Revisiting the Past in the Age of Posts: Rememory in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child and Gisèle Pineau’s Femmes des Antilles

Abstract

In this article, I examine how Toni Morrison and Gisèle Pineau provide timely pieces against the historical amnesia characteristic of post-racial discourse in the USA and in France. Studying Morrison’s God Help the Child (2015) and Pineau’s Femmes des Antilles: Traces et Voix (1998) side by side reveals how Morrison’s rememory is a global concept as pertinent today as when first coined in Beloved (1987). The term’s original use in the context of slavery also suggests a lens through which to read Morrison’s non-slavery era works like God Help the Child. What ultimately comes to the fore in both authors’ potent expositions of the specter of slavery haunting black women in the USA, France, and the West Indies is a rejection of historical silencing.