Literature - It's Connection with History as captured in the Black American Literary Tradition - Case: Morrison's "Beloved"

Topic started by Anoop (@ 203.199.213.5) on Mon Mar 25 02:03:50 .
All times in EST +10:30 for IST.

This thread tries to evaluate how literature, in dealing with, and being intimately connected with the various facets of human life is able to capture the various aspects of human history, it's movements, it's struggles, it's wars, and the details of the human lives that have transpired over the ages. An exploration of this thesis is sought through taking up the case of how Afro-American literature is seen to capture several historical aspects of the condition of the African American people, their struggles, and their aspirations.

Literature is seen as a powerful tool in the hands of the African American writer, one that is used by the author with a cause as a means for awakening the dormant conscience of the people who subjugated them, as a means towards reminding the Afro-American people of their own rich cultural and historical traditions, and seeking to remind them that they too have something to identify with, and be proud of, unlike what their detractors might force them to think, and as a means towards chronicling the historical injustices that have plagued them, helping the reader understand the causes, the root of their present condition, and thereby indirectly providing us with ways and means towards their greater well-being.

The question then naturally arises, what has history got to do with literature -. Indeed, the literary or creative process, especially in the form of the modern day novel, is seen to be greatly affected by the historical events and the traditions of the particular cultural or ethnic background from which the author hails from. Writing a novel may be a creative process, one that tends to fictionalize reality, and thus may be at a superficial level seen to be at odds with the historian's stated aim of trying to objectively chronicle the happenings of history. But as it stands, it often turns out that the way the literary imagination captures history is more effective in conveying the message than all the purported objectivity of the historian. Thus, on the premise that history and its events that are indelibly captured in the psyche of the people that live it, and thus serve as inputs for their literary and creative outputs, one seeks to flesh out the connection between literature and history with the specific example of Black American Literature.

In the sphere of the black American writers, one name that stands out is that of Toni Morrison, the winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature. A black woman writer, her writings are the protest of a person who as member of a doubly jeopardized group, have historically been persecuted and subjugated for countless centuries. Her writings are an ample example of how a great writer uses the medium of literature, of fiction, to capture the stories that history has to tell, and deliver her powerful message to today's world audience.

"Beloved", one of her most critically acclaimed works, which also won the Pulitzer prize, is a case to prove the point. Sethe, the novel's main protagonist, is an escaped slave and mother of four a few years after the end of the Civil War. Her apparent good fortune at successfully escaping while pregnant and giving birth in flight and finding refuge at her mother-in-law's spiritually nourishing home vanishes twenty-eight days later. The sight of a hat belonging to a cruel white owner who has tracked her down sends her and her four children into a woodshed where rather than let them suffer the torments of slavery proceeds to kill them. After killing Beloved, her third child, she is stopped by a friend who has rushed in as she is swinging the infant by her heels to smash her head. The story also chronicles the reincarnation of the murdered child as "Beloved", in a narrative that's part mystery and fantasy, and creates a richly textured world where the rights and wrongs as society then had defined are questioned.

Toni Morrison also portrays the lives of those around Sethe. There is Sixo, who "stopped speaking English because there was no future in it," and Mister, the overseer who defines slaves in terms of "human" and "animal" characteristics. There is Baby Suggs, who makes her living with her heart because slavery "had busted her legs, back, head, eyes, hands, kidneys, womb and tongue;" and Paul D, a man with a rusted metal box for a heart and a presence that allows women to cry. All characters, that reflect the hopeless situation of the blacks. At the center is Sethe, whose story makes us think and think again about the reality of a person living out the horrors of the history, that was her times, beyond the cold objective narrative of history, while at the same time trying to explore the meaning of a persons love for his or her children or freedom. The stories are suddenly clear and horrifying. They paint lucidly the picture of the downtrodden and discriminated black, the misery of their existence and the agony of slavery. The angst of the black woman, as a mother, slave to her husband, to her white master, are brought out. Because of the extraordinary, experimental style as well as the intensity of the subject matter, what we learn from them touches at a level deeper than understanding. Story telling is seen to go one step beyond what mere history books can convey.

What kind of mother would cut her child's head off with a hacksaw? This is one of the several question Morrison tries to explore in the novel with a chilling metaphor about the legacy of slavery and which finds echoes in another current question, Why is the leading cause of death among young African American men murder by another black?

The inspiration for the novel, as the author herself recounts, came from a story she came across about a woman called Margaret Garner who had escaped from Kentucky, into Cincinnati with four children. And she was a kind of a celebrity for a cause among abolitionists in 1855 or '56 because she tried to kill the children when she was caught. She killed one of them, just as in the novel. The author comes across an article interviewing the young woman of 20 later on, and she is seen to be very calm, very serene, and she keeps on remarking on the fact that she was not frothing at the mouth, she was not a madwoman, and kept saying, 'No, they're not going to live like that. They will not live the way I have lived.'

At this juncture, the novelist in Morrison steps over. She did a lot of research about everything else in the book -Cincinnati, and abolitionists, and the underground railroad though she refused to find out anything else about Margaret Garner. Instead, she invents her life.

The Sethe that is thus reborn in novel, crafted as she is from Morrison's imagination serves to capture a piece of history that the history typically fails to capture. History by the usual norm tends to gloss over the life of the ordinary, the common man or woman as unimportant. The history of a nation is usually but a recording of its countless wars or its glorious rulers and kings. But the essence of a civilization is in the masses, something that the novel, the literary piece is in a better position to capture. Thus the novel, and the novelist emerge as powerful alternatives towards chronicling the marginal histories of the commoners, the downtrodden, the much neglected individual.

Yet another way in which the novel touches upon an issue that is very much relevant to a reading of history today is the theme of the characters coming to terms with their own past. Each of the characters have endured a furious past, complete with the worst horrors imaginable. Sethe has been raped and forced to murder, Paul D has been imprisoned in a cube in a ditch, Stamp Paid was forced to give his wife away to be a sex toy, and the list goes on and on. Many of these men and women have chosen, like Sethe and Paul D, to repress the past. Others worked actively against it, like Stamp Paid. However, no sort of resolution occurs for any of the characters until each learns to accept and deal with the past (which is very alive in the present). Only then can a future be found. That, one must agree, is truly one of the key issues related to our pursuit of history. Our study of history too is often an attempt at resolving the cultural moorings, the historical events that are recorded in the collective social psyche, an understanding and coming to terms of which are required for a society to move on. History, through it's peeks into the past gives us glimpses into the future. History, they say, repeats itself. Literature too through trying to answer such questions such as the resolution of a characters past, addresses the same questions.

So then, try and post responses to this line of thought-


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