In the story of the Holocaust, Americans were the heroes; in the story of US chattel slavery, we are the villains. Highlighting—or even honestly confronting—the abuse, genocide, and religious hypocrisy that was so integral to the building of the nation does not uphold the myth of American exceptionalism that so many white Americans have collectively inherited. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error…there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much.
Beloved is not the first or the only powerful, artful, and truthful work of African American literature that opens a window into the often untold stories of our racial history; Morrison is one in a long line of prophetic truth-tellers, including Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Zora Neale Hurston.
It is a disorienting, difficult novel. Beloved violently and lovingly shows more than explains the results of trauma on the human psyche, and in the process, helps the readers to understand their own bruised minds a good friend of mine told me that she had not understood that she had been abused as a child until she read Beloved.
According to Dubois, African Americans cannot identify with Africa, which has not been their home culture, or with America, a land that hates them as human beings, valuing them only as workhorses.
In his very important work on racial trauma, therapist Resmaa Menekam explains that both black and white America, the oppressed and the oppressor, experience a sort of inherited trauma and respond accordingly. For instance, many white Americans have kneejerk, defensive reactions if the topics of racism or racial history are brought up.
This is perhaps one of the main reason why the myth of American exceptionalism stays alive. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle , Sigmund Freud explains that the initial violent events in the life of a trauma survivor are not processed at the time of their occurrence; although the body immediately reacts, the mind can only fully recognize the disruptive, painful nature of the offense through a series of flashbacks, revisiting the original pain in a very non-linear, fragmented sequence.
Her non-fiction books included an essay collection, a book of literary criticism titled Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination and editing anthologies. Her play Dreaming Emmett was about Emmett Till, whose lynching in Mississippi in was a key moment in the US civil rights movement. Morrison was born on February 18, , in Lorain, Ohio, and grew up in a family with a story-telling tradition. Morrison taught in colleges and was an editor at the publisher Random House before writing her own books.
Later she would teach at Princeton University. Her writing was not just beautiful but meaningful — a challenge to our conscience and a call to greater empathy. She was as good a storyteller, as captivating, in person as she was on the page. I wanted it to come from inside the culture, and speak to people inside the culture.
It was about a refusal to pander or distort or gain political points. I wanted to reveal and raise questions. She also spent more than a decade working as an editor at Random House, where she championed the work of black authors.
It was there that she helped put in place the raw material for a black American literary canon. She published the autobiography of Muhammad Ali. But perhaps her greatest legacy as an editor was compiling and publishing The Black Book , a lavishly illustrated primary source collection that documents black American history.
And even when it first came out, it was deeply meaningful to those who picked it up — including an incarcerated man who wrote Morrison to thank her for putting it together. In her own writing, Morrison lavished the underdiscussed lives of black women with language. Her prose is lyrical almost as a default; it is rhythmic and vivid; it sings.
In her hands, to write lyrically feels like an act of both love and defiance. But in her most famous novel, Beloved , about an escaped enslaved woman who kills her baby daughter to prevent her from being taken by slave catchers, Morrison had to balance her tendency toward lyricism with the starkness of her subject matter.
At the same time, she began building a body of creative work that, in , would make her the first African-American woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. That novel, considered by many to be her best, won the Pulitzer Prize in Today, Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of Humanities at Princeton University, where she conducts undergraduate workshops in creative writing.
Set during the Reconstruction era in , Beloved centers on the powers of memory and history. For the former slaves in the novel, the past is a burden that they desperately and willfully try to forget. Yet for Sethe, the protagonist of the novel, memories of slavery are inescapable.
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