Theatres of memory

It is not dreams of liberated grand children which stir men and women to revolt, but memories of enslaved ancestors.

Walter Benjamin: Illuminations

As a writer on the Afro-American question, the Nobel-Prize winning novelist Toni Morrison has no equal today. She probably has, in fact, no real competitors. The literary role she has taken on so deliberately is, first and last, political; or, as she said "it seems to me that the best art is political and you ought to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time." And she does it best in Beloved, which is perhaps the most important text to have emerged out of the Afro-American literary tradition, on par with Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Richard Wright's Native Son. Morrison comes off as the Afro-American in extremis, a virtuoso of ethnic suffering, defiance and aspiration. Her role is that of a spokesperson for her people whose complexions constituted their fate, not only in a society poisoned by prejudice for centuries, but also it seems, in general. For, she appears to have received a heavy dose of existentialism; she is at least more than half-inclined to see the Afro-American question in the era of slavery in the 19th Century in the light of the Human Condition. So, she brings into the novel through an imaginative sweep, a wider and universal vision in which questions of slavery, race, gender, the dilemmas of historical memory and the "politics of reading" are compellingly posed.

Beloved begins: "124 was spiteful". 124 is a house in Cincinnati in 1873 inhabited by Sethe, a runaway slave from the horribly named "Sweet Home" Kentucky farm, and her daughter, Denver. The house is "spiteful" because it is haunted by the terrible fury of a daughter whose throat was cut to make her safe from repossession after the infamous Fugitive Slave Act. (The Fugitive Slave Act that was passed in 1850 mandated the return of runaway slaves regardless of where they were in the Union at the time of their discovery. This legislation was one of the series of events that culminated in the American Civil War.)

Before the Civil War, a group - a family in a sense - of slaves live more or less contentedly under a fairly enlightened rule of reasonably humane masters, the Garners. Mr. Garner moves around with his field hands, consults them on various matters, and treats them as human beings, not implements. Mrs. Garner manages the female house servants kindly and helps them with what they do not know. Still, institutional, if not personal inhumanity, remains. "Sweet Home" had its flaws: "It wasn't sweet and it sure wasn't home" as one of the inmates recalled. But Sethe's response to this witticism - "But it's where we were. All together. Comes back whether we like it or not," states the need for connection with the past that the novel dwells on.

"Sweet Home" falls apart in the 1850s when Garner dies and the farm is taken over by a sadist, called the school teacher by the slaves - he was great for measuring heads (the size of the head was taken as an index for intelligence!) - whose brutality to his human livestock drives them to attempt mass escape. Sethe manages to smuggle her three young children across the Ohio to Baby Snuggs, her mother-in-law, and after giving birth to her daughter, Denver, in the fields, finally gets there herself. But the men are killed, tortured, imprisoned, scattered by their bid for freedom.

This is the novel's background told in flashes. Now it is 1873, the Civil War is over, slavery has been officially abolished, Sethe lives in Baby Snuggs' house outside Cincinnati where she cooks in a restaurant; Baby Snuggs is herself dead, as is Sethe's older daughter; her sons have run away in early adolescence, never to be heard again. She lives in seclusion with her daughter, Denver, who is a bit of a loner and fears to leave home alone. Sethe and Denver are avoided by the neighbours because the house is haunted by the troubled violent spirit of the daughter who died, known only as Beloved from the pathetically brief inscription on the tombstone.

The emergence of the spirit of Beloved who stands at the enigmatic centre of the novel makes it a kind of a ghost story about slavery. But we need to accept the ghost in the same way as the solidly realistic figures in the story if we want to get to the underlying subtext of the novel. And so it is necessary to stand back a bit. Black experience in America originates in slavery, which is to say that it begins with the behaviour of the white people. The whites in the book - the people without skin, as Beloved calls them - are good, bad or indifferent but that is not relevant. For many Afro-Americans, the issue is not so much what exactly they suffered from racism but how they could survive it. And survival points to the heart of the novel, the question of memory.

Sethe's "serious work," she reflects as she is kneading bread in the restaurant, is "beating back the past." Like all of us, there are moments she would rather forget, if only to move on and see "it" through. But the past is always with us; it is never quite past. Besides, it is only when she looks unflinchingly into the past that she can tell us what slavery does to men, how dreadfully it wounds, what for better or worse, defines the manhood that men cherish - physical capacity, pride of dominance, freedom of will and action. And she knows from her own experience that it can do something subtler and perhaps worse to women, something that here centres on the figure of her mother-in-law, Baby Snuggs who is dead now but an abiding influence on her daughter-in-law and her grand daughter, Denver. Baby knew what life in the world was like, that "being alive was the hardest part," as Sethe says later; she knew that the worst horrors of slavery were small and specific, like not seeing your children growing up - as seven of her children from different fathers died or were sold away before maturity. So her mother-in-law says that it is better that the past be accepted than fought against: "Lay'em down, Sethe, Sword and shield. Both of 'em down. Down by the riverside. Don't study war no more. Lay all that mess down." Or, more tersely, "Good is knowing when to stop."

Baby Snuggs, who has had a history of suffering, knew that in the final analysis, all suffering involved a question of choice, not just between one person and another, or between one thing and another but between two conflicting ideas in the mind of a single person. And the choice was always so hideous, so degrading that it further diminished the humanity of those who made it. To live was to become less human.

So her simple gospel was love, but not a kind that orthodox religion has much to say about:

Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don't love your eyes; they just as soon pick'em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. You have got to love it, you. No, they don't love your mouth. You got to love it. This is flesh I am talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved...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, and the beat and beating heart, too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air..Love your heart. For this is the prize.

Very simply, stand up, be yourself. Baby's doctrine of the body as the seat of love and grace makes Sethe see that she herself, not Beloved, may be her "own best thing." But being yourself means coming to terms with your memory, and memory isolated from immediate life can be terribly dangerous. It feeds on guilt and self-loathing and hatred of others to batten on themselves.

But Beloved is all memory - Sethe's seems to be a collective racial memory whose "personal" contents mingle with recollections of the passage of slave ships from Africa. The memory - personal, political and poetical - of a social horror of such magnitude may distort day-to-day living; but living pursued without regard for such memories is pretty sure to be trivial and empty. History matters; stories matter.

What Morrison does with Beloved's story and the stories within the stories, is to tell her people, especially women - the book is dedicated to "sixty million and more" - to create or re-create an imagination of self that "white history" or "male history" has denied them, even while showing them how easily such an imagination can become self-defeating.

RAVI VYAS

Beloved,Toni Morrison, First published 1988, Plume paperback, œ6.99.

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