The Dirtied And Traumatized Self Of Slavery In Beloved
1403 Words6 Pages
Malibiji Zikhona
212292188
LLE 305 World Literature Today
Assignment 1
07 September 2015
In her article ‘“Whites might Dirty her All Right, but Not Her Best Thing”: The Dirtied and Traumatized Self of Slavery in Beloved’, J Brooks proposes the following:
Intent on memorializing and honouring the lives of the dishonest, disremembered slaves and properly, artistically burying them, Morrison attempts to transform the shame and pain of slavery into artistic pride in Beloved. A novel that has achieved a place of honor in the American literary canon, Beloved also is a shame- and trauma-saturated work in which Morrison bears witness to the horrors of slavery and rips the veil drawn over proceedings too terrible to relate. Morrison, who views the literary…show more content… Beloved is a representation of Sethe’s slave years, she does what Sethe did to her when she said she was protecting her from being dirtied. The following quote reveals what Beloved did to Sethe, which is a reminder of the history that she thought was buried and forgotten. “You did it, I saw you,” said Denver. “What?” “I saw your face. You made her choke.” “I didn’t do it.” “You told me you loved her.” “I fixed it, didn’t I? Didn’t I fix her neck?” “After. After you choked her neck.” (Morrison, 2007) Here, Denver confronts Beloved who choked Sethe. What Beloved did to Sethe shows that the history follows Sethe and that she cannot run away from it because it will always haunt her wherever she…show more content… “As Toni Morrison has said, “If we don’t keep in touch with the ancestor, we are, in fact, lost.” Keeping in touch with the ancestor, she adds, is the work of a reconstructive memory: “Memory (the deliberate act of remembering) is a form of willed creation. It is not an effort to find out the way it really was – that is research. The point is to dwell on the way it appeared and why it appeared that particular way” (Mckay, 1999) , Mckay here refers to Morrison’s words that one needs to keep in touch with the ancestor and for Sethe, her ancestor is Beloved and without Beloved which is her ancestor the she is