Naming, Identity and Intersectionality in Toni Morrison's Sula, Beloved and A Mercy

As a result of enslavement, African American people have suffered identity dismemberment across generations. Toni Morrison's novels Sula, Beloved and A Mercy display the complexities of naming and misnaming in a people who seek to create a rooted identity in the face of a violent and dehumanising past. Using intersectionality as an analytical tool, Morrison highlights the intrinsic role that a name holds as a functioning part of an individual's identity. This article begins by providing a contextualisation of naming practices during slavery. Paying particular attention to female characters, I discuss Morrison's use of over-naming and under-naming, merged identities and trinities of characters.The focus then moves to an analysis of characters' struggles to own themselves and their identities, after which I examine representations of bodily fragmentation and mutability as a metaphor for the breakdown of culture within the Black community as a result of slavery. The article concludes with an examination of characters' quest for identity and security through attachment to a godlike other.