Remembering the Disremembered History The Historical Recovery of Slavery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved Introduction: under construction J “Postmodern Blackness” By dedicating her book to the “Sixty Million and more”, Toni Morrison aims at building up a poetic burial stone for all the unspeakable losses of the black slave community. Morrison’s work is detached from previous Western cultural narratives since these narratives usually lack the astonishingly framed experiences of motherhood from a woman’s perspective, the concept of communal identity derived from the African heritage, the magnitude of the different forms and shapes of memory and the peremptorily questioning of the impact of slavery on the human race (Wyatt 474). By filling in these gaps, Morrison calls attention to what was left out of those narratives: what was too painful to articulate by the means of language. However to put the presence of absence into words, Morrison’s “project of incorporating into a text subjects previously excluded from language causes a breakdown and restructuring of linguistic forms” (Wyatt 474). Form serves as backbone to content; therefore the aim of this chapter is to elaborate on the “neo-slave” narrative strategies to reveal how significant the formal and structural characteristics of the novel’s discourse are. The authors of slave narratives in the 19th century were occupied with the depiction of a journey from being an inferior person whose only use was labour force to an individual human being; usually with the intention of serving as a role model for the rest of the slave community (Bell 10). On the other hand, these grand narratives introduced the black community into the social and political axes of acknowledgment in the American society. On account of this political presence, notwithstanding, verified and encouraged by the publications of the abolitionists, these narratives served as good draws in the campaign against the “peculiar institution” of slavery. The authors of these narratives had to suppress those elements of their own experiences of slavery that might have appeared too subjective to meet the expectations of the white reading public (Bell 8). As a result of “institutionalized racism”, there is certain ambivalence expressed in the emotions of African American people about the ideologies of assimilation, and identification as a separate legitimate culture due to the moving distinction between “white hegemonic and black non-hegemonic cultural systems” (Bell 7). Morrison’s “neo-slave” narrative is extraordinary in a sense that she not only develops reality as a fusion of historical and factual realism, but she also heightens the psychological dimension of the past of slavery. As Judylyn S. Ryan notes in “Language and narration in Morrison’s novels”, Morrison’s use of language and textual strategies is a response “to the needs of a nation of readers and misreaders – her focus on expanding representation, participation, and interpretive competence – expresses her commitment to democracy and to the type of social relationships it predicates” (152). To draw a deeply toned picture, Morrison lets the readers examine and re-experience the deeply rooted national-cultural trauma of the past in the present by translating the historical into the personal. By excavating the layers of the individual psyche and its process of working through the memory of slavery, the life of an ex-slave seems actually more real than the historical facts embedded in the novel. The traces of emotional experiences are real to the extreme; the reader’s thoughts might be haunted by them. The torture of a black slave was at least two dimensional: the oppression of the selfhood and freedom going hand in hand with the physical abuse. As Claudine Raynaud suggests in her essay “the slave body bears the traces of torture, the owner’s mark” (51). Seethe’s carved back is described as a piece of art work similar to a “chokecherry tree” (79) as evoked in Amy’s mind. Similar marks of oppression are worn by Sethe’s mother whose mouth had been mutilated by the iron bit to the extent that even “when she wasn’t smiling she smiled” (203). These marks serve as metaphorical historical documents of the physical suffering of the body (Raynaud 52). Only through the healing of the body, for example Paul D’s performance of touching and holding Sethe’s breasts, could Sethe feel relieved in her spiritual self: “What she knew was that the responsibility of her breasts, at last, was in somebody else’s hands” (18). The literal meaning of responsibility is actually the weight of her breasts, thus the actual act of healing must be also performed literally, that is Paul D’s holding and feeling the weight of those breasts. Not just that the insight of the interior lives of the slaves are painful in their very essence but, also the American national core events and their outcome did not bring any immediate change to the oppression of the otherness and to the carefully planned and executed process of dehumanizing blacks by the dominant white master breed. Kimberly Chabot Davis argues in “Postmodern Blackness” that “the private realities of persecution and daily survival matter more to Sethe and Paul D than any dates or public documents worthy of note in a history textbook” (246). Paul D too recognizes that racism, the tragedy of being treated as one’s own property, and later on segregation has not changed with the end of the war. His comments on the Civil War reveal that even though “the war had been over four or five years then, [but] nobody white or black seemed to know it” (52). Neither the end of the Civil War nor the abolishment of slavery dissolved the constant desire and necessity of the black community for reclaiming the human cost and the struggle for historical survival as racial group. The novel gently balances on a rope strung between historical reality and fictional reality. How can one decide on the truest of histories if subjectivity must be taken into account through which historical documentations were filtered. The term subjectivity requires a word of caution since this perspective often belonged to the dominant culture. Although the Middle Passage was an outrageous historical reality, the estimated “sixty million and more” losses of black lives may be more due to the fact that “the deaths of slaves were often deemed unworthy of recording” (Davis 249). The exact number of all the lives lost cannot be accounted, because “our access to history is always limited by words and by those who have control of textual production” (Davis 249). Does a total truth exist? Morrison refuses to offer her position on this discussion. She rather posits the factual elements in the story as futile and insignificant references, hence purposely sweeping them aside from the centre of focus. Morrison’s aim is to give voice to alternative small narratives in the story to precisely reconstruct the “life-lived” history of the slaves. What Ryan calls the “democracy of narrative participation” enables Morrison to introduce little narratives in a fragmented structure “to reveal that even individuals whose presence is temporally or socially limited have full personalities and unlimited human agency” (159). In “Circularity in Toni Morrison’s Beloved” Phillip Page captures the intention behind the method of the fragmentation of the narrative voices as far as giving scope for the aspects of the content (36). Form follows content; thereby the readers’ co-operation is viewed as a necessary response to the text for the readers are to experience the same struggles the characters are going through. Page remarks in his essay that “the characters have to be careful, have to remember their lives in fragments, the narration must be told in fragments” (36). The technique of constructing a fictional world where both major and minor characters are allowed to gain access to the narrative stage creates several important features. First of all, it avoids the danger of offering the perspective of binary oppositions, secondly grants “democracy of narrative participation” and last, it “allows for an exchange of multiple gazes among the characters and the readers” (Ryan 159). Central to the novel is thus the questioning of the capacity of language because the domination through the control of the word and the silencing of the powerless deeply influenced, altered and even destroyed the mother tongue of the slaves. The only medium left to pass knowledge on was the African oral tradition, a subjective and spiritual experience: the passing on memories and knowledge exclusively via voice and singing. To create a symbolical African-American voice, Morrison introduces oral narrative techniques – repetition, folk expressions, music, song and the shifting and blending of narrative voices – that help the reader to understand and respond to the novel as a “speakerly text,” as a magical ritual of teaching and healing derived from African heritage (Dubey 198). African linguistic codes are hardly accessible through language, therefore Morrison invests “transforming and humanizing possibilities in oral and performative rather than literate and literary modes of expression” (Dubey 196). The control of the word by the oppressed can be witnessed by the “triumph of orality” (Tally 83) in the powerful and eloquent teaching of Baby Suggs at the Clearing. Accepting no title of honor before her name, but allowing a small caress after it, she became an unchurched preacher, one who visited pulpits and opened her great heart to those who could use it. […] When warm weather came, Baby Suggs, holy, followed by every black man, woman and child who could make it through, took her great heart to the Clearing- […] “Here,” she said, “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. […] 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.” (87-88) Baby Suggs’s sermon is a performative event that uses music and dancing to celebrate the freedom of the black community by reclaiming their bodies and spirits. Sound and music exist outside of any linguistic codes of the white literary discourse. This spiritual preaching exists outside the world in which language is a means of demonstrating racial hierarchy and overarching authority over the marginal; it does not belong to a world in which “words could be spoken that would close your ears shut” (243). One of the most exquisite literary devices yet to mention, as well as the supporting pillar in the operation of the story, is the blending of the supernatural and the real approaches and treatments of the character Beloved. From a basic point of view, Beloved’s return from the other side fulfils a desire of identification with the African origins (). From the angle of the authorial position, the flesh-and-blood incarnation of Sethe’s murdered daughter enables the characters, and on an extensive level, the African-American community to find the bridge between the past and present. On account of this mediation the resistivity of the characters to remember is dissolved. by serendipity in their souls to remember and work through the forgotten and yet unspeakable losses of slavery, in order to find their own identity rooted in the African soil. To accomplish a complete join or union, the readers are demanded to believe that Beloved is neither just a ghost returned from the dead, nor a magical hallucination, nor purely a symbolic manifestation of the oppressed burdens of the past, but a real human being. In order to believe that Beloved has actually returned from the dead, Morrison “repositions the authorial audience through the device of an ideal narrative audience” (Ryan 159) because such an ideal reader would believe the narrator, and accept the narrator’s offered positions as well as her judgements (Ryan 158). It is supposed that the knowledge of this ideal audience is rooted in faith, more precisely in the acceptance of the presence and validity of the supernatural. In the world of the characters the past is constantly coming back, thus they are forced to “start the day’s serious work of beating back the past” (73). They believe in dead people’s ghosts coming back to present to haunt, atone, or gain approval; just like Ella knows right away that “people who die bad don’t stay in the ground” (188). As following Madhu Dubey’s argument in “The Politics of Genre in Beloved”, “if the writer can assume communal belief in magic, readers would be expected to read magic as literally true rather than as a literary device” (194). Confronting Beloved To awaken the people from the “national amnesia” (Raynaud 46), in Morrison’s Beloved what one remembers is just as significant as what one forgets, since the “disremembering” of history might easily cause the loss of the national heritage. Morrison further draws a relation between death and history. Death and loss are connected to the past, but on the other hand the spiritual embodiment of the murdered child is manifested in the shape of a baby ghost in the present and, later, as the full material embodiment of the repressed memories of agony and pain. In Beloved death is not the final stage of resolution or the surrendering of the body and the soul. Morrison transforms memory, re-memory and “disremembrance” into historical documentation of the slave individuals, whose collective suffering in the past becomes re-articulated in the present. The act of remembering the past burdens is conceived as the first step to be taken in the mourning ritual; to move the oppressed memories from the unconscious to conscious level and work it through thus “negotiating and transcending their debilitating control” (Krumholz 398). The healing process notwithstanding involves a painful reconciliation with these memories. Baby Suggs and Beloved both take central roles in the phases of clearing; the former being a moral and spiritual guide for the black community and the latter embodying the more painful aspects of remembering and confronting the past. While Baby Suggs creates a ritual, “out of her own heart and imagination” (Krumholz 397) to celebrate the freedom of the body and the soul of the black community, Beloved serves as a “psychological catalyst” () in the characters lives. Sethe, Paul D and Denver are therefore forced to open up their “tobacco tins” (113) and thus face the pain and shame of the re-memories they desperately longed to keep in the unconscious. This kind of entertainment is not at least comforting, though necessary with Beloved’s literal rebirth into 124 Bluestone Road. The following paragraphs will be devoted to examining all the possible manifestations of Beloved concerning the way in which she initiates the act of facing the past in Sethe, Denver, Paul D. “Motherlove” Sethe struggles in vain to forget the overwhelmingly painful memories of her past. Although Raynaud suggests that memory in Morrison’s discourse is an act of will, a “form of willed creation” (47), the constantly returning memories and re-memories cannot be controlled by Sethe. She accuses herself of having a shading away portrait of Buglar and “could not forgive her memory” for the “sycamores beat out the children” (6). Baby Suggs also blames her for not being grateful for the remaining fairly accurate images she still possesses: “My first born. All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of the bread. Can you beat that? Eight children and that’s all I remember” (5). What remains for the ex-slave mothers – fading morsels of memory – is captured by the dialogue between Sethe and Baby Suggs. The two events thus which most effected Sethe’s life are the escaping of Sweet Home to get breast milk to her baby girl and the murdering of this little girl to save her from slavery. Sethe believes her choice to kill her child to be the right act: an act of unselfish love. In fact, she intended to kill all her children and herself as well. Under enslavement there are certain limits to how much tendering and caring mothers and a daughters can allow themselves. Accordingly, there are even less possibilities left for the mothers to protect their children from the horrors of slavery. The best thing she was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing – the part of her that was clean. […] And no one, nobody on this earth, would list her daughter’s characteristics on the animal side of the paper. No. Oh no. Maybe Baby Suggs could worry about it, live with the likelihood of it; Sethe had refused – and refused still. (251) Even though Sethe grants the baby the gift of death, from that stage on in the story she becomes preoccupied with searching for a just explanation that would approve of her act, as though she could somehow “make up for the handsaw” (251). Her efforts are defeated because she is never able to tell her own story, also, the one man who offered protection to Sethe to “go as far inside as [she] need to” (46) abandons her after learning her story from Stamp Paid. Since Paul D could not cope with that news it is now the baby ghost’s turn to force Sethe into working through the past. Sethe’s returned adult daughter is necessary to confront her past. After she becomes aware that the young girl is her dearly daughter, Sethe is relieved because she believes that her daughter has returned to be with her and that she finally has to justify her actions to her. However she is the first one to put a claim on her daughter and by that she re-establishes her maternal property over the lost “crawling already baby” she has previously claimed ownership over by not letting anyone else claiming that ownership: BELOVED, she my daughter. She mine. See. She come back to me of her own free will and I don’t have to explain a thing. I didn’t have time to explain before because it had to be done quick. Quick. She had to be safe and I put her where she would be. But my love was tough and she back now. (200) Sethe also hopes that Beloved would understand everything as she explains the murder: “When I explain it she’ll understand, because she understands everything already” (200). She understands, because she shares Sethe’s consciousness. When Beloved insists “I am not dead” (213), Morrison suggests that Beloved is in fact a part of Sethe whom Sethe keeps trying “to murder, the past, is not dead, must not die, must not be forgotten or sealed off” (Koolish). Sethe’s own overwhelming memories of abandonment and the loss of maternal love flames out in the embodiment of Beloved whom she joyfully acknowledges to be the daughter returned from “the other side” (203). By feeding Beloved with both bodily nourishment and storytelling Sethe can make up for the “motherlove” that was destroyed by the realities of motherhood in slavery (Krumholz 400). The insatiable hunger of Beloved and Sethe’s determination of satisfying this appetite creates a situation in which Sethe is always ready to give and Beloved is always greedy to take more. Consequently this action of feeding, to actually have all the milk for Beloved, results in an unharmed symbiosis at surface level because the components are performing the longed for and seemingly right instinctive actions. However the overlapping dimensions of their stretching bodies, voices, memories and monologues create an unintelligible clamor that is not distinct to Stamp Paid’s ears. When Sethe locked the door, the women inside were free at last to be what they liked, see whatever they saw and say whatever was on their minds. Almost. Mixed in with the voices surrounding the house, recognizable but undecipherable to Stamp Paid, were the thoughts of the women of 124, unspeakable thoughts, unspoken. (199) The collective telling of three women offers a concrete way of accomplishing their task of the ritual of telling and thus approve of the validity of their own narratives (Holloway 519). “The Little Antelope” From the beginning of the novel Denver’s favorite story is the story of her birth, in which she shares her past with her mother’s. Although Denver is desperate throughout the novel to become included in some social circle, in some kind of a shared history, she is only interested in Sethe’s accounts of the past as long as they concern her birth. Born on a river that divides free and slave land, Denver shares a “dual inheritance of freedom and slavery” (Krumholz 404). She is notwithstanding part of the past for which she abandoned language because she drank Sethe’s milk along with the blood of her murdered sister. It was Nelson Lord who asked her that question that caused her to go deaf and dumb for two years “to avoid learning the truth about her mother’s past” (Wyatt 482). From that time on Denver lives in a closed world, trapped in a prison her mother’s isolation has created with Sethe and the baby ghost as her only companions. When Paul D intervenes into their harmonic she feels excluded from the circle: “None of that had mattered as long as her mother did not look away as she was doing now, making Denver long, downright long, for a sign of spite from the baby ghost” (12). Paul D knows right away by examining Denver that she must be expecting somebody else for whom she has been long waiting. The exclusion from the shared past increases Denver’s isolation and loneliness even further but she finds refuge in her sister-ghost’s presence. It was also her sister while still being an entity on the other side who initiated Denver’s explosion/outburst from silence: “The first thing I heard after not hearing anything was the sound of her crawling up the stairs. She was my secret company until Paul D came”, remembers Denver in her monologue (205). With Beloved’s “miraculous resurrection” (105) the damage Paul D had done by violating their closely bond family circle and exorcising her sister-ghost can be made undone for Denver. She is the first one to acknowledge her sister and sets out to protecting her from Sethe. What she could not bear listening to flamed out in her dreams and she knows that there is something in her mother that might allow her to do the same damage to Beloved. Denver concedes her fears in her monologue, “I’m afraid the thing that happened that made it all right for my mother to kill my sister could happen again” (205). She becomes so much attached to Beloved, to her dearly sister who has become a flesh and blood companion that she feels hurt when hearing Beloved’s explanation of her return “that she was not the main reason for Beloved’s return” (75). The unconscious fear of loosing Beloved establishes a situation in which Denver is unable to find resolution. Although Denver has been intentionally withheld from the acknowledgement of the past that resulted in her incapability to move into the future, through the continuous storytelling to Beloved she will begin to understand her own history (Krumholz 404). Denver’s tremendous love for her sister gradually forces her to face the accounts and the fears of the past she hates. By retelling her birth-story to Beloved over and over again Denver moves into stages of understanding and re-experiencing history and thus undergoes a “ritual engagement with the past” (Krumholz 404-405). In order to completely identify with her mother’s past she also has to meet the painful process of undertaking the “ritual of mergence” (Krumholz 405). She becomes encircled in the hypnotizing habit of claiming possession as Sethe has previously done when recognizing Beloved as her daughter. However in Denver’s case it is her father Halle and her sister Beloved she wants to declare possession over and reunite with. This ritual of possession will eventually lead to the breakthrough of her isolation and grant Denver “an experience of the past that can lead her into the future” (Krumholz 405). Thus it becomes Denver’s task in the third part of the novel to initiate the breakup of the “self-consuming mother-child circle” (Wyatt 482) when moving out of the safe house to get some food for her starving mother. Although she would have chosen the sister-ghost instead of her mother without doubt she is mature and distanced enough now to see that the prize her mother has to pay for her past will cost her life: Denver thought she understood the connection between her mother and Beloved: Sethe was trying to make up for the handsaw; Beloved was making her pay for it. But there would never be an end to that, and seeing her mother diminished shamed and infuriated her.” (251) She becomes determined to step out of the haunted house but faces great difficulty to cross “the threshold into social discourse” (Wyatt 483). One might ponder about her incapability at her age but according to Jean Wyatt “to a child afraid to step out into the world, the particulars of how that world damaged her grandmother and mother are hardly comforting” (483). After Beloved has played her part in commencing the free flow of the memories triggering the process of repetition without resolution, it is Baby Suggs’s spiritual voice and ancestral guide that will provide assurance to Denver to enter the present. Baby Suggs sums up the family history of the struggle against slavery: You mean I never told you nothing about Carolina? About your daddy? You don’t remember nothing about how come I walk the way I do and about your mother’s feet, not to speak of her back? I never told you all that? Is that why you can’t walk down the steps? My Jesus my. (244) Albeit Baby Suggs becomes defeated in this fight for she could not cope with the fact that there is “no bad luck in the world but whitepeople” who unfortunately “don’t know when to stop”, the lessons and attitude she learned during her “sixty years a slave” make it possible for Denver to emerge into the present world (104). With the knowledge inherited from Baby Suggs “comes the power to endure and change” (Krumholz 405). Baby Suggs as an ancestral preacher helps Denver to put the past where it belongs, “into oral history”, that completes Denver’s spiritual clearing from the past burdens (Wyatt 483). “The Last of the Sweet Home Men” As “the last of the Sweet Home men” (9), Paul D has also learnt the lessons about the self-consuming and self-denying slave system which probed and robbed him in his very essence. The privileges Garner allowed his slave men gave way to a sense that might have become as close as to signify manhood in their understanding (Carden 405). Paul D assumed to be brought up and raised as a man until it became clear under the conduct of schoolteacher and the horrors endured in Alfred that the “definitions belonged to the definers – not the defined” (190). On account of the dehumanizing experiences and peeled identity Paul D develops a way to shut down his unspeakable past: “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” (72-73). Another important moral he followed was “to love just a little bit; everything just a little bit” (45) in order to “guard against loss through disengagement” (Carden 406). Paul D’s arrival at 124 Bluestone Road triggers a slippery task to reconcile Paul D’s “dehumanizing experiences and feelings of nonidentity with the capacity for empathy” (Carden 407). The power to listen to the repressed stories and thus remove the barriers in women’s minds to allow for a facilitating telling ritual raises him to be a figure of blessedness. The telling however is not reciprocal according to Carden because Paul D manages to keep his own story hidden in the tobacco tin (408). Paul D offers reliance and comfort to Sethe building “the male role of protector” on the pillars of their shared past (). Sethe thus is enabled to enjoy Paul D’s assurance and care and therefore could “trust things and remember things because the last of the Sweet Home men was there to catch her if she sank” (18). Paul emerges in Sethe’s world as the saving other and has “the capacity to lead Sethe out of her narcissistic isolation and into relationship with the external world” (Schapiro 204). However, Paul D’s plan to establish a nuclear family with Sethe and re-shape their past by which he would be approved to perform his traditional role as a man and head of family is swept aside by the intruder baby ghost. His first encounter with Beloved eventuates a victorious moment for Paul D allowing him to emerge as a strong male protector who according to Sethe “beat the spirit away the very day he entered her house” (96). On the other hand the demands of the venomous baby ghost are too powerful not be acknowledged thereby she occurs in flesh immediately after her exorcism (Schapiro 204). From that time on, Paul D is forced by Beloved to confront the shame of powerlessness of a man under slavery. Sex with Beloved is understood as a “necessary engagement with his avoided history” (Carden 413). Their needs and claims become articulated in their sexual encounters. Beloved leads Paul D to the “reanimation of his red heart” () and in return Paul D acknowledges and legitimizes Beloved’s need to be recognized by saying her name. Paul D feels ashamed though after realizing that Beloved is literally moving him out of Sethe’s house and her life because “it was he, that man, who had walked from Georgia to Delaware, who could not go or stay put where he wanted to in 124 – shame” (126). Even though he is convinced to possess certain manly qualities signifying heroic features of the idealized man, these qualities serve no protection against Beloved (Sitter 24). In response to Beloved’s seductive manipulation he finds another way to secure his challenged male identity by making Sethe pregnant. Sethe’s pregnancy would assert his ownership and authority played out in the familial hierarchy because he has found “a way to hold on to her, document his manhood and break out of the girl’s spell – all in one” (128). Beloved’s overbearing aura though has such a strong effect on Paul D that he starts questioning the degree of his masculinity. His relationship with Beloved sheds light on the tender spot in the struggle to place his identity as a man thus evokes the conditions that forbade the development of manhood. While elaborating on the particulars of how Beloved managed to fix him he comes to admitting his worst fear: “He could not say to this woman who did not squint in the wind, ‘I am not a man’” (128). Paul D’s obsessive effort to define the meaning of the ideal manhood is a constant mediation “played out in the novel’s shadowy subtext” (Sitter 18). Finding resolution by placing his identity as a man becomes radically problematic for Paul D after being defeated by Beloved. Paul D’s image of conventional manhood is challenged both by the distorting effects of slavery and by Sethe’s role as a complementary other. Even though Paul D thought to understand the traditional roles they were to perform in their nuclear family, this concept becomes puzzled and threatened by Sethe’s not at least ideal womanhood: This here new Sethe didn’t know where the world stopped and she began. Suddenly he saw what Stamp Paid anted him to see: more important than what Sethe had done was what she claimed. It scared him. (164) While being away from 124 Bluestone Road Paul D comes to question the already troubled assumptions and meanings of manhood: Garner called and announced them men – but only on Sweet Home, and by his leave. Was he naming what he saw or creating what he did not? That was the wonder of Sixo, and even Halle; it was always clear to Paul D that those two were men whether Garner said so or not. It troubled him that, concerning his own manhood, he could not satisfy himself on that point. Oh, he did manly things, but was that Garner’s gift or his own will? What would have been anyway – before Sweet Home – without Garner? In Sixo’s country, or his mother’s? (220) Paul D’s recollections about the different positioning and alternative forms of manhood calls attention to the framework in which “manhood appears as the slipperiest of cultural constructions, measured in relation to others” (Carden 420). What makes it possible for Paul D to endure all “a nigger supposed to take” (235) and satisfy the doubts about his own manhood is his ability to reconstruct a different kind of male self that could be placed next to Sethe’s womanhood. Paul D’s mediations of manhood and womanhood come to full circle when understanding Sixo’s feelings about the Thirty Mile Woman (Sitter 26): “ ‘She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind’ ” (272-73). Paul D arrives at a newly found manhood which will be the supporting pillar in his desire to “put his story of troubled manhood next to Sethe’s story of troubled womanhood” (Carden 420). He comes to recognize that Sethe’s and his own past are bearable because they “got more yesterday than anybody” (273). Even though he did not succeed in saving Sethe from her all consuming devil-child manifesting her unbearable past, he now understands that Sethe needs his tender support and help to re-establish her own identity in order to lead a life. He wants Sethe to find a way to claim and appreciate herself by remarking: “ ‘You your best thing Sethe. You are’ ” (273). Despite they were forced to undergo the phases of spiritual clearing separately they gradually work their way back from the haunting past together with the desire to have “some kind of tomorrow” (273). As far we have seen Beloved’s flesh and blood resurrection offers a distinct way for the characters to revise their past packed with their haunting ghosts of slavery so as to find resolution against the overarching psychic trauma (Osagie 430). As Paul D persuades Sethe in the end of the novel, in order to enjoy complete freedom Sethe must leave room for self-recognition. The realization of the self starts with revisiting and further on deconstructing the past. According Iyunolu Osagie Sethe has to understand that “a real claim to freedom must begin with the mind, and until she is able to deal with the past not as a burden which must be beaten back by all means but as a factor which constitutes the present, she will continue to be haunted” (430). Same is the case with Paul D whose identity as a man is radically challenged. Beloved initiates the constant questioning of the definitions of idealized manhood and the query of whether he fits into any of those culturally provided categories. Sethe’s capability and self reliance constitutes a kind of womanhood that in contrast with Paul D’s assumption of traditional domestic roles causes an abyss between his idealized image of heroic manhood and his actual identity. To find his way back to Sethe he first has to find his own course of self-liberation. Denver is the only character in the novel who is not captivated by her own past but by her mother’s. While nursing Beloved she undergoes a healing therapy provided by the telling rituals and thus gains an insight of her mother’s past. She is a daughter of the first free born generation and thus will be able to find the avenues out of the narcissistic mother-daughter-ghost dynamics and lead her life into future social discourse. The therapeutic treatment triggered by Beloved forces the re-memories to the foreground which is not an easy course. Indeed, the healing process will not come to its full circle unless the characters come to realize that the past cannot be forgotten or completely exorcised (Osagie 430). Healing through collective memory The idea of collective experience of history and the remembering and telling of history is staged central in Morrison’s Beloved. Since the slave body is both singular and collective, the experiences of horror, pain and torture are individualized themes gaining their importance of meaning within a “larger cultural and communal logic” (McBride 171). The redefinition of the past and the reclaiming of the unspeakable losses of the black slave community is actually a continuous process of mourning. The return of the repressed burdens of the past demands the memories to be worked through and not forgotten. Morrison suggests that the act of mourning can be executed by the process of an oral tradition: the actual act of remembering and the embedding of the told memories into the African-American oral tradition (Raynaud 44). As touched upon earlier in the second chapter, Baby Suggs embodies “the moral and spiritual backbone of Beloved” (Krumholz 398). Indeed, Baby Suggs oracular sermon opens up possibilities for her beloved community for rebirth. The individual themes of suffering gain recognition at the Clearing within the safe bonds of the community. The communal spiritual experience under the conduct of Baby Suggs allows for the re-articulation of their collective suffering. To liberate her people from the trauma impelled by their enslaved past “Baby Suggs holy” (87) suggests following the guidance of their heart and imagination: She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure. She told them the only grace they could have as the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it. (88) Baby Suggs’s preaching is not based on any kind of moral judgement or the following of the prescribed rules by the grace of God, but rather its spontaneity and spirituality resembles African oral ceremonies that attach the community back to its roots. By her calling Baby Suggs asserts to lay everything down, “sword and shield” (86) with the aim of gaining free excess to love and celebrate their newly found bodies and spirits (Osagie 430). Her command to lay everything down however allows no further treatment of the past which will put a stop to “her imagination” and trigger the collapse of “her great big heart” (89). Osagie argues that the healing ritual is fine as long as “it leaves room for a serum of dead bodies, (…) in the mind of the living, in order to protect the living from the dead and from all that will threaten their well-being in the real world” (430). Apart from believing that “there was no grace – imaginary or real –” (89), the community she offered spiritual clearing despised her. Baby Suggs became an outcast, excluded from the bonds of her community as a result of their shared belief that she “got proud and let herself be overwhelmed by the sight of her daughter-in-law and Halle’s children” (147). The power or rather the lack of the protective power displayed by the community contributes in a significant extent to Sethe’s outrageous response to the sight of the bounty hunters. They failed to warn Baby Suggs and intentionally abandoned their help as a suggestive of their disapproval. Baby closed her eyes. Perhaps they were right. Suddenly, behind the disapproving odor, way back behind it, she smelled another thing. Dark and coming. Something she couldn’t get at because the other odor hid it. (138) (…) It made them furious. They swallowed baking soda, the morning after, to calm the stomach violence caused by the bounty, the reckless generosity on display at 124. Whispered to each other in the yards about fat rats, doom and uncalled-for pride. (137) From that time on Baby Suggs, Sethe and her children continue their lives as outcasts. The ability or rather the will of the community to act has been incapacitated by their obstructive anger. It is important to note that this very same community will come to Denver’s aid to unload the house by exorcising Beloved. Thus the overpowering force of community becomes crucial in the resolution of the novel; it is the community of women who gather together to perform exorcism of Sethe’s all consuming past, Beloved, through the medium of wordless sound: “In the beginning there were no words. In the beginning was the sound, and they all knew what that sound sounded like” (259). Sethe felt as if the Clearing “had come to her with all its heat and shimmering leaves, where the voices of women searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of the words” (261). The voices of the women carry Sethe to present and to a possible future of beginning her own story as a result of the “spiritual of the purgation ritual” which lies “beyond the meaning of words, in sound and sensation, rather than logical meaning” (Krumholz 403). Feeling “younger and stronger” the thirty women arrived at a familiar place which they had been long neglecting: “there they were, young and happy, playing in Baby Suggs’ yard, not feeling the envy that surfaced the next day” (258). This closely knit circle also undergoes the ritual of clearing again at Baby’s place as if to re-visit the original scene of Sethe’s infanticide. The support of this group allows Sethe to complete her “psychological cleansing”. By reliving the pivotal part of her history with a difference she is able to act freely on “her motherlove as she would have originally chosen” and consequently directs her murderous attack at the white man (Krumholz 403). Although Beloved as a catalyst necessarily manifests the burdens of the past in Morrison’s novel, she also embodies the beauty and power of the African pre-slavery past. At the end of novel she becomes an emblem of the African ancestry, the beautiful African mother, “connecting the mothers and daughters of African descent to their pre-slavery heritage” (Krumholz 401). To achieve such a union despite time and pace Morrison extends the personal suffering and guilt of the past to a larger social framework of the enslaved community by linking Beloved to the “Sixty Million and more” souls. Those people during the transatlantic transportation had lost “differentiation in an ‘oceanic’ space” stuck midway between “a place in African history and a place in the history of American slavery” (Wyatt 480, 479). Her account of the experiences on the slave ship lacks the dimensions of time and space thus imitates the disorientation of Africans who were thrown on the ship heading toward a fatal journey without any explanation of the means and particulars of their destination. Beloved’s own recollection of the Middle Passage is a suggestive of the way Beloved emerges to stand for the whole unaccounted slave community as also referred to in the epigraph of the novel. The detection of Beloved’s dazzling appearance and identity in this context demands a more symbolical interpretation. Being captive on the ship with her mother, Beloved witnesses and endures a range of abusive treatments. By entering her own narrative spotlight in the novel, Beloved gives account of the traumatic experience of transatlantic voyage. Her recollection resembles the extremely humiliating and abominable treatments of the slaves, as though she becomes to believe that “there will never be a time when I am not crouching and watching others who are crouching too” (210). The people, in order to escape shrivelling, must drink the urine of their overseers even how they “cannot make sweat or morning water” (210). Beloved also makes reference to being sexually abused by the “men without skin”: “I am going to be in pieces he hurts where I sleep he puts his finger there” (210, 212). The people on the ship are so tightly packed they cannot even find place to die if they wished to: “there is no room to tremble so he is not able to die” (211). The inhuman conditions reach to such an extent that is not bearable any more to the majority of black people, as a result those who succeed in dying form a “little hill of dead people” (211). Having to crouch on the long trip was however not the main cause to Beloved’s split identity. She constantly accuses her mother for committing suicide preferring death to slavery and leaving her behind. Beloved’s own re-memory of the Middle Passage is structured in a form of stream of consciousness with embedded visual gaps metaphorically standing for the themes of loss: the unheard stories of slavery, the forgotten cultural memories, the denied kinship and motherhood, the broken mother tongue, the abuse of children and women, the missing roots of personal identity and self recognition. By filling in these gaps which cannot ever be complete, Morrison frames the stones of the burial vault for all those who were disremembered and unaccounted for, moreover, she subtly forces the reader to contribute to and participate in the healing process in order to keep the African-American cultural memory and “historical consciousness” (Davis 243) alive. Beloved becomes a figure of healing for the multiple personalities she is symbolically split into. Beloved’s narration of the unvoiced and disremembered events of the transatlantic transportation of the slaves reaches back three generations to Sethe’s mother, who is the link to the African mother earth. Beloved emerges to become the communal voice of the millions of individuals tortured, abused, mutilated and abandoned during the Middle Passage thus creating the bridge between the past - the “unspeakable thoughts, unspoken” (199) - and the present process of healing through recognition, compensation, and accounting. The very end of the novel - “Beloved.” - reinforces the method of circular narration which suggests that the resolution of the historical trauma is not complete; the process of healing is a continuous act of remembering the disremembered and the connecting of the past and present in order to reconstruct and preserve the African-American national heritage. Morrison’s technique of circular narration emphasizes the notion of the continuous process of healing by which spirits of the dead are reincarnated into authentic souls. Death according to McBride “seems ever to be an occasion for something more” (McBride 168). Mary Paniccia Carden arrives at a conclusion in “Models of Memory of Romance” asserting that “Beloved challenges America’s faith of the past-ness of the past by undercutting assurance in the resolution of the historical trauma” (423). “It was” and “this is” refer to two different stories of slavery, historical collective memory shifting from past to present referring to the symbolic occupation of the American homeland which has taken over the function of the African landscape. The closure of the novel is challenged by its own desire of extending its novelistic characteristics to a mediative recovery that is rooted in African folk origins (Dubey 197). Beloved, the past must be put where it belongs to allow for a complete cleansing. Indeed, with Beloved’s exorcism, the narrative devices employing the fusion of the magical, supernatural and the real cannot form the basis of the resolution. Beloved’ demand to be acknowledged within the register of the novel is almost completely erased. The absence of naming is suggested by her incapability to enter the “symbolic order”, consequently she “remains outside language and therefore outside narrative memory” (Wyatt 484). Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremember (To be continued) Conclusion (under construction) Works Cited Bell, Bernard W. “Beloved: A Womanist Neo-Slave Narrative; or Multivocal Rembrances of Things Past.” African American Review, 26.1 (1992): 7-15. Davis, Kimberly Chabot. “‘Postmodern Blackness’: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the End of History.” Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1998: 242-260. Carden, Mary Paniccia. “Models of Memory and Romance: The Dual Endings of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Twentieth Century Literature, 45.4 (Winter, 1999): 401-427 Dubey, Madhu. “The Politics of Genre in Beloved.” Novel, Spring 1999: 192-203. Hinson, D. Scot. “Narrative and Community Crisis in Beloved.” MELUS, 26.4 (2001): 147- 166. Holloway, Karla F. C. “Beloved: A Spiritual.” Callaloo, 13.3 (Summer, 1990): 516-525. Osagie, Yyunolu. “Is Morrison Also Among the Prophets?: ‘Psychoanalytic’ Strategies in Beloved.” African American Review, 28.3 (Autumn, 1994): 423-440. Koolish, Linda. “‘To be loved and cry shame’: A psychological reading of Tony Morrison’s Beloved.” MELUS, 26.4 (2001). Krumholtz, Linda. “The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” African American Review, 26.3 (1992): 395-407. McBride, Dwight. “Morrison, intellectual.” The Cambridge Companion to Tony Morrison. Ed. Justine Tally. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 162-174. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Penguin Books, 1988. Page, Phillip. “Circularity in Tony Morrison’s Beloved.” African American Review, 26.1 (1992): 31-39. Raynaud, Claudine. “Beloved or the shifting shapes of memory.” The Cambridge Companion to Tony Morrison. Ed. Justine Tally. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 43-58. Ryan, Judylyn S. “Language and narrative technique in Tony Morrison’s novels.” The Cambridge Companion to Tony Morrison. Ed. Justine Tally. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 151-161. Schapiro, Barbara. “The Bonds of Love and the Boundaries of Self in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Contemporary Literature, 22.2 (1991): 194-211. Sitter, Deborah Ayer. “The Making of a Man: Dialogic Meaning in Beloved.” African American Review, 26.1 (Spring, 1992): 17-29. Tally, Justine. “The Morrison trilogy.” The Cambridge Companion to Tony Morrison. Ed. Justine Tally. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 75-91. Wyatt, Jean. “Giving Body to the Word: The Maternal Symbolic in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” PMLA, 108.3 (1993): 474-488. | 
