From Middle Passage to Medical Apartheid: An Inquest of Alternate American History in Aleisa Phyllis Perry’s Stigmata And Toni Morrison’s Home

Abstract

This paper proposes to analyze three decades of African American history as represented in Aleisa Phyllis Perry’s Stigmata (1998) and Toni Morrison’s Home (2012). This paper attempts to visualize how the memories of protagonists’ challenge the American history. Black women writers break the notions of western historiographers to evoke the emotions of African Americans through their writings as western historiographers do not empathize the emotions of African American women.  In both the novels, the role of memory forms fragmentary and nonlinear pattern of storytelling. They reflect the characters’ private injuries, broken personalities of the story tellers, and their hesitance of trouble in opening up. Both of these writers chronicle the commonly curbed or over looked stories from the point of view of the unprivileged. Hence this paper strives to focus on the histories of African Americans as recorded in Phyllis Perry’s Stigmata (1998) and Toni Morrison’s Home (2012) as an alternate form of history