CONSTRUCTING INCEST STORIES: Black Women’s Voices in Fact and Fiction

Constructing Incest Stories: Black Women’s Voices in Fact and Fiction provides a highly original perspective on incest by an illuminating fusion of social science research and literary analysis.It provides a variety of “truths” about incest, as narrated both from the inside (by survivors) and the outside (by writers of fiction). The book also analyzes the mechanics and significance of narrative construction with specific reference to incest as well the taboo associated with it, which specifically militates against narrative disclosure.The first part presents four accounts of incest, developed from interviews with black women, which have been constructed into first-person narratives of the real-life experiences of incest survivors.The analysis of the process of the construction of these “factual” stories serves as a springboard for examining the problematics of narrative construction in five fictional works whose plots are built around incest: Karen E. Quinones Miller’s I’m Telling, Donna Hill’s In My Bedroom, Sapphire/ Ramona Lofton’s Push, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.The textual analysis poses a fundamental question: How (by what specific techniques) does one tell a story that cannot be told, particularly if you are a black woman? This text provides an answer to this question and reflects on the therapeutic, social, and psychological function of narrative construction in this context.