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��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 ) 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 , 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