to be an individual in a particular time and place.

English Studies Journal, Some kind of tomorrow, American individuals, Morrison’s African American, American Literary, Trauma, Collective Memory, Toni Morrison’s.