The Fatal Plague of Humanity: White Rage

Reading Toni Morrison is more relevant than ever.

I still remember the deadly silence in the classroom while we were thinking about the question in chief. The professor looked at our faces respectively and repeated her words by emphasizing each syllable:

“How can you mentally reach to the point that killing your baby is your only choice?”

Literature has long been successful in portraying the historical, political, economic, social, and cultural realities of its time. Many writers have arisen the questions that societies are unable to confront. But, no issue has ever taken an existence like the one placed in Toni Morrison’s Beloved — a problem that sinks in your chest and prevents you from moving. Both physically and emotionally.

Some minutes had passed since our professor demanded an answer. Often somebody was participating in class discussions, but nobody had enough courage, experience, nor imagination to respond to that inquiry. We just couldn’t figure out how it’d be possible to kill our baby. Our imagination, collectively and individually, failed.

While the professor was scanning our faces, my classmate’s mumble broke the silence: “You can’t. You just can’t reach that point.”

I wasn’t sure whether the professor was satisfied with the answer. Her face was difficult to decipher. Yet, her response was an echo in my ears like a solid rock sinking me into the water and taking my breath away:

“Right. You never do. It is your society that reduces you to that point.”

Are we at this point yet? How many lives have to be gone to maneuver from our disgraceful spot? How much suffering do we have to endure?

Beloved is not easy to read, not because of literary devices, fragmented narrative styles, or complex sentence structures. It is the combination of wounds that carries us to the journey of cruelty, inhumanity, pain, and ignorance. It is the blindness that justifies one group’s superiority due to skin colors and brings the world to the catastrophe.

We cannot move after our immersion with the traumatic story of the novel because everything that shackles us to the state of inertia has happened in life.

Toni Morrison, indeed, dedicates her novel to the “Sixty Millions and more,” who died on slave ships and in captivity. Beloved is the monument to reclaim the Black identity, reminding human beings of their social history.

Everything that happened in the history of slavery continues to take place. We do not learn from history, but history repeats itself. George Floyd is not the only victim of blind ignorance.

Will he be the last?

It is complicated to answer because reading Beloved still feels relevant today, although 33 years have passed since its first publication. And reading it weighs us with a burden because we are not even close to the radical change to achieve equality.

Below are three quotes from the novel that show how we are far from the change to become kinder human beings.

“Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” — Toni Morrison

Slavery was a long, cruel, and inhumane part of human history. Slavery was a synonym for people’s meaningless rage, hatred, and disgrace.

In Beloved, the former slaves Sethe and her husband Halle, plan an escape for freedom because of their unfair treatment at the hands of their owners. As a pregnant woman, Sethe has to escape alone, running miles and giving birth to her new daughter on the way.

For the rest of her life, Sethe spends her life as a freed self, but cannot ever claim her freedom. Slavery remains a part of her life — a shackle in her heart handcuffing her to the painful memories: submission, violence, rape, and harassment. As finite as Sethe’s physical injuries seem to be, her mental struggles never cease. Her mind is never at ease, and her heart carries the burden of her traumatic history as a slave.

Slavery breaks our identity, turning the left fragments into painful and unspeakable memories, denied and repressed. Segregation makes it complicated to remake ourselves; therefore, the notion of self becomes sensitive to pin down. Re-possessing, re-naming, and re-owning our identity is hence challenging and detrimental.

We do not need to be chained to be slaves to others. If one captivates our mind, it will be impossible for us to reclaim ourselves — the selves before being enslaved.

Like many others in Black communities, Sethe struggles to build a sense of self after encountering violence, discrimination, and segregation. She is a psychological slave of the disgraceful community.

“But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day.” — Toni Morrison

The feeling we have today will maintain its impact tomorrow, like a load in our chests. Traumatic experiences of the African-Americans continue to shape history. It is this trauma that our world cannot leave behind but also cannot do without.

In Beloved, when Sethe faces the danger of being recaptured and sent back to her slavery life with her children, she kills her daughter. Yeah, a hard pill to swallow.

Being heavily immersed in her past, Sethe cannot spend a day without thinking about her past. Sethe’s murder of her daughter for the sake of protection haunts her, propels her, and erases her hope for the future.

Morrison forms Sethe’s memories in the shape of Beloved, the mysterious young woman who appears on the doorstep of Sethe’s house. Beloved forces Sethe to reconcile those memories repressed in her heart and mind. Beloved makes Sethe realize that the past, however cruel it might be, will never fade away unless Sethe reconciles and buries it.

Her re-memories consume Sethe. She shrinks, suffers, gets numb, and dies slowly.

If an experience contains a trauma linked to the depth of our hearts, it leaves permanent traces. Our re-memories are the traces of what we did, we knew, and we saw. What we witness will be hovering around our subconscious as if the past is always the present. Our history will stay there. Beloved tells how painful slavery is on individual existence. But, the mark it leaves on the national level makes it impossible to breathe and to survive.

So, imagining the next day becomes more challenging when we wake up to the news of George Floyd and many others.

If we cannot imagine the future, this is not life then, but survival.

With world history and the novel’s plotline, questions arise: How can we ever reconcile with the past? Our past killed our children, broke our hopes for a fresh start, and refrained us from public spaces. Our history erased our humanity, love, grace, and kindness. Our testimonials left the cardboards of “I can’t breathe,” in our hands. Hopelessly. How can we breathe tomorrow? How can we remember the past without letting it take possession of ourselves?

“Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed (…) and broke my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.” — Toni Morrison

The terrifying thing related to George Floyd was our reaction. After having seen the news, the only word dropping of our mouth was “again.”

“Again?” we asked instead of “what the hell?”

We had felt rage, sadness, frustration, and hopelessness through our veins. Yet, none was unprecedented.

In Beloved, labor and productivity reduce slaves to their bodies. Marriage among slaves is encouraged so that they can seed more newborns to the White submission.

White folks refer to slaves with cannibalistic traits. Slaves are working and can own nothing. They are beaten, chained, and raped. Even after escaping to freedom, Black folks are segregated in a neighborhood where no white thing exists.

These are what make the novel so successfully realistic. As Georg Lukács states, Beloved represents “social trends and historical forces.” Reading Sethe’s painful experiences are beyond endurance because what happens in the novel is not beyond the realms of reality. It has never been.

It is a never-ending cycle of violence, massacres, and hate. Not a day passes when a White thing doesn’t justify his force against a Black life.

The United States abolished slavery upon the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865. But, the internalized segregation continues to happen in the present, accelerating its intensity.

These incidents happen over and over again.

With each video shared on social media, it becomes apparent that the White rage has no reason or sense.

Black lives are exposed to harassment because of the White folks’ ignorance.

Black bodies are reduced to their colors because acceptance of equality is so challenging for the White supremacy.

In 2020, we still have to distinguish between African Americans and European Americans due to mistreatments and hatred.

Martin Luther King helped pass the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Toni Morrison received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. Barack Obama served as a president of the United States from 2009 to 2017.

Nothing has changed. Racism still prevails and haunts us.

So, what is going to be?

Tell us. We lost the last drop of our hope.

We cannot breathe; we merely survive.

To George Floyd and more.

Sources:

• Amoakohene, Tiffany. “The Fire and Rage of Black America Lives Within Me.” Gen, 31 May 2020.
• Dalley, Hamish. “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, Allegorical Aesthetics and Georg Lukacs’ Theory of Realism” Narrative is the Essence of History: Essays on the Historical Novel. Cambridge Scholars, 2012.
• Morrison, Toni. Beloved. London: Vintage, 1997.