Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Dergisi

Öz

The Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison is a significant figure in American literature. The black bodies marginalized by the slavery system are the main focus of her writings as an African descent author. Through her black female characters in particular, Morrison focuses on the experiences of black people in American society. Morrison generally deals with slavery, racism, social oppression, marginalization, in short, black lives shaped according to the white-dominated rules. She, hence, reflects the black people’s struggles for existence under the social
hierarchy determined by the skin color. Similarly, Frantz Fanon focuses on the destruction of the colonial system created by the economic and political reasons on black individuals. Psychiatrist Fanon deals with the secondary position of black people in relation to white people with its psychological effects and scrutinizes black people’s sense of self. By analyzing the defense mechanisms against the systematic racism to which black people are exposed, Fanon draws sociological arguments with their psychological dimensions. He focuses on the multidimensional causes of black people’s alienation as a result of social oppression. The aim of this study which brings Morrison and Fanon together is to make a Fanonian analysis of Toni Morrison’s last novel, God Helps the Child. This study primarily focuses on how Fanon’s arguments in his book Black Skin and White Masks which discusses the reflections of white supremacy on black people are mirrored in Morrison’s novel. Accordingly, the effects of black women’s position in white society, the decisive factors of their social roles and societal variables on family dynamics based on the relationships between the family members have been revealed. This study, hence, deeply analyzes how the sense of superiority created by belonging to the white race, as emphasized by Fanon, shapes Morrison’s black mother-daughter relationship, how the black woman is pushed into the boundaries defined by white society and how the accepted perceptions of whiteness keep her captive.