Toni Morrison's beloved: "... and the past achieved flesh"

Re\•ista de Esrudios Norteamericanos, n• 2 ( 199 3) , pp .105-115 TONI MORRISON'S BELOVED: . .. 'AND THE PAST ACHIEVED FLESH' ANGELS CARABI Universidad de Barcelona ANGELS CARABI: In Beloved you move back into history and you plunge in the period of slavery. It seems that by writing about that period, you bring up a collective pain that had been silenced within the Black community but that was always there, kept as an unspoken burden, almost as a ghost-like presence. TONI MORRISON: Yes, I thought that in the folklore and in the songs and in early poetry or lyrics, there was never much mention of the 'middle passage.' The poems that 1 know about this period are recent -after the 60 s-, so there was a part of history, of that joumey from Africa to America, that Bla ck people themselves had never spoken about. I quite, quite understand that ommission because to dwell on it would perhaps paralyze you to the point of not being able to get on with the business of every day life, of not knowing how to survive the daily experience. It was too painful to remember and I had the impression that it was something that needed to be thought about by us, by Afro-Americans. With Beloved, 1 am trying to insert th is memory that was unbearable and unspeakable into the literature. Not only to write about a woman who did what Sethe did, but to have the ghost of the daughter -that she believes is her daughterretum, as a remnant, a tr ace of a period that was unspoken. It was a silen ce within th e race. So it's a kind of healing experience. There are certain things that are repressed be ca use they are unthinkable and the on ly way to come free of that is to go back to them and deal with them. 106 Angels Carabí A.C.: Memory has a dual function. On the one hand, to remember painful periods generates suffering. But on the other hand, remembering has a healing quality; suffering provides information and ultimately offers self-knowledge. T.M.: Oh yes, absolutely. And then that makes it possible to live completely. Part of you is dead if you don 't remember. Part of your mind is vacant, so it is not complete. So the pain is worth it because the healing is great. A.C.: Beloved's arrival stimulates Sethe's memory. T.M.: Sorne ofit. Paul D is there befare, and at least, Sethe begins to think about certain things ... the plantation ... Beloved comes after Paul D and she is Iike a catalyst. She opens up everybody's vulnerability. A.C.: I see Beloved asan individual character, al so as a ghost-I think she could be bothbut also as a representative of ali the women that went through 'the middle passage' whose stories have remained silent. T.M.: She is a child, a girl. But she is also the men and the women ... ali those people. When she tries to remember what that slave ship was like, she remembers the man lying on top of her, the woman that she was identified with ... ali these myri ad people. But in addition to that, she retains the image of the women working in the community, how vital they are as the repository of history, in a certain domesticated sense of what a community and a family is . A.C.: Beloved makes her presence be felt from the very beginning of the novel, but it is only when Paul D. tries to ch ase her spirit away, that she achieves a body. T.M.: Yes, before, she is justa presence that they summon; they want h er there. Denver needs her, Sethe needs her, even Baby Suggs candeal with what is happening in the house-which may be their own invention. They long forthe baby that was killed, but Paul D doesn' t, and he exorcises it. So, there is no room for the imaginative presence and then, Beloved is incarnate. She takes flesh after Paul D gets rid ofher and has to become a person. It's like history moving inside the house, sitting down at the table, so now you cannot avoid it. It's not playful any Jonger. A.C.: Can the fact that Be loved has 'new skin' be associated with the 'birth' of memory ('soft and new') for the Afro-American people? T.M.: It could be. I wanted a baby in human body, without pastor future, having been killed so young and al so to be the embodiment of the past. It is indeed what she says, a brand new segment of th e history that h as been unlived and unattended to. And al so fresh, and therefore, beca.use it is so new and fresh, much more painful to handle. A.C.: Can the fact that she has this demonic quality be associated with t he painful aspect of remembering? T.M.: Oh yes, not only wi th the painful process of remembering but with the act itse lf . She was violently disremembered. It's not that she wasn't mourned as a child in the metaphorical quality of the book, but it's like the history of 'the middle passage.' Ali those people who threw themselves into the sea had been violently ignored, no one praised them, nobody knows their names, nobody can remember them, nor in the Toni Morrison 's Beloved: ... 'and the past achievedflesh' 107 U nüed Sta tes nor in A frica. Millions of people disappeared without a trace and there is not one monument, anywhere, to pay homage to th em because they never arrived safely on shore. So it 's like a whole nation that is under the sea. A nameless, violent extennination. A.C.: Can her redeeming quality be associated to the fact that she provokes understanding of history among the people that are around her? T.M.: Oh, yes. She makes them face up to the things they have been avoiding. They have, in a sense, to grow up in her presence. Her physical presence is so persistent that she cannot be ignored any more, so they have to deal with her. A.C.: On the ship there is no air, no water and no space to move in. This brings echoes of death, of a living death. Were you trying to establish a close association between death and the ship? T.M.: Between the ship and the grave. When she talks to Sethe or Denver, they think she has come back from the grave. And they ask how it was like over there. Her Janguage fits in to their conception oflife after death. And since it was a death, a grave, a dying place, I wanted the association between the phy sica ljourney on the slave ships and the grave to be very strong. A.C.: Can you talk about the water imagery in the novel? Sethe breaks water when she gives birth to Denver, and her bladder 'fills to capacity' when she meets Beloved (maybe as a reenacting of a birth ritual). Beloved comes out of the river and her 'mother' jumped into the ocean ... 'the middle passage' is also associated with water. There is a recurren! water image. T.M.: Well, I wanted Sethe obviously to be reexperiencing birth and, as you say, she loses her water when she sees Beloved. The other part has to do with the African conviction regarding reencarnation. It is believed that, particularly, children or young people who die uneasily retum in forms of members of your family and come out of the water. The water is in teresting but also a dangerous and a haunted place because spirits dwell in it. A.C.: Sethe is also a woman who was abandoned by h er mother and she remembers her as a woman in the field. So she has also experienced the loss of her mother. T.M.: Yes, and that makes her fierce with her children. The fact that she was abandoned, or that she feels abandoned -s he doesn't know her mother-, destroys a normal parent-child relation. Her horror is that, maybe, her mother was trying to escape without her. When she has children, she is excessively ferocious about keeping them with her, a kind of reaction to her own feelings of abandonment. So it makes her gesture, her infanticide, much more powerful, because she thinks that she can kili her children, and kili herself, and go to a place of eternity where ali could be together again without pain. Death would not be termination, it is justa change into something else. But she is impacted by the feeling of abandonment. A.C.: When Sethe was living on the plantation she did not ha ve other women to 108 Angels Carabí talk to, women who would tell her how to take care of her children. Her impulse of killing Beloved comes out of a woman who is used to taking decisions on her own. Would it have been different if Sethe hada community? T.M.: Oh yes, she would have been different if she had hada community. The problem of the house at the moment is that it is isolated. When Sethe commits the act , the community rejects her. She is uncivilized in the woman sense of the word. She doesn 't know how to negociate ce rtain leve Is of pain beca use she has never been advised. If Baby Suggs been there, she would have understood her heartbreaking, everytime she had to tie her children to the well so she could work and watch them, make sure they weren't hurt. Sethe has Jes s than a month ofneighborhood life, that' s all she ever knew of a community of her peers. Her independence is such that, when she leaves the house after the act, the women recognize that solitary excessive pride and reject her. It 's only when Set he feels so beaten down and that excess has gone the other way, that they come and rescue her. A.C.: Sethe is the only child conceived in love; she was named after her father. Her name is one of her own, a name that was conceived out of a loving relations hip; like Denver, who gets her name from Amy Den ver of Boston. Can you talk about th e relevance of having a name of your own, given with !ove and tenderness? Slaves did not have names of their own. T.M.: Did not use to. If they carne with their own name s they were ignored. People ju st named them anything they wanted to. Their purpose was to keep the families separated in order to control them, and gave the slaves the last name of the master, as property. If I give you another name, then 1 own you; this is why Black people had nicknames, names that they gave themselves. Starnp Paid is a very classical example. He 's bom Joshua and he does something that is memorable. He changes bis own name to Stamp Paid. Paul D' s name for instance -ali these lettersis a sign of contempt. So it' s rare and very delicious to ha ve a name that is given to you by a parent, based on a !ove relationship or maybe given by somebody in your family. Then, yo u eam your name and it's notju st a name of a white person attached to you. Baby Suggs is another example. Her name is Janey Whirlow but Jane y she does not recognize, and Whirlow was the name of whoever owned her; but she was married to a man named Suggs and he used to call her Baby Suggs. So that 's her name. It's her resistance. A.C.: When Sethe tells her story to Denver and Beloved she recovers her Ma 'a m 's language which she thought she had forgotten. Can you talk about the relevance of recovering the or iginal language? T. M. : It is a suggestion that ali these languages, including cultures that had been wiped out, can be recovered only through an active effort of the will. Sethe is in fact telling a story and, by narrating it, she so rt of talks herself in to being. She doesn 't talk about the past ever, she just wams Denver, but her daughter does not want to hear either. When Paul D comes, she begins to think a little bit about the past; when Beloved appears, she has to tell them more, a little more each time and, suddenly, certain things Toni Morrison 's Beloved: ... 'and the past achieved flesh' 109 from her childhood just come back; and even though she can't really remember the language, she remembers what it said. She remembers what she understood and that becomes a reclamation of a past. 1 don 't know how many people, except maybe Sixo, could remember the language. 1 don't know how many Afro-Americans could speak these other languages. That disruption of history is very very painful but we can reclaim ourselves by narrative, by active effort, by telling. A.C.: Something which is very interesting is that, even though Sethe does not remember the language, the African past is unconsciously being retained through the image of the dancing antelope that she relives before giving birth to Denver. This image is associated with Sethe's moth er's dance. So part of the African past is transmitted through images. T.M.: Through images and with the help ofBeloved's presence. IfBeloved had not shown up, could this eve r have been remembered by her? It would ha ve been Iost. But the past comes back. Beloved is the past and she comes back. So Sethe can gather bits and pieces of a Iife when she was a little girl. 1 think sh e's lucky because she is made to remember by herself. It would be interesting if she could pass this on to Denver. But 1 have the feeling that Denver goes out to college and forgets about it ali (Toni Morrison and myse lf laugh heartily). A.C.: Africa is seen as a place where women gathered flowers in freedom and played in the long grass before the white men arrived. Jt is freedom that brings the idea of Africa as a lost paradise. T.M.: Yes, that's right. It was theirs. Whateverthe difficulties were, they were 'their' difficulties and not somebody else's. No one could possibly tell what the place would ha ve been like ifthe white men would ha ve neverarrived there. Yo u don 't know it because it was beaten up soear ly. If they had b een Ieft alone, maybe they would have stayed agricultura!. It may be a little too romantic to think about Africa as a kind of Eden, a place before the fall, before co rruption, the cradle of humanit y. And sure enough, it was a place where there were confrontations, but whatever it was, it was not a conquered place where other people's imagination began to work on it, instead of their own imagination. But neverthe le ss, what she remembers before she was captured is a picture of something that was community, harvesting. Something pleasant and without fear. A.C.: Sethe experiences her husba nd's lo ss as well as her so ns' loss. Yet these losses seem Iess than that of her mother and daughter. Is there an indication that the bonds betw ee n mothers and daughters are stronger than the relations between mothers and sons? T.M .: Well, she doesn 't know whether Halley is living ordead. He could always be possibly alive. The loss of her sons is painful, but they are boys and boys always Ieave, anyway. But the fact is that she hit the boys with the shovel and cut the baby girl's throat. I could have made the baby a boy. So 1 am not sure that 1 intended to say anything special about the bonds between mothers and their sons or daughters. 110 Ange/s Carabf A.C.: Sethe's sense of guilt tums her into Beloved's victim and their roles reverse. Does Sethe feel that she deserves to be forgiven by Beloved? Can she? T.M.: No, not by Beloved! (Toni Morri so n laughs). No , she is insatiable. She co uld never give her enough. She represents 350 years of indifference so it would take her 350 years to fill her up. Sethe gives her life to her to the exclusion of Den ver. lt' s herself she cannot forgive. She tried very hard to say: 'T his is the ri ght thing to do.' And she was not repentant at all but, in the face of that child, not the neighbor s', not Paul D' s, but in the face ofthat child, she would have to explain, and explain and she could ne ver explain enough. 1t' s herse lf she can 't forgive; so now s he is not so sure of her deed. With Beloved's presence she feels happy and is able to tell herself: 'See, she carne back, and I don 't ha ve to explain a thing.' She is the one left to forgive herself. Her Iover can 't give her that. A.C.: I don 't find this sense of guilt in Eva-in your novel Su/a -when she burns her son alive. What 's the difference? T.M.: He is nota baby. He is grown and he is going to be a burden to him se lf and to her. And Eva is very arrogant, she names everybody (Toni Morrison laughs). A.C.: At the end, when Sethe tries to kill Mr . Bodwin it seems to me that she exorcises the past addressing her anger against Mr. Bodwin, instead of against her children as she did in the past. Does th is reflect a change of attitude in Black people -instead of self-mutilation, addressing the anger at the source of th eir misery? T.M.: Maybe, but she can't kill her daughter a second time (Toni Morrison laughs). Shejustdirects her fury at the person whom she thinks is going to destroy her . She is in !o ve with her daughter now; if she !oves her daughter, the woman Beloved, she loves herself. Then s he can tum her head and direct her anger at the so urce which she thinks is the ca use of her misery, rather than escape it by doing something viol en t. A.C.: Sethe must co nfront her past to achieve self-knowledge to save her be st thing which is herself. When this past is assumed Beloved can disappear. Would you agree with this? T.M .: Beloved has no place there now. Sethe is now going to concentrate on taking ca re ofher self, the beloved that is inside her which is her. 'S h e' is the beloved, not the child. The past is retumed and buried again or gone. A.C.: Is the past gone or assumed, incorporated? T.M.: The book, at the end, assumes it is gone. Sethe doesn 't, maybe. The last part of it suggests th at they w _ill not get rid of th e whole thing. It' s there, somewhere. Th e least gesture, the least look. I don't know, maybe Sethe will be able to put both things together. The past, admit what she did, and go on from there. Maybe I' m more optimistic about her than about the whole race. I was traveling around the United Stat es after Beloved carne out. Everywhere that I would go, there was a picture of a confederate soldier on a horse in the middle of th e town. Everybody has a monument to every li tt le thing ... there is a huge wall to ali the ve terans ... b ut there is not one bench Toni Morrison 's Beloved: ... 'and the post achievedflesh' 111 where we ca n sit down and think about those people. There is now sorne effort to do that, but it 's like you don 't ha ve to pay respect to your ancestors. They are just waiting there for you to ask them to do something but if you don't know them, don't honor them, don 't think of them or mourn them, or praise them, then you are like a cripple. A public monument or a prívate monument is needed, not just to the ancestors -grandpare nt s, great-grandparents-whom we know, but to ali those we don 't. That's a big gap, a disjunction in the history. A.C.: Is this then 'a story to pass on '? But if it is, then wouldn 't the burden of the past unable the possibility to live the present? T.M.: lt 's both. If you dwell, if you just dwell on the past you can't go forward. If you confront th epas tthere is a possibility to move on. So Isaid that this is not 'astory to pass on' but it's like a warning to Black people. This is nota story to pass on, to give to the next one, but the irony is that it is nota story to pa ss by. So it has both meanings. A.C.: Ali right. Can you talkabout the role ofthe community inBeloved? In fact, it is the community who increases Sethe's isolation. T.M.: The community makes judgments. It 's like a chorus. The survival of the individual is dependent on the community. Sethe makes a valiant effort to live without the com munity. And she can't. They reject her too because she's behaving in a very proud way. She is saying to the community: '1'11 ge t along without you' and they know she's saying this, so they !et her try. And then, when she is beaten down enough, they don 't kick her out; by and large they support her. Baby Suggs was a very big part of the community. When she dies, Sethe is ali alone leading the solitary life of a widow. This is pride of outrageous exaggeration, so the commu nit y lets h er know that they think she is proud, too proud. When Denver finally lea ves the house, it recognizes that she can 't do every thing by herself and then, they know that there is no pride. Sethe leams the lesson and makes it pos sib le for the community to come. They exorcise what they considered the demon ofthe past which is that what has happened to her in the past has hurt her beyond enduran ce. Maybe they have a sort of thermometer (Toni laughs) to measure how much misery a per son can take (we both lau gh heartily). A.C.: Are you implying then that the community does not reject her for her <leed but because of her pride? T.M.: The community <loe s not reject her because of the killing of the child. They think that it is a bit outrageous but this does not cause their rejection. It is how she responded to that murder. She did not come home and weep and say: 'Oh my God, look at what I <lid!. ' She didn't say: 'Help me.' She didn't say: 'I don'tknow why I <lid that.' She just walked out of the house with her head up, went to jail, got taken out, carne home, got a job and went on living like that. And even when she comes out of the house, they are watching her. They sing but they don 't ha ve any words. The y recognize the beginning of that arrogancy and that keeps them away from her. 112 Ange/s Carab{ A.C.: Let's moveon toPaul D. He brings thepasttoSethe 's house and, in a way, he redeems her of a haunted past, leads her in to the present. At the same time he ' s helping himself because he 's been wandering for so long. T.M .: Yes, he's been going from place to place and when he finds Sethe he can help her, he can inhabit herbody, fill it, which is what you don't do when you are very busy, when you are tough and independent. And at the same time, he finds a home, a place to be. Because they have shared memories, their past is very much alike, it 's a segment of their Iives that nobody else knows but them. A.C.: Let 's talk a bit about Baby Suggs. A basic sense of wholeness is achieved through Baby Suggs' celebration of the body. She reconciles the disassociation between body and mind. The people that went through the 'middle passage' were trying to Ieave th eir bodies behind. Beloved feels that she is dismembering herself as well as Sethe when Paul D is bathing her. T.M.: You know, this disassociation ofthe mind from the body is a very special western notion; the idea that there is the mind/the spirit and then, the body, which will betray you. The body has to be closed down, or el se, th ere is sin and contradiction. But in other cultures, people dance and don 't feel the contradictions of the body beca use it is not related to sexual sin. 1 don't mean they don't have regulations about sex but there is a fuller acceptance of the body. And the devastation of slavery was not that explosion and implosion of the family, but also the disassociation of the self, the breaking of the self into bits. Paul D runs around the country trying very hard not to Iove anyone because it is too much. A.C.: Yes, Ella says: 'Don 't love nothing.' And also in the book, fear for lo ss generates a hunger for !ove. Beloved is so hungry for love that she destroys Sethe. 1 think that you are also implying that if you become possessive about the person you !ove you end up destroying him or her . T.M.: One ofthe major, major, profound devastation of oppression is how !ove is distorted. If you love something too much you' ll kill it. Or you love it too little because you are afraid you can lo se it. You don't enjoy, you do itslyly, like when Paul D is in prison; hecan't eve n !ove natur e,j ust a little bit ofthe moon because ifhe would !ove it too much, he would lose it, and you need a little bit of leftover for the next step. So you become emotionally st in gy, aesthetically stingy for fear that it too, like everything else, will be taken away. Pain affects one's personal life, like in abused children or whole nations that ha ve been tormented and then, it is very difficult to start believing, feeling or trusting, because you can' t go through that pain, so you ju st withhold the emotion. A.C.: Freedom meant the po ssibility to love. T.M.: Yes. Exactly. A.C.: You seldom include the presence of white people in your books. In Beloved there are Amy and Mr. and Mrs. Garner who are understanding people within the limitations of belonging to a slavery society. There are al so Schoolteacher and the Toni Morrison's Beloved: .. . 'a nd the pa st achievedflesh' 11 3 nephews who embody an ultimate form of evil. So you are very careful presenting a variety of people. T.M.: Slavery meant lots of los ses and lots of prohibitions. But you know, there were many people, white people, who hated it and thought thatslavery was diminishing to them. They felt as if they were less human and that they were called upon to be hateful. And there were others that had a good time, who loved it because they could feel powerful; in orderto continue living and doing what they wanted, they had to make su re that the people they were abusing were not really people . There were Quakers who were anti-slavery. there were lots of people who just refused to own th em and looked down on people who did. Sometimes they bought slaves to free them, or evento insure th at no one el seco uld buy them. People do ali sorts ofthings and sorne ofth em are fine and noble. Mr. Bodwin was the apogee of what the abolitionists would be like, spending a lot of time, a lot of money. a lot of efforts to miti ga te those circumstances. Whereas somebody like Schoolteacher ju st hada go od tim e and felt that he was doing God's work. A.C.: He is presented as a very rational person who studies the slaves' behavior from a scientific point of view. T.M.: Yes. You see the Age ofEnlightenment was at the sa me time, the age of racis m. In the United States, the Constitution is full of ali these wonderful things about freedom and equality but , at the same time, they were able to accommodate slavery. There is this fundamental co ntradiction in l 8th century philosophical thought because the same people who were going on about Christian !ove and the beatitude and the ri ghts ofman, were also slave masters who didn't carry their philosophy ali the way through. 1 use the name of Schoolteacher because racism is scholarly pursued. Racism was taught in theology. in anthropology, in biology. in the Darwinian theory of evolution ... was taught in everything. Ali that was in the middle of what the West calls the Age of En li ghtenm en t, political enlightenment, the ri se of the individual, the innate, natural rights of man, so th ey had accomodated something that would mean its own destructio n. Therefore, they had to make special provisions for the people that they did not want to be associated with. This would mean Blacks and women. They were ta lk ing about the rights of man and they certainly didn 't mean black s, they meant white men. The white men distribut ed the rights to themselves except for white people who didn't have property and co uldn't vote either. So the poor people, the Black people, the Na ti ve American people and the women had nothing to do with what they were establishing at the foundation of the country. Somebody like Schoolteacher in 1850 or 1855 would be very mu ch in line with the mainstream thought. Th e aberration, the eccentric one would be Mr. Bodwin. A.C.: And the whole thing is even mor e pemicious because it was socially accepted. T.M.: Exactly. A.C.: Can you talk about the role of music in Beloved? Paul D is a singing man,