Beloved (Part 1)
(Originally discussed on 6/2/20)
Zoom link: https://duke.zoom.us/j/
I'd like to hold space for conversations about the murders and subsequent protests that have taken place over the last week or so. It's important for us to articulate our feelings about the last week so that we can identify the links between our isolated emotional responses, the structural/historical causes of our current situation, and our collective responses to yet another incident which seeks to confirm the disposability of Black life in America. All three of these seemingly-distinct events must constantly be in open and honest conversation with each other in order to ensure that we are not merely reacting to or following the script of a Western/phallocentric/white American grammar, but rather developing new modes of relation and speech which exceed the oppressive imaginaries offered to us by our current political and economic systems. Trauma and guilt can operate as disciplinary regimes that are equally effective as race, gender, and sexuality. Our bodies remember terror, both when we are the ones inflicting and experiencing it. Trauma, like race, can become a code through which we become accustomed to seeing, reading, and interpreting other people and ideas. However, trauma, unlike race, cannot always be seen on the body. Often, trauma and its accompanying personalized disciplinary regime ("I don't go there because..." "I don't wear that because..." "That person can't really care for me because...") must be made visible through therapy, conversations with trusted friends, or, for Morrison in Beloved, storytelling.
We never tell stories only for ourselves, though the contours of the stories we choose to tell are always shaped by our deepest desires and fears. We tell stories for and of the dead, partially to honor them, and partially to educate future generations. Stories about the dead perform a kind of magic-- how can you be there, lying eternal beneath a tombstone, but also here, in my mouth and in the mind of my listener? The act of telling stories breaks what we thought was one into two--or three, or four, or more as the story develops its own unique variations over time. That internal variation or difference is the site of a story's--and the dead's--supreme power: both have the capacity to show the living that we were never just one, but always at least two.
The dead we remember in our stories become "our people," our ancestors. In telling the truth of them, we often end up figuring out how to tell the truth of ourselves--what is this particular haunting trying to tell me? Why can I not give up this ghost, even when the act of reliving its memories is profoundly painful? The experience of being haunted or traumatized can be overwhelming, terrifying, frustrating, and deeply isolating--nobody knows your pain but you. And yes, that might be true, but telling stories of the dead teaches us that two or more things can be true at the same time. Nobody else has lived your life but you--that is the condition and pitfall of being human. But, when storytelling functions as an act of witnessing, we are able to experience the truth of ourselves through the eyes and life of another. Witnessing begets storytellers; storytellers beget ancestors; ancestors beget a community; a community begets a grammar. We come to recognize our capacity to contain and communicate difference through telling stories about the dead and exchanging earnest testimonies with the living. What if difference was the grammar or foundation of Truth instead of sameness? That would require storytelling and ancestor-making to exist as a collective effort, as individuals continually interrupt the narrative to insert their experience, perspective, or critique. And if we don't like the story being told or the ancestors being worshipped, we can throw them out and start anew. The stories, ancestors, and language we use to speak to each other must always strive to reflect and confirm our various visions of the future.
This is why Morrison states in the Forward that "to render enslavement as a personal experience, language must get out of the way" (xix). The "language" that Morrison is referring to is really the white, Western, phallocentric grammar that Irigaray and Spillers constantly critique. The fact that language is assumed to be reducible to phallocentrism/whiteness is a major problem for Morrison in Beloved and many of her other critical and creative works. How could one even think to write a novel like Beloved? Morrison found the inspiration for Beloved during the early 1970s when she edited a nonlinear collection on Black American history called The Black Book. The collection contained a small newspaper clipping from 1856 about an enslaved woman named Margaret Garner, who successfully killed one of her children (and attempted to kill the others) in order to prevent their return to slavery. Here's a link to the original clipping. When asked by a journalist if she killed her daughter because she was "excited to madness," Garner replied, "No, I was as cool as I now am; and would much rather kill them at once, and thus end their sufferings, than have them taken back to slavery, and be murdered by piece-meal." The exchange between the journalist and Garner is an example of the dangers of a mode of storytelling which does not allow for internal difference, disagreement, or multiple truths. The journalist (a white man) assumes that it could only be madness that would drive a mother to kill her child; to him, there is nothing in the world that could be so painful, degrading, and traumatizing that a parent would commit infanticide in order to protect their child from its horror. The journalist has never had to live in a world in which murder was not outside the grammar of love. Or rather, the journalist and Garner live in the exact same world, but the journalist refuses to witness Garner's motivations for her actions and to allow himself to be changed by her story. The journalist ends his article with a halfhearted plea for abolition that demonstrates his ignorance not only of the pervasiveness of slavery and racism as disciplinary regimes for Black and white Americans, but also his total unwillingness to confront the structural reasons why he and Garner have very different definitions of parental love. He writes, "These slaves (as far as I am informed) have resided all their lives within sixteen miles of Cincinnati. We are frequently told that Kentucky slavery is very innocent. If these are the fruits, where it exists in a mild form, will some one tell us what we may expect from the more objectionable features? But comments are unnecessary."
The journalist's final sentence-- "but comments are unnecessary"--is just as ineffective as the white people making blackout posts on Instagram and clogging up the black lives matter hashtag. The silence of white people, even the ones who think they are "good" (like Jason in my story) is heavy, blunt, and deafening. Silence is a vacuum which rushes to be filled with racialized assumptions. When you do not speak, the American grammatical regime will speak for you, appropriating your skin to prove the truth of its ubiquitous power. Big Brother needn't tune in because the airwaves are silent in response to crushed airways...
It's only through the act of speaking--including trying, failing, sounding dumb, and getting read--that white people will learn how their sites of internal difference are repressed and made unspeakable by their assumed allegiance to whiteness. Whiteness itself is a kind of trauma--the story, the ancestors, the language all look and sound like you and reflect what someone told you was reality. But the price--in the form of a commitment to obedience, conformity, and repression--is steep. Thinking of whiteness and phallocentrism as grammars can help to elucidate the direness of this condition--if being white and male are supposedly the prerequisites for recognizable speech, why aren't you saying anything? Why don't you say what you want? But then what do you want...
Tonight, I'd like for us to consider these questions as we discuss Morrison's work: Why do we do what we do? What do we do? Who do we do it with? How do we go about doing it together?
Also, I'd like to share Omolola's recent creative work, which began as a wonderfully creative and genre-bending final project for a class in the literature department. It is titled, "A Portrait of Reality." Link to Youtube: https://youtu.be/
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