those aspects of the past which could not be easily assimilated into its rhetorical discourse or into the collective consciousness of black people as a group.' (1990, p.190)
             This idea of an Afro American cultural memory is important to Toni Morrison. The enslavement of Africans and their relocation to America coincided with the systematic dehumanisation of these people and the stripping away of their culture. Morrison is attempting to acknowledge this past in order to leave it in the past. By revealing the truth it allows us to move on unhampered by lies. But Toni Morrison writes fiction. How can she reveal the truth with a story that is a fabrication. In his book The idea of History R G Collingwood sums up the new relationship that is being forged between history and literature.
             As works of imagination, the historian's work and the novelist's do not differ. Where they do differ is that the historian's picture is meant to be true. The novelist has a single task only: to construct a coherent picture, one that makes sense. The historian has a double task: he has both to do this and to construct a picture of things as they really were and of events as they really happened. These are rules from whi
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