African Spiritual Traditions in the Novels of Toni Morrison

6. Living with the Dead: Memory and Ancestral Presence in Beloved

6 Living with the Dead Memory and Ancestral Presence in Beloved I was made to touch my past at an early age. I found it on my mother’s tiddies. In her milk. —Gayl Jones, Corregidora Now women forget all those things they don’t want to remember and remember everything they don’t want to forget. —Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God The ax forgets the tree remembers. —African American proverb Using the conceit of memory as the central organizing principle, Toni Morrison lays the necessary mythic foundations to invoke ancestral presence in the novel Beloved (1987).1 The focus of this chapter is an examination of the heroic character, Sethe, and the ways in which the ancestor, as memory, works in consonance with Yoruba Òrìsà, African iconography, and ritual to engender psychic wholeness. Examining memory is an important place to begin, because it is only when characters regain a sense of the past that they can begin to imagine a future. Ironically, the novel ends with the sentence, “It was not a story to pass on.” Repeated three times, this sentence frames the last five paragraphs of Beloved. In these concluding lines, the eponymous character, Beloved, is described as “disremembered and unaccounted for” as well as irretrievable and “unclaimed” because they “don’t know her name” (274). Perhaps, the reason they do not know her name is because Sethe’s deceased child, did not have a name while living. From an African perspective, this innominate status would leave her nameless in the spirit world. Even though Sethe had “bought” her name by trading sex for a headstone with the seven-lettered inscription “beloved” shortly after her death (204), by not having been so- 146 k Chapter 6 cially incorporated into the community with that name, she would remain nameless to them. How then can Beloved be remembered? Beyond the spiritual dilemma created by postmortem considerations of naming, this tension of remembrance is complicated further by the historical disjuncture of enslavement and the anonymity corequisite with African people’s status as chattel. Morrison attempts to retrieve the lost contents of culture and to mitigate the trespass caused by un-naming in the dedication to the novel by connecting the character Beloved to the unnamed “sixty million or more.” Morrison also raises a few philosophical questions: is it possible to know on another level? Are there other epistemological approaches to gain access to the past? Throughout the novel, Morrison highlights the characters’ reluctance to delve into memory, while coterminously invoking that remembrance in her literary figurations. Using conservative estimates, sixty million ancestors not only lost their names, but also their lives during the Middle Passage from the west coast of Africa to the Americas.2 Countless others would be renamed consistent with their predicament of being enslaved. In Beloved, this presence/absence manifests itself by the omniscient narrator’s seemingly paradoxical ending of the story mandating a mass forgetting, which constitutes memory, albeit, in a different way than remembering does. It is as if forgetting and memory are twin activities; one has to forget something to remember something else. Mary and Allen Roberts note among the Luba of Southeastern Congo the concept of forgetting, like memory is complex and signifies a purposeful action of concealment. That is a person “may not have forgotten at all, but is purposefully withholding information as a secret” (Memory 33). In this construction, forgetting is a conscious disruption, yet still a remembrance. Signifying on Frederick Douglass’s recollection of his first remembered trauma and the dialectical idea, “I shall never forget it whilst I remember one thing,” the characters in Beloved intimate that the process of memory is complex and highly nuanced. It can work in reverse, deleting items rather than storing them. In any case, memory acknowledges that some conscious decision has been made, some selection process has occurred. “They forgot her like a bad dream,” “quickly and deliberately forgot her,” “couldn’t remember or repeat a single thing she said,” “Remembering seemed unwise” (274), are word masks that disguise the deliberate recollection of Beloved. In the deep structure where compelling meaning abides, the narrator fortifies the remembrance of the story events. Invoked by the twists and turns of historical deletion, these memories resemble Pierre Nora’s no- Living with the Dead: Memory and Ancestral Presence in Beloved k 147 tion of lieux de mémoire, since the environments...