| This study is an archetypal reading of Aime Cesaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. It shows that, in those two books, Cesaire and Morrison use the universal, semi-cryptic language of archetypes to continue and articulate the resistance discourse begun in the Americas in slave narratives, or, in Eleanor W. Traylor's terms, "emancipatory narratives." The study pinpoints the various archetypes, overtly outlined, fleetingly alluded to, or camouflaged, in these texts. Such a reading shows that the archetypes tends toward asserting cultural identity and disclosing a state of warfare against, or victory over, human conditions, self-made, or deterministic. Chapter One of this study is an introduction: it reviews the archetypal studies made on the texts at hand, and posits the link between historical resistance and these archetypes as they explore the concepts of life-force and survival. The second chapter presents a census of the archetypes found in Cahier , with partial interpretation. The third chapter does the same with the archetypes used in Song. The fourth chapter presents a view of the two writers, and suggests that the rapprochement between Aime Cesaire and Toni Morrison shows that, though the two writers differ in gender, geographic space, linguistic medium, and literary genre, the archetypal images they use convey a continual discourse of resistance. |
