ABSTRACT
Toni Morrison identifies the 'place' where the female voice originates as the site of struggle for a self-definition and self-love whose nourishment comes from a reclamation of ancestry. The need to reclaim the past in order to define the female self in terms of inherited culture, is both a feminist and a racial urge. In the 1960s, when the seeds of Morrison's early novels were germinating, the need of black Americans was for an awareness of an ancestral past before their enslaved American experience wherein their supposed inferiority had been inscribed and reinforced. Similarly women, black and white, were demanding that their own contribution to the culture of their society was given recognition. All of Morrison's novels are underpinned by her drawing upon Afro-American oral tradition in her incorporation of folkloric myth. In her listening to the language and stories of her people she also hears the music into which her enforcedly illiterate ancestors had poured their souls.
