When reading Beloved for the first time I was stunned by this lyric tale, and by the author’s chorus of African American women’s voices, I instinctively knew that a heretofore unknown to me, tradition of Black women’s writing existed. I recognized the way the story was told. It was the shape of my mother’s storytelling — a simple story becoming increasingly complex, mythic, beyond solution, yet teaching me a lesson I needed to know. Not only women of different ethnicities, but also
African American men can feel the words on the author on their tongues. Sometimes uncomfortable with the way she placed women at the center of her stories, they nonetheless loved her sound a fellow black student called it the “language he dreamed in,”. Morrison is a woman writer, but she can imagine the lives of men, their desire and resistance to flying — her metaphor for the capacity to surrender, even under the madness of capitalism and racism, to communal love.
Beloved is not just a novel, but a prayer, a ealing ritual for our country’s holocaust of slavery. Many of my friends claim that I am crazy because I claim that Beloved is one of the greatest literary works of all time. For me, the novel is not difficult in the way so many “sane” readers find it. The supposedly “fragmented” quality of its narration — which mirrors the country’s fear of remembering, for remembering is painful and dangerous, as well as freeing — was visceral, and quite normal, to these readers.
As we circled the novel, distinctively a folk opera, I recalled Morrison’s sense of herself as a writer, as one who should be of service because of the saving grace her folk have with language. It is a grace that has led her to explore a world in which claiming freedom, and therefore the power to love, is dangerous, risky — but always blessed. How bereft we would be without Toni Morrison’s liberating sound! How fortunate to have lived at a time when we can dwell in, and heal, through her language!
