• Wheatley’s Writing on the Wall: Concepts of Mercy and Alternate Literary Histories in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy
• Éva Tettenborn (bio)

For those familiar with the African American canon, it may be difficult to read Toni Morrison’s novel A Mercy (2009) and not understand it as a form of signifying on African American literary history in general and Phillis Wheatley’s much-anthologized and frequently taught poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America” in particular. After all, Wheatley’s poem’s first line reads, “‘Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,”¹ and if we know how to listen for it, it echoes throughout Morrison’s novel. Those originally introduced to African American literature through surveys of anthologized works perhaps even identify the term “mercy” as the second word uttered in the chronological canonical presentation of printed works authored by Black women. It appears that Morrison, whose works often serve as the anthologized bookend of the African American women writers’ literary canon up to the early twenty-first century, responds to Wheatley, whose eighteenth-century works are often presented as the foundational bookend of the African American women writers’ tradition as we understand it today. Indeed, Justine Tally identifies Morrison’s novel as “a direct call to one of the most well-known foundational texts of African American literature,” pointing to the poem’s first line as well as to the topical overlap between the two works.² Since this brief remark contains the extent of the current discourse of reading A Mercy alongside Wheatley’s work, I here offer my analysis of what I consider Morrison’s improvisation on and decolonization of Wheatley’s literary legacy. In so doing, I posit two intertwined claims related to the act of mercy and A Mercy.

The novel’s title notwithstanding, I maintain that Morrison’s narrative actually introduces the religious concept of mercy only to reject it as an adequate response to oppressive [End Page 271] systems, while calling instead for areligious acts of intersectional solidarity that serve to truly destabilize oppressive societies and the power differentials on which they rest. I use the term intersectional solidarity to refer to acts of solidarity that recognize rather than gloss over the intersectionality of the respective identities of the characters portrayed in the novel, thus celebrating difference as an ironic source of identification rather than exclusion. The point of intersectional solidarity is to identify with another in need not because of overlapping identity categories but precisely without predicating one’s help on shared identity, thus performing a decolonizing move. I posit that both Morrison and Wheatley refer in their works to acts of mercy to suggest that such acts are the works of either divine power, as Wheatley appears to contend, or, as Morrison’s work here suggests, largely coincidence that does not measure up to true solidarity.

Secondly, I suggest that we should understand A Mercy as a depiction of disrupted reciprocal literary mothering across various eras in African American literary history: Morrison indirectly celebrates Wheatley as the literary foremother of African American writing in general and African American women writers in particular. At the same time, she creates a character, Florens, who appears as an unidentified, unacknowledged, and ultimately unknowable seventeenth-century literary foremother of the well-known Bostonian poet and who serves to decolonize Wheatley’s public image. Florens emerges as an alternate to Wheatley’s public persona of the slave whose creativity was both indulged and subsumed by American colonial cultural expectations. A Mercy represents many of the concerns Wheatley herself was not able to name in her published poems, at least not without carefully coding them in subversive presentations of those poems. Such concerns include the slave’s emotional economy, which traditionally demands the exclusion of anger, mourned attachments to others, and self-awareness as a sovereign subject. In so doing, Morrison’s novel creates an imagined discursive exchange between enslaved African American women writers, both known and unknowable, in colonial America and insists on our awareness of the archival void.

A Mercy depicts Florens, the daughter of an enslaved African woman, who writes her life narrative on the walls of her dead...

• 惠特利的墙上的文字：托尼·莫里森的《怜悯》中的怜悯概念和另类文学史
• 埃娃·泰滕博恩（简介）

对于那些熟悉非裔美国人经典的人来说，读托妮·莫里森的小说《慈悲》（ A Mercy，2009）时，可能很难不将其理解为非裔美国文学史的一种象征形式，以及菲利斯·惠特利的大量选集和经常教授的诗歌。特别是“论从非洲被带到美洲”。毕竟，惠特利的诗的第一行是这样写的：“是仁慈把我从我的异教土地上带了出来” ¹，如果我们知道如何倾听它，它就会在莫里森的小说中得到回响。那些最初通过对选集作品的调查而了解非裔美国文学的人甚至可能将“怜悯”一词视为按时间顺序排列的黑人女性所著印刷作品中的第二个词。莫里森的作品经常被视为二十一世纪初非裔美国女性作家文学经典的选集书挡，而莫里森似乎回应了惠特利，惠特利的十八世纪作品经常被视为非洲裔美国女性作家文学经典的基础书挡。我们今天所理解的美国女作家的传统。事实上，贾斯汀·塔利将莫里森的小说视为“对非裔美国文学最著名的基础文本之一的直接调用”，指出这首诗的第一行以及两部作品之间的主题重叠。^{2由于这个简短的评论包含了当前与惠特利的作品一起阅读}《仁慈》的讨论的范围，我在这里对我认为莫里森对惠特利文学遗产的即兴创作和去殖民化进行了分析。在此过程中，我提出了与仁慈行为和慈悲相关的两个相互交织的主张。

尽管小说的标题如此，我认为莫里森的叙述实际上引入了仁慈的宗教概念，只是为了拒绝将其视为对压迫性[第271页]制度的充分回应，同时呼吁采取跨部门团结的宗教行动，以真正破坏压迫性社会的稳定以及它们所依赖的功率差异。我使用“交叉团结”一词来指代承认而不是掩盖小说中描绘的人物各自身份的交叉性的团结行为，从而将差异视为一种讽刺性的认同来源，而不是排斥。交叉团结的要点是认同另一个有需要的人，不是因为身份类别重叠，而是准确地不以共同身份为基础提供帮助，从而实现去殖民化的举动。我认为莫里森和惠特利在他们的作品中都提到了仁慈的行为，表明这种行为要么是神圣力量的作品，正如惠特利似乎主张的那样，要么是莫里森在这里的作品所暗示的，很大程度上是巧合，不符合真正的团结。

其次，我建议我们应该将《仁慈》理解为对非裔美国文学史上各个时代互惠文学母爱被破坏的描述：莫里森间接地颂扬惠特利为非裔美国文学尤其是非裔美国女作家的文学先驱。与此同时，她创造了一个角色，弗洛伦斯，他以一位身份不明、未被承认、最终不为人所知的十七世纪著名波士顿诗人的文学前辈的身份出现，并致力于使惠特利的公众形象去殖民化。弗洛伦斯是惠特利奴隶公众形象的替代者，其创造力被美国殖民文化期望所放纵和包容。《慈悲》代表了惠特利本人无法在她出版的诗歌中提及的许多担忧，至少在没有仔细编码这些诗歌的颠覆性表现形式的情况下是这样。这些担忧包括奴隶的情感经济，传统上它要求排除愤怒、对他人的哀悼依恋以及作为主权主体的自我意识。通过这样做，莫里森的小说在美国殖民地时期被奴役的非洲裔美国女作家（无论是已知的还是未知的）之间创造了一种想象的话语交流，并坚持我们对档案空白的认识。

《慈悲》描绘了一位被奴役的非洲妇女的女儿弗洛伦斯，她在死者的墙上写下自己的人生故事……