The experience of slavery and trauma in the novels of Toni Morrison, Caryl Phillips and Fred D'aguiar

Historical and cultural realities might be known through literature. Theoreticians have emphasized that "trauma" is a significant means of disclosing people's sufferings hidden in historical and cultural facts. Because trauma provides formerly silenced people with the ability of self-expression, literary works, which bring trauma and witnessing together, become testimonies. Testimony enables a person to become a subject who survives, tells his own story of traumatization and gets cured, for this account helps, first, to face the past himself, and then, to make the painful event known by the others who listen to him. The aim of this thesis is to analyze how the act of reading novels such as Toni Morrison's A Mercy, Caryl Phillips's Cambridge and Fred D'Aguiar's Feeding the Ghosts, where traumas are witnessed and transmitted, connects human beings from different cultures through sympathy, and how this may bring a future that is relieved of past mistakes. Transatlantic black writers D'Aguiar, Phillips and Morrison responded, via Feeding the Ghosts, Cambridge and A Mercy, to Africans and Native Americans' dismissal in the western archival history. The study of these novels, the authors' call for justice, has shown that the colonization and enslavement in America, which was conducted via the triangular slave trade, traumatized those peoples. After witnessing to slavery in three retellings of the experience as voiced by the subjugated, it is evidently observed that witnessing to and sharing the trauma of slavery is still an urgency since this inhumane practice is prevalent even in the contemporary world.