Beloved: The Pain of Remembering
When reading Beloved for the first time I was stunned
by this lyric tale, and by the author's chorus of African
American women's voices, I instinctively knew that a
heretofore unknown to me, tradition of Black women's
writing existed. I recognized the way the story was told. It
was the shape of my mother's storytelling -- a simple story
becoming increasingly complex, mythic, beyond solution, yet
teaching me a lesson I needed to know.
Not only women of different ethnicities, but also
African American men can feel the words on the author
on their tongues. Sometimes uncomfortable with the way
she placed women at the center of her stories, they
nonetheless loved her sound – a fellow black student called it the
"language he dreamed in,". Morrison is a
woman writer, but she can imagine the lives of men,
their desire and resistance to flying -- her metaphor for
the capacity to surrender, even under the madness of
capitalism and racism, to communal love.
Beloved is not just a novel, but a prayer, a
healing ritual for our country's holocaust of slavery.
Many of my friends claim that I am “crazy” because I claim
that Beloved is one of the greatest literary works of all time. For
me, the novel is not difficult in the way so many "sane"
readers find it. The supposedly "fragmented" quality of its
narration -- which mirrors the country's fear of
remembering, for remembering is painful and dangerous, as
well as freeing -- was visceral, and quite normal, to these
readers.
As we circled the novel, distinctively a folk opera, I
recalled Morrison's sense of herself as a writer, as one who
should be of service because of the saving grace her folk
have with language. It is a grace that has led her to
explore a world in which claiming freedom, and therefore the
power to love, is dangerous, risky -- but always blessed.
How bereft we would be without Toni Morrison's liberating
sound! How fortunate to have lived at a time when we can
dwell in, and heal, through her language!
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