Book Review of Beloved by Toni Morrison

Extract

[...] Book Review of Beloved by Toni Morrison It is easy for cataclysmic traumatism to press to obscurity past history because of the weakness and shame of the human spirit itself. History is never a clean palindrome backward and forward, because during its recollection there is always an emotional motive, and nearly every motive is bruised. In her magnum opus Beloved, Toni Morrison lends her semiotic voice to people, who, during their own frangible history, were denied language itself. In one of the most spiritually brave novels ever written, Morrison refuses to allow the reader to disavow the imprint of history and pronounces the painful and debilitating effects it has on the collective humanity that does so. [...]

[...] Beloved develops a strange attachment to Sethe and seems to have a mystical knowledge of her history. With a fervent hunger, she soaks up every detail that Sethe shares with her, and it is clear that Beloved, like Paul is a conduit to the past and its need to be actualized. Denver believes that Beloved is her dead sister that has come back and develops an obsessive monomania for taking care of her. So anemic is Denver's sense of self and so strong is her spiritual loneliness that she becomes utterly obsessed with Beloved. [...]

[...] In the middle of the book there is an absolute breakdown of language where the severity of their own lack of self is accented by the clutching onto their dwindling powers of language. Beloved speaks in a sequence of stream-of-consciousness thoughts that along with the possibility of the infinite womb of death, may represent the middle passage of the slave trade. She describes a cramped place filled with “black and angry dead” and without skin.” In any case, the interconnectivity between the intimate meaning of Beloved and the collective meaning of the destroyed history of a people are indelibly linked and their interplay is necessary. [...]