How Does Toni Morrison's Beloved Reflect a Postcolonial Sensitivity
Summary:
Beloved is not a linear tale told from beginning to end, but is written in fragments, with the reader left to piece the whole story together. The events of twenty years earlier are told through the fragmented flashbacks of the main characters, with some events retold through different perspectives and successive narrations adding further information. Like the archaeologist who works with broken pieces of pottery or human remains, each new piece provides more clues to uncovering a history long hidden.
Toni Morrison defines her writing as a kind of literary archaeology which relies on memory, history and autobiography. How does her literary practice reflect a postcolonial sensitivity?
The archaeologist sifts through the rubble of past civilisations for signs of human activity, in order to construct a picture of how people lived in the past. Like a kind of literary archaeologist, Morrison sifted through historical records and researched the diaries and memoirs of slaves and their owners before writing Beloved, in order to gain some sense of the experience of slavery as seen through the lives of ordinary people. As Morrison (cited in Conway, 2003, p.49) says: "The book is not about the institution - slavery with a capital S. It was about these anonymous people called slaves."
Beloved is not a linear tale told from beginning to end, but is written in fragments, with the reader left to piece the whole story together. The events of twenty years earlier are told through the fragmented flashbacks of the main characters, with some events retold through different perspectives and successive narrations adding further information. Like the archaeologist who works with broken pieces of pottery or human remains, each new piece provides more clues to uncovering a history long hidden. Each character provides different pieces of the story, through their memories and flashbacks, or sometimes the story is told plainly as if happening in the present. The confusion of past and presence gives a sense that somehow the past is very much alive in the present.
Before the story starts are the ominous lines "Sixty million and more" in reference to the estimated numbers of slaves who died on the passage from Africa to North America. For those who survived, attachment to family or loved ones was a risky business especially when they could be separated at any time at the whim of their owners. Understandably non attachment was one defence against the emotional brutality of slave life. In Beloved, the bond between mother and child is central and foregrounds the greater picture of family dysfunction inherent in the institution of slavery. Slavery wrought havoc on family relationships and Morrison conveys the traumatic effects of this inhumane treatment and how it impacted on very human emotions through the fragmented memories and thoughts of the various characters.
There is the grandmother, Baby Suggs, who has lost seven of her eight children. Numbed by her a lifetime of loss, she scarcely seems to show any attachment, although emotions do surface with the murder of her grandchild. Anyone she has known or loved, .".. who hadn't run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized (Morrison, 1997, p.23)." She is accustomed to a life where men and women are moved round like checkers and for her the nastiness of life was that "[n]obody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children (Morrison, 1997, p.23)."
Paul D is determined not to love anything too much. It is better to love a little bit, so that when .".. they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one (Morrison, 1997, p.45)." He considers it very risky for Sethe to love her child: "For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love (Morrison, 1997, p.45)." Mothers shouldn't love their children too much because they could be taken from them.
Sethe is violated by white men and her mother's milk, the nourishment for the child who will later be slain, is stolen from her. "They stole my milk" becomes her recurring lament, symbolising all the pain and anguish of the slave woman who loved her child too much. The act of murdering her own child might initially seem simply immoral, but it becomes something difficult to totally condemn or condone. Morrison challenges the reader to consider the desperation which drove her to take such action and to question set standards of morality and the absoluteness of good and evil (Harris, 1993, p.171).
The sexual abuse of black women and their economic status as producers of children/livestock was a fact of slave life. It is expressed in Denver's thoughts "they have to have as many children as they can to please whoever owned them (Morrison, 1997, p.209)." Slaves were not treated as human beings but like commodities or livestock, to be bred, worked or sold as the owner saw fit. In the real-life story which inspired Morrison to write Beloved, Margaret Garner, an escaped slave, killed one of her children rather than return to slavery. She was never tried for murder but for being a fugitive slave. In this famous case in 1856, the matter of whether Garner should be tried under the Fugitive Slave Law or for homicide was decided with the declaration that it was "a question of property (Kirshmann, 1998)."
Interestingly Beloved diverges from the real story of Margaret Garner in a significant respect. Whilst Margaret was returned to die in slavery, Sethe manages to escape this fate, which suggests Beloved is meant as something more than the story of Margaret Garner. Sethe is a free woman as the story opens, and the use of present tense and confusion with the past, creates a sense that the past is very much alive in the present. Sethe uses the words 'rememory' instead or 'remember', as if to emphasise that everything is held in memory. She uses 'disremember' rather than 'forget', implying that events are forced to the back of the mind, repressed rather than simply forgotten.
Beloved is the mysterious ghost like figure, who haunts Sethe, and can be interpreted as her repressed memory, the horrible past of slavery returned to haunt the present. Through Sethe, Morrison is perhaps suggesting that contemporary readers must confront the dark hidden history of slavery before we can address its legacy, which manifests itself in continuing racial discrimination and dysfunctional social relationships. Like the scars on Sethe's back - her chokecherry tree - there are wounds that are there that cannot be seen. Homi Bhabha (1994, p.63) talks of memory as the necessary and sometimes hazardous bridge between colonialism and the question of cultural identity: "It is a painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present."
Told from the point of view of the slaves, through their experiences and memories, Beloved exposes the physical, emotional, and spiritual devastation wrought by slavery, the legacy of which lives on in American society today. It offers a subjective account of African American slave experience, reinserting the human voices so long absent from the representations of those times. In the 're-membering' of American slave experience through the voices of the oppressed, Morrison recuperates a history that had been lost due to the ravages of forced silences and self-willed historical amnesia. In so doing Beloved becomes an important contribution to what Leela Gandhi (1998, p.8) calls the postcolonial "project of historical and psychological 'recovery'."
Bibliography
Bhabha, H. (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
Conway, J. (2003). Issues and Themes in Contemporary Writing ENG00401 Study Guide Semester Two 2003. Lismore: Southern Cross University.
Gandhi, L. (1998). Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Harris, T. (1993). The Novels of Toni Morrison. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press.
