Toni Morrison, Beloved & the legacy of slavery

1. Toni Morrison, Beloved & the legacy of slavery

2. Redefining African American Identity • Born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931 • Family part of great 20th century migration of African Americans away from the oppression of the Jim Crow south to northern cities. • Important in the rise of African American literature and studies, both as teacher at Howard University and as an editor at Random house • Her work has helped redefine African American identity and experience in literature, and create a more inclusive American identity that includes all—especially the central importance and history of minorities and all of our history, including slavery.

3. Her Body of Work Morrison has won the National Book Award, a Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature for a body of work that includes. • The Bluest Eye, 1969 • Sula, 1974 • Song of Solomon, 1977 • Tar Baby, 1981 • Beloved, 1987 • Jazz, 1992 • Paradise, 1999 • Love, 2003 • A Mercy, 2008 • God Help the Children

4. America & the Scars of Slavery • Though Morrison’s work has focused on black experience, and particularly on the experience of Black women, she long avoided subject of slavery. • Slavery was considered taboo within her own family and culture. Too big, too traumatic, too embittering, too hard to face. Morrison has said that America too has willfully repressed the memory and shame of slavery, leaving the millions of slavery’s victims “disremembered and unaccounted for.” But the “ghosts of the dead,” as Morrison refers to the millions lost to slavery, “haunted” her. Then Beloved appeared to her “out of the water” demanding—along with all the lost and forgotten victims of slavery that she represents—to be known. No monuments exist in America to honor and commemorate those enslaved. Morrison believes literature must be their memorial.

5. Slavery in America: • Slavery began in America in 1619 with the arrival of a Dutch slaveship. • Practiced throughout the country—north and south in 17th and 18th centuries. • African-slaves helped build the economic foundations • http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/slavery

6. An Unprecedented Brutality • In its scale and scope, slavery in 18th and 19th Century America becomes a soul-destroying brutality unprecedented in human history. Six million slaves. • Slavery became a life sentence. • Worse yet, it became generational • Young women valued as breeding stock. • Families scattered and broken—the mutilated family tree. • Loss of children and destruction of families became the hardest burden of all to bear. • Hundreds of thousands risked all to escape to North.

7. A couple of relevant particulars • The Middle Passage: • http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook_print.cfm?smtid=2&psid=3034 • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nePOpkYwjY • The Fugitive Slave Acts, and their effects • The Ohio River and Cincinnati, Ohio.

8. Back to Morrison & Beloved • Beloved considered her masterpiece. Chosen in 2000 by literary critics and scholars as the most important novel of the 20th century in America. • Importance in terms of themes, stylistic innovations and national identity. • Haunted by ghosts of slavery’s past—lost to history, without identity, memory, human dignity. • Beloved appears to Morrison “out of the water,” representing the “needy dead” and their need to be known, accounted for, and loved. (Read excerpt from Forward)

9. Morrison America & Slavery • “There are no monuments to slavery.” We have chosen to turn away and forget, once again denying the humanity, dignity and identity of the enslaved. Literature, Morrison has said, must be their monument and collective memory. • Loving our country fully means coming to terms with all of its past and heritage. To honor and remember the victims of slavery grants them their humanity and enriches our country. • Morrison creates a kind of collective memory/consciousness of slavery and the slave experience. • In Beloved, Morrison wants to make the experience of slavery intimate, and grant love, identity, and humanity to its victims. • Morrison suggests that as a country, we must confront the history of slavery in order to deal with its legacy.

10. Ways of reading the novel • As a ghost story: A story about the haunting legacy of slavery on America • As a love story: The love between mother and child, the love within families, the love between couples. • As a slave narrative: The brutalities and inhumanities of slavery from the intimate perspective of the enslaved • As a novel about motherhood and the intensity and complexity of maternal love and relationships • As a novel about the nature of memory and history • As a novel about dealing with a traumatic past and trying to build a better future: Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome on both personal and national level.

11. Literary techniques to watch for • Nonlinear structure: Interweaving of past and present in ways that go far beyond conventional use of flashbacks in literature. Time is unstable and the past is recurrent. • Densely packed imagery and figurative language • Biblical allusions and religious overtones • Gothic novel re-imagined; ghosts and thesupernatural • Symbols & motifs • Multiple, shifting narrative voices & points of view • Strange sort of collective consciousness or memory of the experience of the Middle Passage and of slavery.

12. Sources • “The Writer’s Almanac,” Garrison Keillor, American Public Radio • Yale-New Haven Teacher’s Instititute, “This Is Not a Story to Pass On”: Teaching Toni Morrison’s Beloved, by Sophie Bell • “Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” by Pauls Harijs Toutonghi, from American Writers Classics, Vol. 2. • “Slavery in America,” by staff of History.com. http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/slavery • “The History of Slavery in America”: http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/history/overview.htm • “Slavery and the Making of America.” PBS. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery/