The Black Female Body in Bondage. When Undecipherable Pain Becomes a Healing Voice

Abstract

This dissertation is conceived as a journey of exploration of the black female body under slavery and its aftermath, in 19th and 20th-century America. At the center is the black enslaved woman; she was transformed into bare flesh, divested of any human trait, used as labor force, exploited for her sexual attributes and breeding function. Excluded by the canons of white womanhood, she was stereotyped into different mythical figures according to her master’s whims and the southern discriminating culture. The black female slave’s body was the recipient of patriarchal domination, which rendered it the ideal site for medical experimentation and scientific achievements, principally for the benefit of white people. Against this background, the black woman’s body was primarily a body in pain; tortures, abuses, sexual violence were designed to desubjectify an individual whose original world had already been dismantled. With physical pain, language withdraws into inaudible spaces leaving sufferings inexpressible and unexpressed. Bodily trauma gradually morphed into psychological suffering, affecting not just the individual but falling upon an entire community and the following generations. Enshrouded in a veil of silence, as a reaction to the traumatic events experienced, the black woman needs to find the instruments which can help her to voice those emotional wounds. One of those tools is poetry. Through verse, the 20th-century African American woman learned to flow with her feelings, joining language and its transformative power. Silence gives place to words to explore past and present: the past of the foremothers, whose living experience shaped the contemporary black woman, the present which enhances the black female body, honoring its blackness. It will be the voices of Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton and Maya Angelou that will accompany the reader through the final stage of this journey.