Surviving the Impossibility of Black Motherhood: Trauma and Healing in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose

Abstract

The paper reads the novel Dessa Rose (1986) by African American author Sherley Anne Williams, and focuses on the duality of motherhood as compounding and healing trauma at the same time.After placing the novel is its socio-cultural and literary context, I argue, relying on Black feminist and Afro-pessimistic theory, that the subversive potential of Williams's novel lies in its claim that enslaved Black women are capable of healing through (re-)appropriating what is meant to dehumanize them: their stories, their bodies, their children, and their communities.