God Help the Child Themes

God Help the Child depicts a world where abuse and trauma are passed from person to person across generations. In a way, the novel presents a view of trauma similar to the law of conservation of energy, a concept in physics and chemistry that states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. In the novel, trauma, like energy, is neither created nor destroyed; instead, it is continually passed from one person to another. Bride’s…

Sweetness uses colorism to defend her poor treatment of her daughter, Bride, who was born with inexplicably dark skin. She explains that she is “high yellow” and that many of her relatives passed for white. Sweetness thinks of Bride’s skin color as “terrible,” and it drives her “mad” to the point that she considers killing Bride when she is a baby. With that in mind, the novel shows how Sweetness has internalized racism that…

As Bride travels to find Booker, she notices that she is losing her hair, her earlobes have closed, and her breasts have vanished. Her body is reverting to a younger form—specifically to when she was eight years old and falsely testified against Sofia Huxley. Bride’s physical transformations symbolize her inability to forgive herself for harming Sofia Huxley—in other words, the physical transformations Bride experiences as an adult mirror the psychological burden of guilt…