Women as Doubly Dispossessed in the Writings of Toni Morrison and Bama A Comparative study

Abstract

Toni Morrison describes herself as a black woman novelist but also as Midwestern. She sees herself, then, as a writer with a racial/ cultural identity, a gender identity, and a national/ regional identity. Karukku discusses oppression borne by Dalits at the hands of state (Police) panchayat, the upper castes and at the church. Bama also highlights how Dalit women are oppressed further by Dalit men at home. The collusion of patriarchy with caste hegemony is a harsher and more unjust suppression of Dalit women. Bama s writings celebrates Dalit women s lives, there wit, their humour, their resilience and their creativity. They re shown as hardworking, courageous women who work ceaselessly at home and outside and manage the house-hold single-handedly when their men folk are rounded up by the police over trumped up chargers. The community bonding the solidarity among neighbors in a Cheri (Dalit colony) are valorized. Despite dual pressures of work at home and in the fields / workplace, Dalit women are forced to put up with enormous violence at male hands. Dalit men abuse their women no less than the upper caste men argue Bama s narratives. Bama s writings celebrates Dalit women s Subversive strategies to overcome their oppressions while some act as shrews and overwhelm their alcoholic, violent husbands with their verbal tirade and thereby escape physical violence, some of others wrestle with the men while a few of them choose to walk out on their abusive husbands. The Bluest Eye shows racism damaging effects on the black community at large and on black families. As the black community and individual black people observe the wider cultures racist pictures of themselves, they focus their self-hatred on the most vulnerable character, twelve-year old Pocola Breedlove. Pocola s tragedy, then, is the culmination of many other tragedies. However, The Bluest Eye also contains stories of perseverance and Survival.