Claiming Linguistic Agency Through Voice: Rereading Toni Morrison's A Mercy

A Mercy, Toni Morrison’s nineth novel, has been traditionally read as a neo-slave novel that retells the history of the Middle Passage and the formation of slavery in the “New World.” Few research has paid attention to Morrison’s depiction of the voice, particularly black female slave’s voice and its significance to the navigation of agency for the first generation of African American women. This article examines Morrison’s writing of the voice of the enslaved and try to unveil how the first generation of African American women, despite enslaved and deprived, struggle to claim agency through voice and therefore successfully transform from the voiceless to the voiced.

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