Review: Beloved by Toni Morrison

More than halfway through this novel, the enslaved man Sixo learns a lesson about words and power. He’s been stealing food from his enslavers but insists that it is not really theft, because the stolen food will help him work harder and produce more. Despite his display of the warped logic that the system of slavery produces, his masters disagree, and Sethe, the woman at the heart of Beloved, learns that, “Definitions belonged to the definers — not the defined”.

At the beginning there is the word, and so is it in the depths of slavery. Sweet Home, the Kentucky farm where Sethe and Sixo are enslaved along with four others, is notable because its owners call the enslaved men “men”, not “boys” as is the dehumanising convention. Sethe and the others come to see Sweet Home as exactly that, a haven in a land of horror, where they are treated more kindly than elsewhere than in the South, small-yet-immense mercies. But such fragile peace shatters upon the death of their benevolent master and the terror descends on Sweet Home, driving Sethe to flee north across the Ohio River to the periphery of Cincinnati, where the novel opens. “Without [the master’s] life each of theirs fell to pieces,” Morrison writes, “Now ain’t that slavery or what is it?”

It’s here in Cincinnati we meet Sethe in 1873, 18 years after her flight from Sweet Home. Her mother-in-law is dead, her two sons have left, it’s just her and 18-year-old daughter Denver at the house. But also a haunting, someone leaving their handprints in the cake, smashing mirrors, abusing the dog, keeping visitors away. Shortly after Sethe arrived in Ohio her other baby daughter died and Sethe could purchase only the word Beloved (as in “dearly” so) for her tombstone. The circumstances of the baby’s death and the identity of the ghost are questions that drive much of this novel. Soon Paul D, another man enslaved on Sweet Home, arrives, and then a mysterious young woman calling herself Beloved shows up sitting on a tree stump in the backyard. These happenings cause characters to remember pasts they have been striving to forget. Beloved slips between memory and present as if there’s no boundary, the reliving power of trauma. “If a house burns down, it’s gone,” Sethe says, “But the place — the picture of it — stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world.”

Beloved is a story of being haunted and overcoming haunting. Despite Morrison’s unforgettable depiction of the experience of enslavement and its destruction of meaning, her real focus is what happens after. How can people who have experienced the most abject things that can be done to a person go on? “You got two feet, Sethe, not four,” is among the worst of things said to Sethe in the novel, and not coincidentally perhaps the connection Beloved most vividly evoked for me is Hayley Singer’s recent essay collection on the slaughter of animals. In it, Singer describes the concept of abandonment:

Though predicated on the production of mass death, which is a form of mass loss, industrial slaughter cannot be described in the language of loss. Those born into the system are endlessly replaced, endlessly replaceable, and can only be written in the language of abandonment, which is the flip side to loss, or to getting lost, which speaks to the shadow potential of being found, rescued, traceable, countable.

It’s an idea that shadows Beloved and surfaces most shatteringly in its final pages. Abandonment is totalising, all consuming, if you can’t be found then the only response is survival, and we say that survival is hardly living. And what was the Atlantic slave trade, the trade that saw nearly 13 million Africans transported across the ocean, perhaps 2.4 million killed on the journey alone, but the production of mass death? In Beloved Morrison personalises the farm economics of endless replacement that slavery rested on.

It all comes back to the word. As in Morrison’s Song Of Solomon, the word is both tool of oppression and of liberation. Morrison’s prose is so lithe it spins through tenses, perspectives, and even turns to poetry in an astonishing chapter from the perspective of Beloved herself. Her creativity is as boundless as the her characters are enslaved. Morrison’s novels invest words with greater power than any others. It’s in the singing voices of her characters, “the sound that broke the back of words”, that just maybe she finds a way through the atrocity of the past, turning beloved from something like a curse into, at last, a plea, a command.

Gay rating: not gay.