“Beloved is the forgotten spirit of the past that must be loved even if it is unlovable and elusive”
Toni Morrison’s Beloved depicts a story of the hurtful and violent events that happened during the historically famous Atlantic Slave Trade. As a brief overview, the Atlantic Slave Trade was basically an era characterized by mass buying of African natives for slave trade and their transportation to the New World, mostly in the Central and Western part of Europe, which existed from the 16th to 19th century. Being sold to slavery and maltreated by oppressive masters was extremely traumatic for the Africans—extreme to the point that they resort to killing their sons and daughters, and even themselves just to end their agony. This was what Toni Morrison, in his book, Beloved, tried to relay to the readers.
Sethe, the central character in the story, used the words rememory and disremember, unsparingly. There can be several rationales that an analytical reader could look into in determining her reasons or motives for doing so. According to Krumholz (1992), one of the main themes that can be extracted from the Beloved is historical recovery. Basically, in the Beloved, the characters have two options, they can either rememorize the events that happened in the traumatic Atlantic Slave Trade, or they can disremember them. The process of learning to live with the past—rememorizing, was described as “the process of healing depicted in the Beloved, and Sethe’s process of learning to live with the past, a collective past that lives right here where we live.” Disremembering on the other hand was described as the repression of the historical past that could be as psychologically damaging as the repression of personal trauma” . Even though how traumatic it may be for the African Americans to remember the events that happened to them or their ancestors, they must learn how to love such memories because it is the only way to prove how they have already learned to live with the past and to move on.
Works Cited
Krumholz, Linda. "The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison's Beloved." Indiana State University Press (1992).
Levine, L. "Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom." New York: Oxford University Press (1987).
Rampersad, A. "Slavery and the Literary Imagination: Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk." Slavery and the Literary Imagination (1989).
