Toni Morrison’s Beloved: a slave narrative as social history and as a possible rewriting and criticism of 18th century Age of Enlightenment
In a conversation with Paul Gilroy, Toni Morrison comments on the concept of history in the African-American culture saying:
We live in a land where the past is always erased and America is the innocent future in which immigrants can come and start over, where the slate is clean. The past is absent or romanticized. This culture doesn’t encourage dwelling on, let alone coming to terms with, the truth about the past.
For Morrison, the past is not a thing or an experience. It is a life that is always present. This idea is, indeed, reflected in her novels. The revisionary impulse of her novels is related to the African-American experience, mainly the history of slavery. Her novel Beloved presents the way ex-slaves resist their past. Through it, Morrison intends to emphasis on ex-slaves’ need to heal from their past of slavery; a past that keeps haunting them and that hinders them in their efforts to move on.
One of the techniques used by Morrison to stress the question of slavery and its history is magical realism, which is, as Amaryll Beatrice Chanady states in her book Magical Realism and the Fantastic, “characterized by two conflicting but autonomously coherent perspectives, one based on an enlightened and rational view of reality, and the other on the acceptance of the supernatural as part of everyday reality”. In Beloved, magical realism is a way of opening new realms of signification, unlimited by the realistic convention. It allows Morrison to speak about the unspeakable, reflecting what horror it entails to unveil the unspeakable without falling into sentimental rendering of the injuries reflected upon the African-Americans during slavery. This is achieved through the presence of the ghost of Sethe’s killed baby; a presence that creates a conflict between the natural and the supernatural.
The ghost as a fantastic element has an immediate impact on the fictional space-time framework of the narrative. The characters repress their past which emerges or erupts in fragments and ghostly memories, or engage in remembering or in what Sethe calls “a rememory” of the past. Being ex-slaves, they supply different interpretations of the ghost and of the incarnated Beloved. This latter becomes, in fact, part of them, but they do not acknowledge it. As the memory of what happened to them is pushed aside, repressed, silenced, “placed in a box”, the characters find in the disembodied spirit and then the incarnated Beloved an alter-ego, which is an alternative self, into whom they displace the knowledge of feelings too painful to be allowed to the consciousness. As such, they opt for dissociation.
When Beloved returned, she obliged them to remember her. She says to Sethe: “Do you rememory me?”. She is a memory, just a memory that needs to be remembered to become an embodied being. She is a memory of the past claiming with vengeance all the characters to remember her. Therefore, remembering her becomes an act of giving life to the past, of giving it a body, a materiality, a physicality and a presence. However, it is a past that becomes a present which threatens the ex-slaves.
Toni Morrison’s solution to this is that ex-slaves cannot break free from their past and enjoy their future without having a direct contact with the outside world. Thus, for healing to take place, dissociation must give way to the reclaiming of that split self. Seethe, Denver, Paul D, Stamp Paid and then the community of ex-slaves must go through a process by which they gain awareness of all that alter-ego, and then an introspected awareness of its psychological origin.
Although as a slave narrative, Beloved sounds shocking as it represents a violent act committed by a slave, who is Sethe, rather than a violent act committed on her as a slave, this violent act which is Sethe’s killing of her baby Beloved, comes as a counter discourse. By killing her child, Sethe tried to claim her lost daughter as her own “thing”, her own property. She, thus, imitates the practices of slave-owner. However, in the slave economy in which she could not claim her body and her kids, she could replicate her practice only through killing to assert that her murdered one is her own. In bell hooks terms, Sether’s act of killing becomes an act of “talking back”; an act of defiance to her own community.
As such, unlike the historical narrative which entails that the novel is just about listing slaves’ suffering and complaining about the past, Morrison’s Beloved goes farther and represents solutions to contemporary African-Americans. It is relevant to their present being a historical memory that revolves around the idea of re-appropriating the past with all its suffering. And by allowing ex-slaves to re-tell their history in their own ways, Morrison helps her community to heal psychologically and to reconstruct their personal consciousness as African-Americans.
