Sacrificial Love Across Generations- Interview

 Camya Whitlock

Dr. J Harris

ENGL 2017-65125

May 1, 2025


Sacrificial Love Across Generations

For my major project I will be doing a visual podcast on The Complexities of Love, but specifically Intergenerational Love, and how personal sacrifices within the families sometimes lead to the need for healing. I will be interviewing a family member of mine comparing and contrasting how sacrifices look for different families using Sula by Toni Morrison as my primary text to make the connection, but also an article “Intergenerational Relationship Quality Across Three Generations” by Kira S. Birditt, Lauren A. Tighe, Karen L. Fingerman, and Steven H. Zarit to show the differences between healthy communication, mutual support, and relationship patterns across generations versus sacrifices or abandonment in the name of love, and how those choices affect future generations. The visual that I have provided will shed light on how sacrifices look completely different in every family and even if the sacrifice is the same, families heal differently. While also connecting the article I found on Intergenerational relationships to Sula and how one generation (like grandparents) can affect the next two (parents and grandchildren). In Sula we see Hannah question if Eva ever loved her and she gets a run around answer about her having to make sacrifices for her kids and how she is alive so that should answer her question to whether she loved her or not. Hannah just before having that conversation with her mom was talking to her friends and Sula overhears her say “Sure you do. You love her, like I love Sula. I just don’t like her. That’s the difference.” My visual podcast will breakdown how unconsciously intergenerational trauma plays a role in Sula’s family and sometimes certain sacrifices can alter a whole generation when love is not shown or spoken in an African American household. It will show that while being a sacrificial mother can be beneficial eventually it hurts the children.


Interview: https://youtu.be/Iz0p5cjISbk?si=v2HnGsqf8r_A3dpR 

Questions:

  1. Do you think all mothers do what they must do to provide for their kids?

  2. How would you react if you overheard your mother say, “I love her, I just don’t like her”?

  3.  “Research and theory suggest that African Americans report lower quality intergenerational relationships than European Americans,” do you think that is true?

  4. How is your relationship with your immediate family?

  5. Who is the main provider of your family?

  6. Has the provider ever had to make any sacrifices that you know of?

  7. Do you think the sacrifices made caused the family to need any type of healing?

  8. How is your family different from Sula’s?






Works Cited

Birditt, Kira S et al. “Intergenerational relationship quality across three generations.” The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences vol. 67,5 (2012): 627-38. doi:10.1093/geronb/gbs050

Morrison, Toni. Sula Vintage International, 2004.

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