Realität, märchenhafte Elemente, eine besondere Lyrik und auch poetisch.
"Menschenkind " ist ein Werk von mysthische Kraft. Es erzählt von dem unerfüllten Wunsch die größten Schrecken zu vergessen um sich doch am Ende wieder an sie zu erinnern.

Es ist das Jahr 1885 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Die Geschichte erzählt von Sethe, der hochschwangeren Sethe, der die Flucht mit ihren Kindern von der Farm "Sweet Home" gelungen ist. Die Geschichte erzählt von Folter, Vergewaltigung, Mord, Demütigungen und von der Hoffnung auf Freiheit. Es erzählt die Geschichte der Sklaverei und auch seinen daraus entstehenden Entscheidungen, seine Liebsten vor dem Schlimmsten zu bewahren.

Morrison erzählt sehr einfühlsam, aber auch verschlungen. Ich wurde durch Träume und Alpträume geführt, die manchmal kaum auszuhalten waren. Für mich auch teilweise verwirrend und unverständlich, musste ich manche Passagen zweimal lesen um sie wenigsten teilweise zu verstehen. Auch fand ich es schwierig den Zugang zu "Spuk und Geistern" zu finden.

Es herrscht eine immenses Traumata und es handelt sich hier definitiv um keine leichte Kost. Ein Buch was viel abverlangt. Ich werde es auf jeden Fall ein zweites Mal lesen müssen um Klarheit zu erlangen.

Toni Morrison erhielt für dieses Werk 1988 den Pulitzer Preis!

Technically brilliant and emotionally wrenching. I've seen critics tout this as a book "about" slavery, but it's also a ghost story and a family story and a love story all at once. The story is haunting, beautifully written, and daringly told.

into the past, into the darkness. it was a sweet home back then, as sweet a home as slavery could have allowed, a refuge surrounded by cancer. but that cancer is no benign tumor, to be kept at arm's length, condescended to; it is malignant, always. it will invade, kill the body, each of the parts dying one by one. out of the past and into the present came the cancer, and it made itself a new home. a cancer is not so easily removed, even if the doctors say: the surgery was successful, it was cut out, it is officially no more! it changes shape, it metastasizes into something different. it reconstructs itself. Morrison knows this, so do Sethe and Paul D; it will take generations to cure this sickness.

a child dies, a child is reborn: Beloved. she is the fog of memory, of regret, of violence, made solid, no longer a recollection or abstraction, come from the past to destroy the present. she is what happens when the body and mind are broken down: a symptom of the cancer, not the cancer itself. she will hurt the worst those who love her the most...

the story has no storyline, the movements of past and present overlap, combine, become one. the stories and memories bleed into each other, in the mind and in the flesh, the blood flows in all directions. a tree of scars, a longing for colors, all the tragedies still alive. what was then what was now, what will be, what can be. can the body survive this cancer? one can only hope, or pray. the last few pages of Beloved hint at survival, at a new life, new paths, new hopes. perhaps the prayers have worked? keep praying.

This is one of those rare and beautiful books that begins as if it's written in a code you have to crack. You have the sense early on that you've missed some vital shred of information and it's these perceived black holes that engage your attention on an ever deepening level. As is the case in the best detective novels maddening clues needed to complete knowledge are scattered deftly at every turn. The past is a constant illuminating presence in every present moment. Beloved exploits brilliantly so many of the possibilities the novel offers as an art form. And Morrison has an ingenious control of her difficult material throughout. Beloved is historical fiction, probably the best ghost story ever written along with Wuthering Heights, it has elements of playful magical realism but it's also a raging righteous social document; it's an exciting detective story, a rich and character strong family saga and a moving grown up romance. Rare to encounter a novel written with so much heart combined with masterful artistry.

Rabbia, paura, amore...

Ci sono molte persone che in questi giorni commentano i fatti recenti di Minneapolis e della rivolta dilagante con imbarazzante superficialità.
Se Trump il mese scorso mostrava comprensione per quei bravi ragazzi che con le armi in mano protestavano in Michigan contro il lockdown, oggi la musica è diversa. Se sono dei neri ad esprimere un malcontento, allora sono delinquenti e vanno repressi con la Guardia Nazionale.
La rabbia della comunità afroamericana è un fuoco acceso da molto tempo. La faticosa e lenta conquista dei diritti civili non ha di fatto negli Usa trovato riscontro in una reale pacificazione.
La discriminazione continua in modo strisciante (ho letto di uno studio dove si dimostra che i curricula di persone con nomi “afro-americani” ottengono dalle aziende la metà delle risposte rispetto a quelli con nomi “razzialmente neutri”...ad esempio) o in modo eclatante.
Un ginocchio che per otto/nove minuti preme su un collo nero è un immagine che rappresenta questa continua pressione.

La stretta sociale, politica, storica, psicologica...è stata la tematica letteraria di tutta la produzione di Toni Morrison.
“Amatissima” è l’emblema più incisivo del suo messaggio.

Ne L'origine degli altri, l’autrice ci parla della genesi di questo romanzo.
Era redattrice alla Random House quando per la realizzazione del libro “The black book” (un testo che raccoglieva fotografie, canzoni, brevetti di invenzioni, testimonianze, ecc...) le capita tra le mani un ritaglio di un giornale del 1856 dove un reverendo battista parla della visita fatta in carcere da una certa Margaret Garner una schiava fuggita dal Kentucky verso lo Stato libero dell’Ohio che si macchiò di un crimine che fece molto scalpore.
Su questo caso, la Morrison ricama la storia di Sethe e di sua figlia Denver, Baby Suggs, Paul D.
Un doppio binario: la realtà e il sogno che è comunque metafora dello strazio di un popolo.
Ed è noto che per ogni oncia di dolore ce ne sia altrettanta di rancore.

Qual è la misura giusta di un amore e quale quella di un risentimento?

C’è un limite alla sopportazione?

Una rilettura che oggi da madre faccio con un altro occhio...

...quant’è lunga la cicatrice?

4,5 stelute

Is it over? Can I wake up yet?

Sigh. THIS won the freaking Pulitzer prize, REALLY?

I feel like I need an adrenaline shot to the heart, Pulp Fiction style, just to recover from this snoozefest. This was so terribly written, I can't even, I just, see? Nope. No words describe this.

It jumped ALL over in time, sometimes in the middle of sentences, conversations, thoughts, and all of a sudden the author was like "HEY let's fuck with everyone's mind and go back 20 years and see how long it takes these readers to figure it out. I bet I'll even win an award for it!"

And the writing itself, the vernacular and slang were unheard of. I live in South Carolina, OKAY? I was raised on Southern literature. Gone With the Wind is one of my favorite books of all time. Mark Twain is one of my favorite authors. I am well familiar with the way slaves talked back then. The way this author made the characters speak was ridiculous. Half the time I had no earthly idea what the hell they were talking about.

And THEN, on top of that, the author combined her terrible slave writing with a pathetic attempt at metaphors and symbolism, which miserably crashed and burned.

Just stop, please.
n  n

Releitura 2024:

"Beloved" retrata a história dos negros escravizados nos Estados Unidos, a história de um povo pela experiência de uma mulher, escrava, que era uma "parideira", apenas servia para dar à luz crianças que um dia poderiam ser escravas.

A história de "Beloved" foi inspirada numa história real, uma mulher chamada Margaret Garner, que no livro de Toni Morrison se chama Sethe.
Sethe foi presa e, depois de sair da prisão, foi ostracizada pelas pessoas da sua comunidade. Não vou contar o que fez, acho que isso estraga parte da magia do livro, apesar do mais importante não ser o que a Sethe fez, mas sim as razões que a levaram a cometer tal acto.

Assim como na primeira vez que li, senti uma enorme dificuldade em entrar na história. A escrita da Toni Morrison é difícil e custou-me a entrar no ritmo. Mas que história esta

This book is so messed up.
I suppose I should have expected a lot of horrible shit since it tackles an awful time in our history.
Toni takes a lot of tragedy and inserts such beautiful and flowing words that you look forward to reading more despite the harshness of the content.
This was my first Toni Morrison and I look forward to reading more of her work!
P.S.
I started physically reading this and then switched to the audio at a friend's behest.
I highly suggest having Toni's voice guide you through this story; you won't regret it!

Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
…
Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
…
“Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.”
…
This is not a story to pass on.

In 1855, Sethe escaped from a Kentucky plantation with her four children, and made it across the river to Cincinnati, Ohio. After a single happy month with her mother-in-law, an unimaginable act ends with the death of her two-year-old daughter. By 1873, Sethe and her now 18-year-old daughter Denver live in social isolation in a home that they and everyone else believe is haunted by the ghost of her dead child who was known simply as Beloved. And then one day, Paul D, another of the former slaves from the Sweet Home plantation, arrives at Sethe’s home and seems to drive away Beloved’s spirit. But just as Sethe begins to adjust to Paul D’s reentry into her life, a distressed young woman appears seemingly from nowhere on Sethe’s doorstep claiming that her name is Beloved. Before long, Sethe and Denver question whether this new Beloved is somehow the reincarnation of Sethe’s dead daughter….

Beloved is a challenging book to read, for a number of reasons. Perspectives change with little warning, and characters often shift into memories of the past such that one must pay careful attention to track what happened in the past as opposed to happening in the present. Then there is the fact of Beloved herself. She’s an opaque character, but is she flesh and blood, or is she a ghost and Beloved a ghost story? There are no absolute answers to these questions, leaving the meaning ambiguous. In many ways, the deliberate lack of clarity about Beloved the character reminded me of the Judge from  Blood Meridian.

Most of all, though, Beloved is a difficult read because of the subject matter. Ms. Morrison is an extraordinary writer, and this novel is beautifully written, often poetic, and deeply moving. But here her skills bring to life the brutality of plantation life and the cruelties of slavery, and the permanent scars left behind by such inhumanity. I read fiction for pleasure, and this book is … deliberately upsetting, the opposite of a pleasure read.

Beloved is an important story, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and efforts to ban it from schools and AP classes are misguided attempts to bury the worst parts of American history. In the end, it reminded me of the movie Schindler’s List, a technical achievement, powerful and moving, but about a subject so horrible that I only wanted to experience it once. The novel is so brutal and dark that I wanted to enjoy it more than I actually did. 3.5 stars rounded up to 4. Recommended.

I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms. No more running - from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something: it cost too much! Do you hear me? It cost too much.

What's the difference between tragedy and melodrama? To me Sethe is one of the most tragic heroines in literature, but not everybody feels the same. The most peculiar critical comment I have come across after I finished reading the story of this runaway slave and her children claimed that Toni Morrison didn't take a necessary step back from her characters, that she was too passionate and too fierce about her subject, lacking in proper academic detachment and biased towards pointing out only the horrors of the institution of slavery. To me it seems like somebody is trying o demonstrate that the Holocaust wasn't all that bad, that there were reasons for the actions of the killers, that not all Germans were bad. I know I have come across in the past over portrayals of the coloured people in a paternalistic manner, arguing that the slave owners were doing them a favor by giving them shelter and food in exchange for work, liberating them from a savage life back in Africa and so on. Since the first generations of slaves were mostly illiterate (and insistently kept that way by their masters) there are very few direct accounts to challenge this self-serving theory.

Eighteen seventy-four and whitefolks were still on the loose. Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; eighty-seven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children; children whipped like adults; black women raped by the crew; property taken, necks broken.

For Toni Morrison this is part of her personal history, and she makes herself the voice of this legion of ghosts whose stories some people would like to remain buried and forgotten. With her artistic sensibilities, she takes a real case of a woman pushed beyond the limits of endurance by the system (Margaret Garner) and makes it a poem of pain and redemption, of the awakening of individual conscience and of the sense of belonging to a community of the opressed.

The terrain, slavery, was formidable and pathless. To invite readers (and myself) into the repellant landscape (hidden, but not completely; deliberately buried, but not forgotten) was to pitch a tent in a cemetery inhabited by highly vocal ghosts.

The inspiration for the novel and the focus on the meaning of freedom, according to the introduction written by the author, has its source in the moment of release of the mind from the petty concerns of holding on to a job with limited satisfactions, of being for the first time sole master of her own life after she gave up an editing job to dedicate herself to full time writing.

I think now it was the shock of liberation that drew my thoughts to what "free" could possibly mean to women. In the eighties, the debate was still roiling: equal pay, equal treatment, access to professions, schools ... and choice without stigma. To marry or not. To have children or not. Inevitably these thoughts led me to the different history of black women in this country - a history in which marriages were discouraged, impossible, or illegal; in which birthing children was requirred, but "having" them, being responsible for them - being, in other words, their parent - was as out of the question as freedom. Assertions of parenthood under conditions peculiar to the logic of institutional enslavement were criminal.

Encapsulated in this passage in the core of Sethe's tragedy: born into slavery, denied the care of her own mother, sold to a "liberal" houselhold that was still part of the system, Sethe is tricked into believing she can have a normal life, that she can love another slave and have his children. When the farm changes ownership to a more severe patron, Sethe has to chose between running away or abandoning her children. Without going into details, her love for the children drives her to an abominable act, and for eighteen years she has to cope with the trauma and with the neighbors shunning. The ghosts of Sethe's past are manifest in the novel, given first an invisible, malefic presence in the house she lives in, and later given flesh and breath in the form of a mysterious young woman who calls herself 'Beloved'.

The structure of the novel is non-linear, with the revelations about Sethe, about her children and the men in her life presented gradually, in painful flashbacks, reflecting the tortured mind that shies away and denies the painful memories, approaching them obliquely and fearfully, lest they shred her sanity once more. The question whether Beloved is a ghost or a real person is never settled, leaving the possibility that she is either a figment of the mother's imagination or another victim of the persecution and torture of the coloured people by the system. Seen as an exercise in magic realism, Sethe stands as a mythical figure in the liberation movement, together with her mother-in-law, another former slave who gained her freedom through the sacrifice of her son, Sethe's partner, the only one of her eight children that was allowed to stay by her side and work towards paying her manumission. Baby Suggs is a religious figure to the new community of escaped slaves on the banks of the Ohio, and for me she is special because she steps away from hate. Through her improvised sermons, urging her people to put down the sword and the shield of revenge and learn how to love themselves and the world they live in, Baby Suggs is probably the only character in the novel who really believes in the future.

She told them that the only grace they could have is the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.

Baby Suggs is a dreamer, drunk with the unexpected awareness of freedom, leading a wild dance of happiness in the midst of a forest clearing, but the world has this nasty habit of crushing visions of utopias of fellowship and understanding under a tide of greed, hatred, envy. The same events that set Sethe's blood boiling with helpless rage  killing her own children rather than allowing them to be returned to slavery , broke the belief of Baby Suggs in that better future.

... in all of Baby's life, as well as Sethe's own, men and women were moved around like checkers. Anybody Baby Suggs knew, let alone 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. So Baby's eight children had six fathers. What she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning than nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children.

A powerful metaphor captures the tragic destiny of these two women, a play on colours and light and darkness on a quilt made from scraps, a reflection of a life put together from things other people have thrown out as useless, of a long series of defeats and disappointments that are interrupted by a feeble hope only once every twenty years or so:

The walls of the room were slate-colored, the floor earth-brown, the wooden dresser the color of itself, curtains white, and the dominating feature, the quilt over an iron cot, was made up of scraps of blue serge, black, brown and gray wool - the full range of the dark and the muted that thrift and modesty allowed. In that sober field, two patches of orange looked wild - like life in the raw.

Can a day of eating wild blackberies in the company of friends or another one spent with an unexpected kind man at a country fair compensate for the long years of drudgery and loss? What if this is all that Fate can offer you in a lifetime? Sethe can either accept it or go crazy:

Was that the pattern? she wondered. Every eighteen or twenty years her unlivable life would be interrupted by a short lived glory?
Well, if that's the way it was - that's the way it was.

While doing a little more background reading on toni Morrisonr I have come upon another remarks of hers that I admire: when asked why she is focused so much on women issues she replied that she doesn't consider herself a feminist, that she doesn't want to replace patriarchy with a matriarchy, but only to promote understanding and respect between sexes. 'Beloved' is for me a fine example of this stance, with the men shown both in their strength and in their weaker moments, both as cruel dictators (the schoolteacher) and as angels of mercy (the abolitionist). Two of them, Stamp Paid and Paul D, are central to the story of Sethe and carry their own trees on their back and their own ghosts from the past to haunt their every waking moment. Victims of brutality, of denial of education, denial of family ties, of every decency and mercy that makes life worth living, these two men have refused to be broken and have gained passage to the land of freedom.

Tell me something, Stamp. Tell me this one thing. How much is a nigger supposed to take? Tell me. How much?
All he can, said Stamp Paid. All he can.
Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?

Sethe will need their strength and their kindness if she is to exorcise her own ghosts. The tension between man and woman is not one of dominance, of demonstrating who is stronger, but one of learning to accept the imperfections of the other and of admitting your own need of help in a time of crisis. The only sure thing for these people, at this moment of their history (the aftermath of the Secession War) is that the birth of conscience is accompanied by pain, that the price of freedom is paid in blood:

'It's gonna hurt, now' said Amy. 'Anything dead coming back to life hurts.'

I feel humbled after turning the last page, painfully aware of the sheltered life I have led and of the numerous things I took for granted - like growing up in my parents' house together with my brother and sister, going to school for free, not having to worry about food or safety at night, getting paid for the work I do... As long as women, and men, are still struggling in the third millenium with these essential freedoms of life, the story of Sethe and of her 'Beloved' remain relevant and remind us that it is not enough to do no evil, but we must speak out and push back against intolerance and abuse.

Beloved
You are my sister
You are my daughter
You are my face; you are me.

“En el 124 había un maleficio. Todo el veneno de un bebé”

En Beloved (1987), la afroamericana (PNL93) Tony Morrison (1931-2019) nos muestra la verdadera profundidad de las cicatrices provocadas por la esclavitud. Basada en un hecho real, narra la vida de Sethe, una esclava huida que comete una acto horrendo y antinatural ante una situación de pánico extrema. La elección de ese hecho, así como la manera personalísima de la autora de desarrollar sus consecuencias es como esta novela adquiere su singularidad y nos lleva a comprender aún más la verdadera dimensión de este sistema abominable.

La autora opta por lo sobrenatural, lo fantasmagórico, como única respuesta a este acto irracional e injustificable. Una huida de la realidad donde la muerte deja paso a los conflictos que provoca en las personas involucradas y en cómo estas intentan comprenderla. Belobed posee además un fuerte simbolismo espiritual, desde el árbol que conforman los latigazos en la espalda de la protagonista, cual árbol del pecado cristiano o del animismo africano, o la insólita encarnación, hasta las celebraciones de la anciana Baby Suggs en el Claro del bosque cual chamán tribal africano. Este recurso no parece responder a la búsqueda del perdón o de la venganza, sino como la única replica ante tanta atrocidad.

No les decía que se purificaran ni que dejaran de pecar. No les decía que eran los bienaventurados de esta tierra, su mansedumbre ni su gloria. Les decía que la única gracia con que contaban era aquella que fueran capaces de imaginar. Que si no la veían no la tendrían. —En este lugar, carne somos —decía—. Carne que llora y ríe, carne que baila con los pies descalzos en la hierba. Amadla. Amadla intensamente. Más allá no aman vuestra carne, la desprecian.

En Beloved se nos cuenta una historia, pero a la autora parece no importarle que la sigamos. Se demora en darnos los detalles que la clarifiquen y nos sentimos perdidos durante gran parte del texto. Se limita a sumergirnos en un ambiente cerrado, denso, siniestro (incluso dentro del momento de supuesta libertad donde se desarrolla la novela: los años posteriores a Guerra de Secesión donde se decidió la abolición de la esclavitud), un ambiente aislado que sirve al doble propósito de escondrijo y protección para nuestras protagonistas (la casa 124 donde residen se erige así como una protagonista más). Es dentro de ese microcosmos donde accedemos más fácilmente a su mundo interior, a sus sentimientos, mientras intentan comprender u olvidar lo sucedido, mientras se enfrentan al contraste entre el horror y la inocencia provocados por el sinsentido de la esclavitud.

-De todos los que Baby Suggs conoció -para no hablar de los que amó-, el que no se había fugado ni lo habían ahorcado, fue alquilado, prestado, comprado, devuelto, conservado, hipotecado, ganado, robado o arrestado. Por eso los ocho hijos de Baby tenían seis padres.

Morrison describe de modo escueto, pero preciso, el momento histórico, los conflictos sociales, el modo de vida…, pero Beloved es, sobre todo, una novela de personajes. Una novela sobre las relaciones entre personas y sobre las diferentes clases de amor. Los personajes destacados son principalmente mujeres. En esa época doblemente esclavas por su añadida condición de mujeres. Relegadas a una mera función de trabajadoras, reproductoras y criadoras, pero que aquí se nos muestran como luchadoras, poderosas y resolutivas. Mujeres ancladas a un lugar para poder sobrevivir, soportando la carga familiar, mientras los hombres vienen y van, entran y salen de sus vidas. Simples seres ausentes, secundarios, bienvenidos si lo desean, pero no imprescindibles si desaparecen.

-Un hombre solo es un hombre -decía Baby Suggs – Pero un hijo… bien, un hijo ya es alguien.

Toni Morrison crea una obra de una fuerza lingüística y estilística abrumadora. Todo en Beloved es peculiar: una estructura compleja, una trama inversa, empleo del flujo de conciencia y un múltiple juego de tiempos y voces narrativas de gran profundidad. Encontramos un texto erizado, con capítulos inconclusos, frases sin sentido aparente o sin puntuación, diálogos atípicos, etc., pero con una prosa tremendamente hermosa, cruda y poética. Una prosa repleta de simbolismo (los nombres de los esclavos o su ausencia en los bebés ya que los separaban de sus madres, de los lugares, de los animales; el significado de los colores…). En definitiva, un estilo que te obliga a mantener la atención en todo momento. Nada es nítido en Beloved, es casi irreal. Estamos ante una obra de arte, un magnífico cuadro expresionista, donde las coloridas imágenes son desdibujadas por pinceladas informes o despojadas de contornos, que, en lugar de distorsionarlas, logran resaltar aún más su significado.

…él duele donde yo duermo mete su dedo allí dejo caer la comida y me rompo en pedazos ella se llevó mi rostro nadie me desea nadie desea decir mi nombre…espero en el puente porque ella está debajo está la noche y está el día otra vez otra vez noche día noche día estoy esperando ningún círculo de hierro rodea mi cuello ni pasan barcas por estas aguas ni hombres sin piel mi muerto no flota…

Hay un profundo abismo en Beloved que los más intrépidos lectores deberían lanzarse a descubrir sin dudarlo.