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Memory, Redemption and Salvation

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Memory, Redemption and Salvation chapter 2 Memory, Redemption and Salvation Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, in that grey vault. The sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is History. ... Then came from the plucked wires of sunlight on the sea floor the plangent harp of the Babylonian bondage, as the white cowries clustered like manacles on the drowned women, and those were ivory bracelets of the Song of Solomon, but the ocean kept turning blank pages looking for History.1 Hesse points out that “postcolonial memory takes the form of a critical exca- vation and inventory of the marginalized, discounted, unrealized objects of decolonization and the political consequences of their social legacies.”2 The excavatory work of Morrison’s fiction and its profound concern with historical memories is achieved through a narrative which is about memories and me- morialization. This chapter explores Morrison’s use of memory as a trope and as a means of narration in both Beloved and Paradise. Remembering is the ethi- cal imperative in these texts. My reading of these novels explores Morrison’s 1 Derek Walcott, “The Sea is History” in Collected Poems, 1948–1984, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987, 364. 2 Barnor Hesse, “Forgotten like a Bad Dream: Atlantic Slavery and the Ethics of Postcolonial Memory”, in Relocating Postcolonialism, eds David Theo Goldbery and Ato Quayson, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002, 165. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi �0.��63/9789004360044_004 <UN> Memory, Redemption and Salvation 35 recourse to Christian heritage, values and metaphors to both challenge and revise dominant views of innocence, guilt, good and evil. While dismantling a Western, dichotomous approach to these categories (which has been much the focus of scholarly attention in the last two decades)3 Morrison’s fiction re- figures Christian narratives of redemption and salvation; my focus here is not only to explore the extent of such intertextual references, but also to interpel- late this allusiveness. Morrison’s deployment of Christian narratives functions as a ‘radical’ language with an ethical import: at once it pays tribute to and challenges the grand narratives with which it is so intimately connected. Beloved: Remembering and Redemption Beloved (1987) is Morrison’s fifth novel, a Pulitzer Prize winning book set in an- tebellum America. Usually classified as a neo-slave narrative, it deals with slav- ery and the myriads of traumas inflicted by such a horrifying institution. The novel, set in the free state of Ohio and the slave state of Kentucky, is based on the true story of the infanticide slave Margaret Garner who killed her daughter rather than give her away to slavery.4 In Beloved the sequence of events is non- chronological and it takes the reader repeatedly from the periods of freedom to the time of slavery. The novel revolves mainly around Sethe Suggs and several sections are focalized through her perspective. Sethe runs away from Sweet Home, the slave house, and, having gained free- dom, gives birth to Denver on her way to Ohio with the help of a fugitive white girl, Amy Denver. Traced back by her previous master in her new home, Sethe’s maternal love turns into a horrific crime: the killing of one of her daughters. Left in 124 Bluestone Road House with Denver, now eighteen years old, Sethe lives in isolation. Her two sons, tired of living with the ghost of their little sister violently killed by Sethe, abandoned the house, and her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, passed away leaving the house empty and quiet. Sethe, guilty of filicide, 3 See Terry Otten, The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989; Deborah McDowell, “‘The Self and the Other’: Reading Toni Mor- rison’s Sula and the Black Female Text.” In Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, edited by Nellie Y. McKay. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1988; David Middleton, Toni Morrison’s Fiction Contempo- rary Criticism, New York: Garland Publishing, 1997; Trudier Harris, “Toni Morrison: Solo Flight through Literature into History,” World Literature Today 68.1 (Winter 1994): 9–14, 1994; Shirley A. (ed), Toni Morrison and the Bible: Contested Intertextualities, New York: Peter Lang, 2006; Jan Furman, Toni Morrison’s Fiction: Revised and Expanded Edition [1996], Columbia: Univer- sity of South Carolina Press, 2014. 4 Carl Plasa, Toni Morrison, Beloved, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, 52. <UN>.
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