How Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” Redefined Memory

What is Beloved to Toni Morrison, not just the novel but the character and the concept?

In my reading, the driving event of the novel is the arrival of Paul D, a long-forgotten (or suppressed?) reminder of slavery at Sweet Home. He inserts himself both domestically and sexually into 124, Sethe’s isolated shell. It’s only after this point that Beloved appears, physical and eventually all-consuming.

“The shadows of three people still [holding] hands” that Sethe sees after a day at the carnival is a watershed moment for her mental state. What we get with Paul D is a trigger of memories, painful and vivid and uncontrollable.

“Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.”

Morrison creates a new word in Beloved: rememory. The way she uses it, rememory seems to be a noun rather than a verb. So my question is, what’s the difference between rememory and memory?

In a narrow sense, rememory can refer to traumatic memory. No matter how far Sethe goes, the ravaging effects of slavery will follow her. It exists in her day-to-day life, in the food she eats, in the people around her.

But if this is the only meaning of rememory, what is Beloved then? In a way, she’s also a form of traumatic memory for Sethe. Yet, what haunts Sethe is not the act of murdering baby Beloved, but what she could’ve become in a world without slavery, in a world where Sethe was able to fully be a mother to her. It’s because Sethe knows this world doesn’t exist that she murders Beloved.

However this doesn’t go far enough for me because it would only suggest that Sethe would prefer her children to be dead than subjects of slavery. I think it’s important to link the concept of rememory with Sethe’s sense of burden for raising the next generation.

Sethe knows that the fate of slaves is to be forgotten. If you are treated no better than a cow, than who will remember you? Where, in death, will you live on?

“Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place — the picture of it — stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think if, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.”

Sethe’s answer is the mind, in rememory. White people can claim her body, her milk, her labor, but Sethe seems to believe that by murdering Beloved and burning her body, she could forever keep her baby safe within the warmth of her mind.

She’s wrong, of course. The mind is unstable, and it’s impossible from keeping memories from mixing and changing. It’s seem that only in Morrison’s novel, in the form of words, can the legacy of slavery be controlled and understood.

With the success of Black Panther in mind, I think Morrison’s novel is vital because it highlights the troubled relationship between past and present for the African diaspora. Killmonger feels abandoned, unloved, and most importantly forgotten. Is there a difference between Beloved who increasingly consumes Sethe’s life, and Killmonger who sought to reign over Wakanda? How does the history of colonialism turn diaspora against each other?

If you enjoy my writing, please consider leaving a tip on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/xichen