AMADA, DE TONI MORRISON: UMA RELEITURA

Abstract

This research has as its aims to propose a rereading of Toni Morrison’s novel Amada (1987) in the light of the layers of reading present in the book “Duas meninas” (1997), by Roberto Schwarz. His theorethical perspective foresees three successives readings, the first one being a romanesque or plot reading. In this reading level is possible to detect contradictions both in theliterary style as in the surface of the text. Sethe’s story is about a runaway slave that willing to avoid her children to return to slavery, commits the baby “already crawling” infanticide. This baby returns as a ghost that haunts the family and later on, it comes back reencarnated as a Young woman whose name is the same as the one in the words writen in the gravestone, Amada. The plot asks for the reading to be deepened in the inbetween lines level, leading to the second reading which interprets the social aspects and the way the coexistence situations are in a community with majority of negroes; as well as, the return to each one's past when the characters remember how their lives were in the slavery times at “Sweet Home” farm, specially the memories of Sethe, Baby Suggs and Paul D. The third reading analyses Amada “in countercurrent” and it analyses the power relations in a slavery society before the United States Civil War and, later in reconstruction with the end of that war, in order to unravel de basis of a racist society.