«INSPIRING FEMALE WRITERS: TONI MORRISON AND HER NOVEL BELOVED». Por Mary Williams
Toni Morrison´s 1987 Pulitzer Prize Winning Novel, Beloved, captures the injustices inflicted on black people during the entire epoch of slavery in the U.S. Set around the time of the American Civil War, and spanning both slave-owning and non-slavery states, the novel focuses on the inner world of its victims and the psychological confusion caused by the absence of human rights.
Although there is a marked gender thread to the story, the degradation and suffering by male slaves and ex-slaves, are found on the pages too.
The events told in the novel are so cruel that recalling them in a coherent story format with an easily identifiable beginning, a middle, and an end would be impossible in the conventional sense.
The central character, Stethe, invents the term rememory to sum up the things that are recalled as they really were, regardless of how they are now, and to affirm that they exist as non-linear phenomena regardless of the outward appearance of change.
Stethe killed her own daughter by slashing her throat. They were hiding in the garden shed in a relative´s home in Cincinnati after they had escaped from the farm where they were slaves in Kentucky. Stethe mistakenly thought that the slave catchers were after her and she couldn´t bear the thought of her young toddler being abused the way she had been.
However, the murdered daughter doesn´t “die” because she exists as a living ghost. Stethe calls her Beloved and tolerates her behavior as she crashes around the family home, like a delinquent.
This literary metaphor is unmistakable: it allows us to enter the real world of the memory of abuse and, at the same time, piece together the inner, haunting, world of its consequences for the victim.
Beloved is a postmodern, historical novel, and for many people, including myself, that means that it´s sometimes cryptic and therefore hard to read. The augmented reality that Morrison seeks through her prose, and her literary response to one of the most dehumanizing regimes in world history, cannot be transmitted in a traditional story format. The deepest recesses of the collective experience of slavery take the characters close to the edge and that´s why voices change without warning and the events, however gruesome, are not easy to describe or to understand. The result is that, sometimes, Beloved´s unpredictable behavior is the most rational event in a particular
scene, and the reader forgets that this character is illusionary.
I can´t say that Toni Morrison is my favorite author, but she´s definitely among my most respected ones. Look at her metaphors: minnows of light; and, eaten alive by the dark, to quote just two. And her poetry, because it is a joy to read and reflects her considerable talent and her sensitivity to the meaning of words.