"Working dough. Working, working dough. Nothing better than that to start the day's serious work of beating back the past."- Toni Morrison, Beloved

"Beloved" focuses on the psychological trauma of slavery which permeates the very atmosphere and even emerges in ghost form. It seems to be a good book to read in the light of the recent discussion on the Roots reboot, as well as the recent New York Times article which discusses how African-American DNA bears signs of slavery. I feel that for many this isn't too much of a surprise.

This was a tough read, even tougher the second time around. I never get used to books like this; if anything they get more painful as I become more and more aware of what slavery consisted of. One of the things that always gets to me when reading slave narratives is the burdens the slaves had to endure and with little to no help, but I'm learning about the little things they did to try to endure and survive. Some of their methods may not sound healthy, from our perspectives (for example, limiting love because you know that any time your family could be taken away from you), but this book shows us in many ways how unless we are in a certain situation, it's really impossible for us to know how we'll react to it.

At the beginning of the book, former slave Baby Suggs is contemplating colour, all because she is about to die and she has never had the time to do so before. The world of a slave is small and it doesn't belong to them. And even with freedom the past still haunts them:

"Her past had been like her present--intolerable--and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color."

Love is one of the themes in this book, and throughout I wondered whether love is ever enough to get over the past. Paul D and Sethe's love story is against the odds, with Paul D guarding his heart and Sethe still recovering from deaths, abuse, and children running away. Two very broken people, and Paul D with this sort of mentality:

"He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut. He would not pry it loose now in front of this sweet sturdy woman, for if she got a whiff of the contents it would shame him. And it would hurt her to know that there was no red heart bright as Mister's comb beating in him."

And Sethe:

"Would it be all right? Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?"

This time around I tried to focus more on the characters I didn't dwell on much in my first read, so Denver, Sethe's daughter, received more of my attention. I pictured her loneliness, loneliness that caused her to value the company of a ghost, which is why she clung to Beloved, who demands so much attention and affection.I ended up liking her character transformation the most:

"In that bower, closed off from the hurt of the hurt world, Denver's imagination produced its own hunger and its own food, which she badly needed because loneliness wore her out. Wore her out."

Pain is a given throughout the book, and I've been thinking a lot about the following quote: "Can't nothing heal without pain, you know." Such a hard truth and the characters in this book had so much more to heal from than the rest of us.

3.5 Stars

This is one horror of an emotional story. If you think you've heard or read the worst about the brutality and vile acts of slavery, Beloved just may change your mind as you visit the haunted world of 124 Bluestone Road.

I do so love a novel with a good ole active (and revengeful) spirit and slow build-up to a shocking secret (OMG infanticide) but the narration switches (sometimes even mid-paragraph) were confusing and a bit irritating to me.

As I struggle to rate this intensely powerful Pulitzer Prize winner, I think back on the evil at Sweet Home Farm, the colorful characters with their interesting names (Stamped Paid, and Here Boy, the dog...my favorites) and "Schoolteacher".....a word I never thought to abhor.....realizing this is indeed a wonderful story despite my personal dislike of the writing style.

Absolutely great discussion novel, but not a book I would read again.

‘Something that is loved is never lost.’

Every so often a book comes along that shakes you until you feel you might break open and, worn out in the aftermath of emotional devastation, you recognize how important and impactful storytelling can be. Storytelling carries memories on into the future though, as is the case of Nobel Prize winning novelist Toni Morrison’s Beloved, memories can often be very painful to revisit and can still haunt and harm in the present and future. Such are the horrors of slavery and Beloved addresses the collective memory of violences that are physically, emotionally and spiritually destructive. ‘Rememory’ is the term Morrison’s character Sethe gives to memories that not only affect the individual but those around them as well, and through the rememory of Beloved Morrison addresses not only the child that was killed but also the countless deaths to slavery and racial violence and states that all of them are beloved. Beloved is an essential classic, revising and revitalizing the slave narrative through a collective of voices that explore the psychological as well as physical suffering and shows how it is perpetuated for years to come. While those who met Beloved seem to fall silent on the matter later because ‘It was not a story to pass on,’ Morrison shows why it is necessary to tell these stories (especially as Sethe is based on the real story of Margaret Garner) and through Beloved she expertly explores memory, community and the lasting consequences of the horrors of slavery.

‘Who would have thought that a little old baby could harbor so much rage,’ those who live in the house 124 say of the ghost who haunts the home. Yet if this ghost—that of Sethe’s unnamed child known only as Beloved for the solitary word Sethe paid in flesh to have carved—is also the memory of all those lost to slavery, one begins to understand the limitless express of sadness and rage that could be had. ‘Beloved represents African American history or collective memory as much as she does Sethe’s or Paul D’s individual memory,’ wrote Pamela E. Barnett, and other critics have compared her to the collective pain of those lost in the Middle Passage (Beloved at one point recalls memories of being aboard a slave ship) and is much a figure of Sethe’s daughter remembered but also the countless lost to slavery.

This can be a very difficult book, especially emotionally, with horrific depictions of sexual and physical violence and recounting some of the darkest moments in US history, yet through Morrison’s exquisite prose it becomes a horror one cannot—or should not—look away from. An aspect of Morrison’s oeuvre that ensures it lasting importance is how she draws a direct line between past and any present to force us to confront the lasting effects of slavery and that we cannot just dismiss it as a sin of the past but as a lasting trauma with its talons still drawing blood in the present day. Which is why we tell stories, to draw attention to the past and contextualize the present, which Morrison does here showing how slavery affects those who have been freed.

‘Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.’

Sethe and Paul D have a lot of trauma behind them, having both been captive at Sweet House, a place that ‘wasn’t sweet and it sure wasn’t home.’ They do not want to revisit these stories, but the sudden arrival of the mysterious Beloved force the memories to resurface. Sethe cannot help but see even beautiful natural scenery without juxtaposing it with images flashing in her mind of bodies hanging from the branches and Paul D hopes to keep the past hidden away ‘in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be.’ Beloved ruptures this and calls to mind the lost child haunting the house, depicted in many ways like an infant with her head seemingly unable to be supported by her neck, having croup, and demanding all of Sethe’s attention and support, but we see how while these memories can be painful they can also be healing. For Sethe we see the connection with her and Beloved being assessed as a second chance to raise her child, but a moment of more or less sexual assault on Paul D also returns his memories to him. In Pamela E. Barnett’s essay n  Rape and the Supernatural in Belovedn, she describes Beloved as a figure of a succubus from African folklore and that by awakening his memories—which also reconnect him to his body and emotions—is a recurrence of his sexual assault and ‘has emasculated him just as the guards in Alfred, Georgia did.’ Except through this he heals instead of breaks.

‘In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it.’

The sexual encounter also points at another major theme in the book about the focus on flesh. We have, of course, the violence against the flesh of work on the plantations and the extreme abuse that lacerated their skin. But we also see the healing of touch, such as Baby Suggs working Sethe back to health with her hands.There is also the imagery of the bruises around Sethe’s neck, which Denver accuses Beloved of leaving but Beloved says ‘I didn’t choke [her neck]. The circle of iron choked it’ in reference to the iron collar worn by the slaves leaving a lasting mark on the body. There is the lesson that Black people must remember to love their flesh despite and in spite of the hatred for it from the white people. To love oneself and love the Black community is the path to freedom:

‘And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. and all your inside parts that they'd just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver--love it, love it and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.’

One of the best depictions between the link of the individual body and the collective body is that of the call and response songs sung as slaves. They ‘saing it out and beat it up, garbling the words so they would not be understood; trickling the words so their syllables yielded up other meanings.’ There is the aspect that they were a community through song as much as they were being physically chained together in shared, forced labor. Body and spirits united, and why it was so important to remember ‘a man could risk his own life, but not his brother’s.’ I also feel Morrison helps create a feeling of community and the collective through the multiple perspectives sharing the narrative.

A critical form of community with others in Beloved is that of motherhood. Under slavery, bonds between mothers and their children we thwarted because a mother would likely watch their children sold to another farm. For this reason Paul D sees Sethe’s relationship with Denver and thinks ‘to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love.’ The connection with a mother is also why Denver feels so betrayed by the closeness of Sethe and Beloved, who she feels is usurping her place (while most character growth is turned inward in the novel, Denver’s is more active, going from isolated and somber to entering the larger community through work and taking a more active role in everyone’s lives). Motherhood is such a strong emotional core to the novel, particularly when we learn why the unnamed child was killed and how we as readers cannot even fathom having to choose to find the death of your own child a sort of mercy when ‘being alive was the hard part.’ I enjoyed Morrison’s craft of juxtaposing the climax of both the past and present narratives around Sethe seeing a white man as a threat to her freedom and the freedom of her children, with the scene in the present being a moment where she is saved by her community, reestablishing its importance to the story.

‘Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.’

Toni Morrison once said ‘slavery broke the world in half’ and her body of work examines this as well as the long litany of aftershocks haunting the present. In Beloved we watch how even those freed from slavery after escaping are still suffering in its shadow. Memory is a point of pain, but also an avenue to healing and we tell these stories so those who are not here to tell of their pain are still remembered and loved. Beloved is a towering achievement of a novel, both in terms of craft and importance and it is one that rocks the reader to the core. An essential read if there ever was one.

5/5

I give this book as a gift to people I hate.

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label

Book #23: Beloved, by Toni Morrison (1987)

The story in a nutshell:
To understand the importance of 1987's Beloved, you need to understand that before this first novel of hers, author Toni Morrison was already a respected executive within the publishing industry, and a highly educated book-loving nerd; this is what made it so frustrating for her during the 1970s and '80s, after all, when trying to look back in history for older books detailing the historical black experience, and finding almost nothing there because of past industry discrimination, general withholding of education from blacks for decades, etc. This novel, then, is Morrison's attempt to partially right this wrong, loosely using a real historical record from the 1850s she once discovered when younger and obsessed upon for years, the story of a slave woman her age who once voluntarily killed her own child rather than let her be taken back to slave territory.

In Morrison's case, the novel is set in the decade following the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, up in Ohio (in the northern US) where so many former slaves fled during the so-called "Reconstruction" of the American South in those years. As such, the actual plotline resembles the beginnings of what we now call "magical realism," a style that has become virtually its own new sub-genre in literary fiction in the last twenty years; because not only is this woman's house haunted by a violent poltergeist, but eventually even a young woman appears claiming to be Beloved herself, the bizarre revenge-seeking reincarnated version of the very daughter this woman killed during the Civil War years. But is she? Or is she a runaway taking chance advantage of intimate knowledge she randomly happened to learn through odd circumstances? And does it matter? Just as is the case with most great postmodern literature, Beloved actually tackles a lot of different bigger issues in a metaphorical way, perhaps the more important point altogether than the details of the magical part of the plot, which never does get fully resolved in a definitive way even by the end; it is instead a novel about love, about family, about responsibility, about the struggle between innate intelligence and a formal education. It is ultimately a book about the black experience, a sophisticated and complex look at some of the emotional issues people from that time period must've had to struggle with, Morrison writing their stories for them precisely because none of them were allowed to back then, or were given the education to express themselves in such an eloquent way; and as such, it's not really the "ghost" part of this ghost-story that is important at all, but rather that it serves as a convenient coat-rack in which to hang all these other issues.

The argument for it being a classic:
Well, for starters, it won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize, and when was the last time you won a Pulitzer, chump? Much more important than that, though, say its fans, it heralded a whole new sea-change in the global arts altogether; a triumphant moment for both black artists and women artists (and especially black women artists), a story that not only speaks powerfully and intimately to all people with that background, but that proves to the rest of the world that it's not just stuffy white dudes who can write beautiful, haunting, instantly classic literature. It's a major highlight of the postmodern period, say historians, a changing of the guard just as important as when the early Modernists shut down the Victorian Age; this one novel and its overwhelming success single-handedly ushered in a whole new golden period for the arts concerning people of color, women, the gay community and more. And not only that, but so far it's held up well too; it was not only made into an extremely high-profile movie ten years later, starring and produced by The Great And Almighty Oprah Hallowed Be Her Name Amen, but in 2006 was named by the New York Times as the very best American novel of the last 25 years.

The argument against:
A weak one, frankly; it seems that most people who read this book end up loving it, and with very little dissent found online. And a controversial argument, too; because the argument against this book being a classic seems mostly to be the anti-politically-correct argument, that books such as these got as much attention as they did in the '80s, '90s and '00s merely because the overly liberal academic community had a political agenda back then, that they were determined to usher in a new golden age for writers of color and women and the gay community, even if they had to falsely trumpet a whole series of merely okay books, or sometimes even semi-crappy ones. It's an argument more often applied to other, lesser books than Beloved, frankly; but like other books in the CCLaP 100 series, you can technically argue that this book started the entire trend, was the one that led to the lesser books afterwards that people complain about in a more valid way. I'm not sure how much water this holds, but you do see people arguing this point online.

My verdict:
So in many ways, this week's book very directly illustrates why I wanted to start this essay series in the first place this year, of why I first thought it good for my own life that I tackle all these so-called "classics" for the first time, and only then thought, "Oh yeah, and I could write essays about the experience afterwards too." Because I admit, as a white male with a Modernist education, I was raised as biased against books like these, and in fact until they started appearing in the '80s and '90s was one of those people who never even thought about their conspicuous absence from world classic/canon lists in the first place. Plus, I'm predisposed to dislike the so-called "ebonics" on display here in Beloved, an aspect of this book that continues to be controversial; that is, Morrison wrote all the dialogue here as actual barely-educated former slaves in the 1870s would've actually talked, making it difficult to follow along and requiring close attention while reading, a decision that some "Western Classics" style professors have accused of being damaging to the arts in the long term, and another bad legacy of the politically-correct years.

But then again, let's plainly admit that I have absolutely loved reading all these old Victorian novels that I have through the CCLaP 100 this year as well, of looking back on the nerdy little overdressed white people who were my very ancestors and seeing how they talked, behaved, what they found important, what they fretted about when the doors were closed, feeling that connection between them and myself, feeling that except for the wardrobe and funky flowery language we were actually quite alike. When thought about this way, suddenly one has a lot of empathy for what Morrison and other intelligent, educated black women went through in pre-Beloved days; they simply wanted to have the same experience I've been having with Victorian literature this year, frustratingly couldn't because of no literature from smart educated black women even existing from those years, so realized that they were going to have to write it themselves. And also when looking at it this way, you realize that the ebonics of Beloved is no worser at all than, say, the Romanticism of Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables; both are old-fashioned language, hard for modern eyes to follow, yet historically accurate and reflecting what those times were actually like. Both require patience, both require forgiveness, but both can offer up richly rewarding experiences if taken seriously and if meeting the author halfway.

It's this essay series, this newfound attention to the historical classics, that is making my brain suddenly work in these new ways this year, to have a more patient and more expansive view of any particular project I tackle; like I said, that's the whole reason I decided to read a hundred classics in the first place, is to hopefully learn something from it, since so many people are always arguing that there's something unique and important to be learned from "reading the classics." It's why I call Beloved today an undeniable classic itself, one of the top-20 titles in fact of this entire CCLaP 100 list, why it turned out to be such a profoundly great book but only once I was ready to accept it on its own terms, and once understanding the real history it references. It gets an extremely high recommendation from me today.

Is it a classic? Yes

I did not end up caring much for this book. I really wanted to like it since it is a classic, but it really was a chore for me. There was so much time jumping without obvious breaks that it was difficult to understand. It also didn't help that there was a mix of prose, poetry, and stream of consciousness.

I can see how some might see this as a must read, but not me.

Very haunting, and exceptionally written. The best kind of poetry.

Beloved has been on my list to read for some time and I am very glad to have finally read it with my Constant Reader group of friends. Over the past few years I have read several books, both novels and nonfiction, that have actually been excellent preparation for Beloved. The horrors of slavery that underlie this story are now coming to light in so many places, so many ways. How can any doubt the anguish of a mother who knows what can happen to her children if they are returned to slavery? Those years when runaways could be legally captured in non-slave states led to horror for many who had struggled hard for freedom.

I am not going to discuss the plot here. It is widely known. Morrison produced a book that deserves the wide reading it receives. And now is so righteous that it is being increasingly banned because it is disturbing some high school age readers. Luckily, librarians, publishers, and knowledgeable readers everywhere continue to get books like Beloved into the hands of those who want to read meaningful books that continue to have so much to say to us today.

I plan to read much more of Morrison’s work.

“Darkness is stronger and swallows them like minnows.” - Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Beloved” is a beautiful, haunting story that is set around the time following the slavery emancipation declaration. It’s mysterious and supernatural, as well as being a love story, a tale of horror, forgiveness, loss and confusion. It’s very poetic and lyrical, full of metaphors and powerful imagery.

The book tells the story of Sethe, a runaway slave who has left her home in the South but is still living in the past. Her deceased two year old baby supposedly haunts 124, the house in which she and her daughter Denver live. Later, we find out the awful way in which the baby died and that makes the story even more tragic.

The house is an ominous character in the book; it had a life of its own. I felt the hopelessness of Sethe and Denver who had no place else to go:

“So Sethe and the girl Denver did what they could, and what the house permitted for her. Together they waged a perfunctory battle against the outrageous behaviour of that place; against turned-over slop jars, smacks on the behind, and gusts of sour air. For they understood the source of the outrage as well as they knew the source of light.”

The love story in this book is a different kind of love story, a love story that involves a couple,Sethe and Paul D, who were once slaves. How can people move on from being slaves to being in free relationships? As slaves they became accustomed to their loved ones, their parents, children and lovers being sold or running away. The past has left scar marks like the scars in the shape of a chokeberry tree on Sethe’s back.

“And then she moved him. Just when doubt, regret and every single unasked question was packed away, long after he believed he had willed himself into being, at the very time and place he wanted to take root- she moved him. From room to room. Like a rag doll.”

What I found very powerful was the term Morrison used “rememory,” which is remembering memories. I experienced it when I visited a slave memorial in Zanzibar and entered the dungeons where the slaves had been kept. Obviously the slaves aren’t there anymore but I felt a multitude of emotions and I felt as though they were still there in some form.

I found it nearly impossible to read large chunks of the book at a time; I had to take breaks. Toni Morrison stands in a class of her own.This book was beautiful yet tragic; a true masterpiece.