Remembering Colonial Histories: Trauma and Cultural Memory in Toni Morrison's Beloved

Abstract

Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) has resulted in many interpretations as a novel about the experience of slavery and its aftermath in the United States, but it is also a novel about colonialism—a saga to which slave systems relate. In this paper these points will be examined to see how Morrison's novel Beloved can be analysed with reference to postcolonial theory, and as her novel entices to illuminate her wider colonial ploy that involved physical and psychological torture of slaves, as well as destruction of black history, black culture and black identity. The study understands the haunting, fragmented subjectivity as well as cultural memory to be a representation of the lingering effects of colonialism, as described by Frantz Fanon, Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Edward Said. Alongside being a ghost of personal tragedy, the ghost of the novel, Beloved, is also the ghostly presence that refuses to be silenced of colonial histories. The violence of the colonies was not only physical, but it also took the form of Sethe's killing of the baby, and a lack of communication between the community. But Morrison also tells of the possibility of catharsis gained from people sharing together and the retrieval of oppressed histories. In making memory resistance a key feature of the novel, Beloved elicits contestation to colonial forgetting and makes room for cultural revival. This research argues that Morrison's novel is a portrait of the ‘silenced' voice and an interaction with the legacy of the colonial oppression in postcolonial literature.