Laughter Of The Wretched

Abstract

Toni Morrison is the most popular African American female writer who attempts to describe, criticize and reflect the circumstances of black females‟ suffering from oppression. Because of their skin color that signified submission and inferiority, African American women had to struggle double if not triple oppression because of being black, because of being female and also because of being poor, weak, lonely and hopeless. Suffering for the black female has frequently been a lifestyle and tears their only way to respond. However, when the black woman laughs, it has mostly nothing to do with what is funny at all, it is but a way to keep from crying. African Americans‟ laughing aims at breaking whites‟ stereotypical hegemonic and oppressive consciousness and their pride of the illusive superiority. It is a cry of pain that Morrison calls the cry of laugh that characters reflect in her famous novel „Beloved‟ which unveils the suffering of colored people. In their laughing, blacks attempt to decolonize whites‟ consciousness and replace it with the blacks‟ consciousness of freedom, resistance and self-esteem. The paper examines how laughter is used by African Americans as one of the defense mechanisms to deconstruct white racist thinking and oppressive ideology.