RE-INVENTING THE PAST AS “RE-MEMORY”: TRAUMA, MOTHERHOOD AND HISTORY IN TONI MORRISON’S BELOVED

Abstract

This paper examines the narrative thrust of Toni Morrison’s Beloved as a response to previous slave narratives. It discusses and identifies the writer’s handling of issues of slavery, identity, motherhood, class and history in the novel using the backdrop of Trauma and Psychoanalysis as theoretical models. A close reading of the text reveals that although the novel follows the pattern of slave narratives; it raises more vivid issues by filling in the gaps of silences in traumatic experiences of motherhood, sexual abuse and violence as the haunting echoes of slavery resonating in the memory of black American lives. Between the extremes of forgetting to memory, lies another understanding of an unconscious effort to erase the dehumanizing relics of the past. The textis therefore Morrison’s attempt at contextualizing the ‘re-memory’ model in merging the past and present selves together, moment by moment, in a process of both group and individual reconstruction.