RESISTING REPRESSION: FEMALE CHARACTERS IN ALICE WALKER'S NOVELS

Abstract

African American history is history of racial repression on African American people in the United States as an integral part of American socio-political history. African Americans, formerly referred as Negroes are the descendants of captive Africans held in the United States. According to Frederick Douglass, "the first recorded Africans in British North America arrived in 1619 in Jamestown Virginia. Most African Americans are of West African descent" (33). Negroes were brought to America in chains and treated as slaves. Even the marital status of the Africans as Mr., Miss, and Mrs. etc. was not designated. There were no laws in United States in the early seventeenth century to define the rights of Negroes and groups of Negro slaves were frequently offered for sale with no mention of family ties. The white masters used them as commodities and put them under the severe repression from the very beginning of their arrival in America. Blacks as Slaves and Indentured Servants Negroes are now called African American. In the past, they were deprived of any freedom and individual identity. As the victims of racism, they were even deprived of language, symbols, beliefs, traditions and religion they once had in Africa. As a result, over a period of time, they developed a peculiar sensibility of "double consciousness" (Du Bois 3). They developed a kind of feeling of a loss of their originality and the loss of self. It led them to self-hatred and made the victims of self-negation. The black man's notion of his own 'self' got completely eroded with the domination of Whiteman's ideology of racism, sexism and cultural hegemony. It kept blacks in the state of inner insecurity making them feel as if living in exile in their own land.