Review: Toni Morrison's Beloved
- Stephanie Evelyn
- Jun 17, 2020
- 5 min read
Hi folks,
In true Stephanie Writes style, I’m coming atcha with another sporadic blog post after weeks of silence. But, after everything that’s happened in the last few weeks, it’s evident that silence can no longer be tolerated.
I don’t need to give you a refresher on the events that have happened in the past three weeks. You should know their names. Say them.
Breona Taylor. George Floyd. Ahmaud Arbery. Tony McDade. Riah Milton. Dominique Fells. Nina Pop. Chantel Moore. Oluwatoyin Salau. D’Andre Campbell. Jason Collins. Stuart Andrews. Eisha Hudson. Everett Patrick. Regis Korchinski-Paquet.
You should know that all the people attached to these names have died at the hands of racial violence. You should also know they’ve all happened within the last three months, many of them by the hands and weapons of the police. And what’s even more terrifying is how many names we don’t know about. How many Black and Indigenous folks have gone missing in the last three weeks alone? How many First Nations women have been missing for decades?
We know that the system we live in is fundamentally functioning for one type of skin colour, one gender, one sexuality, one type of able body. And we know that it will do anything to protect itself, even if that means assaulting journalists and firing rubber bullets into a crowd of non-violent protestors.
Although this blog post certainly is not trying to function as a history lesson, it is important to remember that these systemic issues, in both the United States and Canada, are in a direct line with how the countries were built. These systems are supposed to displace BIPOC in order to keep that one type of person in positions of power. So, it’s time to pull up.
But where do we go from here? What do we do with this anger? How do we transform it into sustainable change?
Nothing infuriated me more than hearing one of my white male peers say, and I’m paraphrasing, “Yeah, it sucks. But I don’t think there’s anything we can really do about it.” Don’t be that person. There is always something to do. For instance, as many have recommended, read books by Black authors (amongst your adamant e-mails and calls to government officials in demand of justice for all the names listed above).
And since this is a space that reviews books, I’d like to talk about one that I keep seeing being recommended by infographics on Black authors.
Toni Morrison’s Beloved is one of the most incredible books I’ve had the opportunity to read, which is I suppose why so many have been recommending it, and I’d like to talk about both the book and the author.
A little background on Toni Morrison: she was a graduate from Howard University, who completed her Master’s at Cornell and went on to edit for Random House for a few years before turning to the creative word full time. In fact, at her memorial, Ta-Nehisi Coates remarked how he was inspired to begin writing by one of the first novels that Morrison edited for Random House, The Black Book.
Throughout her lifetime, she won over 35 awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her canon is vast, and the works themselves are some of the most dense and powerful our generation has ever witnessed.
Which of course brings us to Beloved itself. The novel tells of a family that escapes their lives as slaves in Kentucky, only to be met with the same amount of hardships in Cincinnati, Ohio.
The main characters are Sethe, her partner Paul D, her daughter Denver, her motherin-law-, Baby Suggs, and the mysterious young girl who appears from the river, Beloved, who is quickly realized as the embodiment of Sethe’s young infant that she killed shortly after giving birth to her. The book is actually based off of the real story of Margaret Garner, who was so terrified of her child living in a world with slavery, that she made the incredibly heart-wrenching decision to take the life of her own child rather than watch her suffer. I won’t reveal the ending, but I will say that it does not give you answers, just as the whole book doesn’t either. Just as real life rarely does, too.
More than anything, what I’d like to say about this novel is that Morrison does not write to easily present her words and thoughts. Nothing about this book is simple, nothing about this book is there for education purposes. Famously, Toni Morrison has explicitly stated that her goal is to write without the implicit expectation to make her works presentable to a white audience. Morrison, in Beloved and throughout her works, creates Black characters that do not have nor need any mediation, and presents them as unapologetic in their identity.
I’ll say it again: this is not an easy, light read, and you’ll likely to have to read it more than once. Amongst the many powerful themes throughout the book, Morrison tackles the huge question of what the embodiment of trauma, violence, and the past would look and act like if it were a human. What does her sexuality look like? How does she speak? What are her hobbies? Her hopes? How does her family respond to it?
I would argue that Morrison does not shy away from LGBTQ+ representation, either. I spoke for twenty-five minutes in my class on representations of slavery in U.S. literature that both Paul D and Denver show evidence of same-sex attraction through their connection to trees, but that’s just one Literature student’s rant. It is also something I continue to grapple with, because as I said, nothing about the book is presented as truth and is instead mediated through the experience of trauma. Every sentence seems to aim to displace the reader, just as the trauma of slavery consistently displaces Morrison’s characters.
Nonetheless, there is a reason this book is recommended by every company’s “anti-racist book list.” Yes, it is hard to read, both in the sense that the diction is guarded, and that the subject matter is painful. But does that mean you shouldn’t dedicate your time to it? Absolutely not. Because, just as the book is difficult, so is the work of anti-racism. Just as the readers of this book constantly learn new things by revisiting it, so too do those who remain open and listening to each voice that adds to the movement. I’m certainly not saying that this book is the voice of the movement. That’s neither my place to say that, nor my opinion. But what I am saying is that, if you want to do some real work on your perceptions of what Black trauma looks and feels like, this book is a great place to start.
You know well that there’s no need for me to review this book. It’s accolades speak for themselves! Just go read it! And in between reading it, check out this comprehensive document and do what you can, when you can.
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