The Impossible Sacrifice: Negotiating Agency and Infanticide in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.70091/Atras/vol07no02.18Keywords:
Colonialism, identity, infanticide, structural violence, traumaAbstract
Infanticide in postcolonial and African American literature is rarely about individual pathology. Instead, it emerges as a desperate response to the structural violence of “total institutions.” This study explores the impact of the forces of slavery and colonialism on parental responsibility in the realm of what we can call an “impossible sacrifice” in both corpora, namely Things Fall Apart (1958) and Beloved (1987). Characters face a ghastly situation where they are condemned to make a decision whose consequences are devastating: taking the life of the very children they are supposed to cherish and protect. This research employs a comparative qualitative analysis of the two novels to trace how these protagonistsprotagonists struggle mightily to reclaim ownership of their identities and families. The environment in which they evolve seeks to strip them of both identities and families. This analysis calls upon trauma studies, postcolonial theory, and existential thought to grasp how systems of domination reshape the psyche and invade the private space of the home. Within these closed structures - where human value is limited, distorted, or erased - infanticide emerges not as a free choice but as a coerced act, a last attempt to assert meaning in a world that refuses to recognize their humanity. While intended to save a soul or an identity, the act leads to irreversible psychological trauma and permanent haunting. It is a pyrrhic victory in a world already in ruins.
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