Childhood Traumas, Journeys, and Healing in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child

In Morrison’s works, traumatized children are victimized by the dreadful impact of racist and sexist stereotypes and their subsequent patterns of exclusion and marginalization. My contention is that in Morrison’s latest novel God Help the Child (2015), these children learn to survive their early traumatic experiences, and develop diverse strategies of resilience, re-embodiment, and self-empowerment in order to articulate a new sense of identity on their path to physical and psychological healing. Drawing from gender and intersectional studies, I argue that Morrison’s God Help the Child delineates the coming into being of alternative female and male identities that are intrinsically dynamic and highly performative. The main protagonists, Bride and Booker, embark on a mysterious journey back to their childhood to be able to come to terms with their former selves that eventually leads to healing and wholeness, allowing them to envision a brighter future.