Toni Morrison's Lorain

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This interview of Toni Morrison discusses her novel Beloved by Angels Carabi in Spring 1994, published in the Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women. The novel was first published in 1987, portraying formerly enslaved characters' struggle and victory over the past trauma under slavery. 

[AC] In Beloved you move back into history and plunge into the period of slavery. It seems that, by writing about that period, you bring up a collective pain that had been silenced within the black community but that was always there, kept as an unspoken burden, almost as a ghostlike presence.

{TM] Yes, I thought that in the folklore and in the songs and in early poetry or lyrics, there was never much mention of the “middle passage.” The poems that I know about this period are recent — after the 1960s. So there was a part of history, of that journey from Africa to America, that black people themselves had never spoken about.

I understand that omission, because to dwell on it would perhaps paralyze you to the point of not being able to survive everyday life. It was too painful to remember, yet I had the impression that it was something that needed to be thought about by Afro-Americans. With Beloved, I am trying to insert this memory that was unbearable and unspeakable into the literature. Not only to write about a woman who did what Sethe did, but to have the ghost of the daughter return as a remnant of a period that was unspoken. It was a silence within the race. So it’s a kind of healing experience. There are certain things that are repressed because they are unthinkable, and the only way to come free of that is to go back and deal with them.

[AC] Memory has a dual function. On the one hand, to remember painful periods generates suffering. But on the other hand, remembering has a healing quality; suffering provides information and ultimately offers self-knowledge.

[TM] Oh yes, absolutely. And then that makes it possible to live completely. Part of you is dead if you don’t remember. Part of your mind is vacant, so it is not complete. So the pain is worth it because the healing is great.

[AC] Beloved’s arrival stimulates Sethe’s memory.

[TM] Some of it. Paul D is there before, and at least Sethe begins to think about certain things, like the plantation. Beloved comes after Paul D and she is like a catalyst. She opens up everybody’s vulnerability.

[AC] I see Beloved as an individual character, also as a ghost — but also as a representative of all the women that went through the middle passage whose stories have remained silent.

[TM] It could be. I wanted a baby in human body, without past or future (having been killed so young), and also to be the embodiment of the past. It is indeed what she says: a new segment of the history that has been unlived and unattended to. And because it is so fresh, much more painful to handle.

[AC] Can the fact that she has this demonic quality be associated with the painful aspect of remembering?

[TM] Oh yes, not only with that but with her death itself. She was violently “disremembered.” It’s like the history of the middle passage. All those people who threw themselves into the sea had been violently ignored; no one praised them, nobody knows their names, nobody can remember them, not in the United States nor in Africa. Millions of people disappeared without a trace, and there is not one monument anywhere to pay homage to them, because they never arrived safely on shore. So it’s like a whole nation that is under the sea. A nameless, violent extermination.

[AC] Can Beloved's redeeming quality be associated with the fact that she provokes understanding of history among the people around her?

[TM] Oh, yes. She makes them face up to the things they have been avoiding. They have to, in a sense, grow up in her presence. Her physical presence is so persistent that she cannot be ignored anymore, so they have to deal with her.

[AC] On the ship there is no air, no water, and no space in which to move. This brings echoes of death, of a living death. Were you trying to establish a close association between death and the ship?

[TM] Between the ship and the grave. When Beloved talks to Sethe or Denver, they think she has come back from the grave. And they ask what it was like over there. Her language fits into their conception of life after death. And since it was a dying place, I wanted the association between the physical journey on the slave ships and the grave to be very strong.

[AC] Can you talk about the water imagery in the novel ? Sethe breaks water when she gives birth to Denver, and her bladder “fills to capacity” when she meets Beloved.

[TM] Obviously I wanted Sethe to be reexperiencing birth. The other part has to do with the African conviction regarding reincarnation. It is believed that, in particular, children or young people who die uneasily return out of the water in forms of members of your family. Water is a dangerous and haunted place because spirits dwell in it.

[AC] Sethe is also a woman who was abandoned by her mother; she remembers her only as a woman in the field.

[TM] Yes, and that makes her fierce with her children. The fact that she was abandoned or that she feels abandoned — she doesn’t know her mother — destroys a normal parent-child relation. Her horror is that, maybe, her mother was trying to escape without her. When Sethe has children, she is excessively ferocious about keeping them with her as a kind of reaction to her own feelings of abandonment. So it makes her infanticide much more powerful, because she thinks that by killing her children and herself, she can go to an eternal place where they can be together again without pain. Death would not be termination, merely a change into something else.

[AC] When Sethe was living on the plantation she did not have other women to talk to to tell her how to take care of her children. Her impulse to kill Beloved comes out of a woman who is used to making decisions on her own. Would it have been different if Sethe had had a community?

[TM] Oh yes, she is isolated. When Sethe commits the act, the community rejects her. She is uncivilized in the woman sense of the word. She doesn’t know how to negotiate certain levels of pain, because she has never been advised. If Baby Suggs had been there, she would have understood Sethe’s heart breaking every time she had to tie her children to the well so she could work and watch them, to make sure they weren’t hurt. Sethe has less than a month of neighborhood life; that’s all she ever knew of a community of her peers. Her independence is such that when she leaves the house after the act, the women recognize that solitary excessive pride and reject her. It’s only when Sethe feels so beaten down and that excess has gone the other way that they come and rescue her.

[AC] Sethe is the only child conceived in love. She was named after her father. Her name is one of her own, conceived out of a loving relationship. Can you talk about the relevance of having a name of your own, given with love and tenderness? Slaves did not have names of their own.

[TM] If slaves came with their own names they were ignored. People just named them something they wanted to. The purpose was to keep families separated in order to control them, and to give the slaves the last name of the master, as property. If I give you another name, then I own you; this is why black people had nicknames, names that they gave themselves. Stamp Paid is a classic example. He’s born Joshua, and he does something that is memorable: he changes his own name to Stamp Paid. Paul D’s name, for instance — all these letters — is a sign of contempt. So it’s rare and delicious to have a name that is given to you by a parent, based on a love relationship or maybe given by somebody in your family. Then you earn your name; it’s not just a name of a white person attached to you. Baby Suggs is another example. Her name is Janey Whirlow, but Janey she does not recognize, and Whirlow was the name of whoever owned her. She was married to a man named Suggs, and he used to call her Baby Suggs. So that’s her name. It’s her resistance.

[AC] When Sethe tells her story to Denver and Beloved she recovers her Ma’am’s language, which she thought she had forgotten. Can you talk about the relevance of recovering the original language?

[TM] It is a suggestion that all these languages, including cultures that had been wiped out, can be recovered only through an active effort of the will. Sethe is, in fact, telling a story, and by narrating it she sort of talks herself into being. She doesn’t talk about the past ever; she just warns Denver, but her daughter does not want to hear either. When Paul D comes, she begins to think a little bit about the past. When Beloved appears, she has to tell them more, a little more each time, and suddenly certain things from her childhood just come back. Even though she can’t really remember the language, she remembers what it said. She remembers what she understood and that becomes a reclamation of a past. I don’t know how many people, except maybe Sixo, could remember the language. I don’t know how many Afro-Americans could speak these other languages. That disruption of history is very very painful, but we can reclaim ourselves by narrative, by active effort, by telling.

[AC] Something that is very interesting is that, even though Sethe does not remember the language, the African past is unconsciously being retained through the image of the dancing antelope that she relives before giving birth to Denver. This image is associated with Sethe’s mother’s dance. So part of the African past is transmitted through images.

[TM] Through images and with the help of Beloved’s presence. If Beloved had not shown up, Sethe could never have remembered this. But the past comes back. So Sethe can gather bits and pieces of a life when she was a little girl. I think she’s lucky because she is made to remember by herself. It would be interesting if she could pass this on to Denver. But I have the feeling that Denver goes out to college and forgets about it all (laughter).

[AC] Africa is seen as a place where women gathered flowers in freedom and played in the long grass before the white men arrived. It is freedom that brings the idea of Africa as a lost paradise.

[TM] Yes, that’s right. Whatever the difficulties were, they were their difficulties and not somebody else’s. No one could possibly tell what the place would have been like if the white men had never arrived there. You don’t know it because it was beaten up so early. If they had been left alone, maybe they would have stayed agricultural.

It may be a little too romantic to think about Africa as a kind of Eden, before corruption, the cradle of humanity. And sure enough, it was a place with confrontations, but it was not a conquered place where other people’s imaginations worked on it instead of their own. Nevertheless, what Sethe remembers before she was captured is a picture of community.

[AC] Sethe experiences the loss of her husband as well as of her sons, yet these losses seem less than those of her mother and daughter. Does this mean that the bonds between mother and daughter are stronger?

[TM] Well, she doesn’t know whether Halley is living or dead. The loss of her sons is painful, but they are boys, who always leave anyway. But she hit the boys with the shovel and cut the baby girl’s throat. I could have made the baby a boy. So I am not sure that I intended to say anything about the bond between mother and son or mother and daughter.

[AC] Sethe’s sense of guilt turns her into Beloved’s victim, and their roles reverse. Does Sethe feel that she deserves to be forgiven by Beloved? Can she?

[TM] No, not by Beloved! (laughter). No, she is insatiable. Sethe could never give her enough. She represents 350 years of indifference, so it would take her 350 years to fill her up. Sethe gives her life to Beloved to the exclusion of Denver. It’s herself she cannot forgive. She tried very hard to say: “This is the right thing to do.” And she was not repentant at all, but in the face of that child — not the neighbors, not Paul D — but in the face of that child she would have to explain and explain — and she could never explain enough. Now she is not so sure of her deed. With Beloved’s presence she feels happy and is able to tell herself: “See, she came back, and I don’t have to explain a thing.” She is the one left to forgive herself. Her lover can’t give her that.

[AC] I don’t find this sense of guilt in Eva — in your novel Sula — when she burns her son alive. What’s the difference?

[TM] He is not a baby. He is grown and he is going to be a burden to himself and to her. And Eva is very arrogant; she names everybody (laughter).

[AC] At the end, when Sethe tries to kill Mr. Bodwin, it seems to me that she exorcises the past by addressing her anger against Mr. Bodwin instead of against her children as she did in the past. Does this reflect a change of attitude in black people — instead of self-mutilation, addressing the anger at the source of their misery?

[TM] Maybe, but she can’t kill her daughter a second time (laughter). She just directs her fury at the person whom she thinks is going to destroy her. She is in love with her daughter now; if she loves her daughter, the woman Beloved, she loves herself. Then she can turn her head and direct her anger at the source she thinks is the cause of her misery, rather than escape it by doing something violent.

[AC] Sethe must confront her past to achieve self-knowledge, to save herself. When this past is assumed, Belovedcan disappear. Would you agree with this?

[TM] Beloved has no place there now. Sethe is now going to concentrate on taking care of herself, the beloved that is inside her, which is her. She is the beloved, not the child. The past is returned and buried again, or gone.

[AC] Is the past gone or assumed, incorporated?

[TM] The book, at the end, assumes it is gone. Sethe doesn’t maybe. The last part of it suggests that they will not get rid of the whole thing. It’s there, somewhere. The least gesture, the least look. I don’t know. Maybe Sethe will be able to put both things together — admit what she did and go on from there. Maybe I’m more optimistic about her than about the whole race. I was traveling around the United States after Beloved came out. Everywhere I would go, there was a picture of a confederate soldier on a horse in the middle of the town. Everybody has a monument to every little thing . . . there is a huge wall to all the veterans . . . but there is not one bench where we can sit down and think about those people. There is now some effort to do that, but it’s like you don’t have to pay respect to your ancestors. They are just waiting there for you to ask them to do something, but if you don’t know them, don’t honor them, don’t think of them, mourn them, or praise them, then you are like a cripple. A public monument or a private monument is needed, not just to the ancestors we know, but to all those we know, but to all those we don’t. That’s a big gap, a disjunction in the history.

[AC] Is this then a story to pass on? But if it is, then wouldn’t the burden of the past make us unable to live the present?

[TM] It’s both. If you dwell, if you just dwell on the past, you can’t go forward. If you confront the past, there is a possibility to move on. So I said that this is not a story to pass on, but it’s like a warning to black people. This is not a story to pass on, to give to the next one, yet the irony is that it is not a story to pass by. So it has both meanings.

[AC] Can you talk about the role of the community in Beloved? In fact, the community increases Sethe’s isolation.

[TM] The community makes judgements. It’s like a chorus. The survival of the individual is dependent on the community. Sethe make a valiant effort to live without the community. And she can’t. They reject her, too, because she’s behaving in a very proud way. She is saying to the community: “I’ll get along without you,” and they know she’s saying this so they let her try. And then, when she is beaten down enough, they don’t kick her out; by and large they support her. Baby Suggs was a very bit part of the community. When she dies, Sethe is all alone, leading the solitary life of widow. This is hubris, so the community lets her know that they think she is too proud.

[AC] When Denver finally leaves the house, the community recognizes that Sethe can’t do everything by herself, and then they know that there is no pride. Sethe learns the lesson and makes it possible for the community to come. They exorcise what they consider the demon of the past, which has hurt her beyond endurance. Maybe they have a sort of thermometer to measure how much misery a person can take (laughter).

[AC] Are you implying then that the community does not reject her for her deed, but because of her pride?

[TM] The community does not reject her because of the killing of the child but because of how she responded to that murder. She did not come home and weep and say: “Oh my God, look at what I did!” She didn’t say: “Help me.” She didn’t say: “I don’t know why I did that.” She just walked out of the house with her head up, went to jail, got taken out, came home, got a job, and went on living like that. And even when she comes out of the house, they are watching her. They sing but they don’t have any words. They recognize the beginning of arrogance, and that keeps them away from her.

[AC] Let’s move on to Paul D. In a way, he redeems Sethe from a haunted past, leading her into the present. At the same time he’s helping himself because he’s been wandering for so long.

[TM] Yes, he’s been going from place to place, and when he finds Sethe he can help her; he can inhabit her body, fill it, which is what you don’t do when you are very busy.

[AC] Fear of loss generates a hunger for love. Beloved is so hungry for love that she destroys Sethe. Are you implying that if you become possessive about the person you love, you end up destroying him or her?

[TM] One of the most profound devastations of oppression is how love is distorted. If you love something too much you’ll kill it. Or if you love it too little, because you are afraid, you can lose it. You don’t enjoy; you do it slyly, like when Paul D is in prison; he can’t even love nature, just a little bit of the moon because if he loves it too much he will lose it, and you need a bit left over for the next step. So you become emotionally and aesthetically stingy for fear that it, too, like everything else, will be taken away. Pain affects one’s personal life, like in abused children or whole nations that have been tormented. It is difficult to believe, feel, or trust because you can’t go through that pain, so you just withhold the emotion.

[AC] Freedom meant the possibility to love.

[TM] Yes. Exactly.

[AC] You seldom include the presence of white people in your books. In Beloved there are Amy and Mr. and Mrs. Garner, who are understanding people within the limitations of a slavery society. There are also Schoolteacher and the nephews, who embody an ultimate form of evil.

[TM] Slavery meant lots of losses and lots of prohibitions. But you know there were many white people who hated it and thought that slavery was diminishing to them. They felt as if they were less human and that they were called upon to be hateful. And there were others that had a good time, who loved it because they could feel powerful. In order to continue living and doing what they wanted, they had to make sure that the people they were abusing were not really people. Many people refused to own slaves and looked down on those who did. Sometimes they bought slaves to free them, or even to ensure that no one else could buy them. People do all sorts of things, and some of them are fine and noble. Mr. Bodwin was the apogee of what the abolitionists were like, spending a lot of time, money, and effort to mitigate those circumstances. Whereas somebody like Schoolteacher just had a good time and felt that he was doing God’s work.

[AC] He is presented as a rational person who studies slaves’ behavior scientifically.

[TM] Yes. You see, the Age of Enlightenment was at the same time as the age of racism. In the United States, the Constitution is full of wonderful things about freedom and equality, but it was able to accommodate slavery. There is this fundamental contradiction in 18th-century philosophical thought, because the same people who were going on about Christian love and beatitude and the rights of man were also slavemasters who didn’t carry their philosophy all the way through. I use the name of Schoolteacher because racism was pursued in a scholarly fashion. It was taught in theology, in anthropology, in biology, in the Darwinian theory of evolution — in everything. They had accommodated something that would mean its own destruction. Therefore, they had to make special provisions for the people that they did not want to be associated with: blacks and women. Somebody like Schoolteacher in 1850 or 1855 would be very much in line with the mainstream thought. The aberration, the eccentric one, would be Mr. Bodwin.

[AC] Can you talk about the role of music in Beloved? Paul D is a singing man, Amy sings a soothing song for Sethe when she is in pain, Sethe sings to her children a song that Beloved recognizes, the women sing.

[TM] It’s a summons. Music is a powerful, magical tool. Singing is soothing; it gets you through a difficult period but it has a greater power than that, which is like poetry — it allows you to articulate what you are feeling. Paul D makes a song about his relationship with Sethe. The women in Beloved avoid the house; they stand outside, but when they get serious they burst into song like a religious exorcism. By song you can make things happen. I heard a singer say that during the Civil Rights Movement, when black people would get ready to go out and demonstrate — to permit themselves to be humiliated — they would have meetings and you couldn’t get them to do anything unless you would start with a song. And then they understood that it was a call, a clarion call. Music gives you the information you want. It raises your courage; it gives you clarity and focus. Then you are able to go forward into a dangerous situation.

[AC] Some of your characters make an effort to “beat” the past. Sethe beats the dough in the mornings as a way to beat back the past. Paul D has this tin heart.

[TM] It’s always threatening to break out. Memories are always threatening, like dreams. Whatever you are not thinking about in the daytime world comes out in your dreams. If you are serious about not wanting to remember, if you try to contain it, hold it back, it takes activity; you have to work at preventing the past from coming through. If you don’t work hard, it will come out in distorted ways. You can’t let those memories come back until you are strong enough to deal with them.

[AC] There are some isolated points in the book that I would like to ask you about: Sethe’s tree on her back reminded me of a family tree, like the words the woman warrior has carved on her back in Maxime Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. She carries the family history on her back.

[TM] Well, I used to look at those pictures of people with scars. Sethe is not able to see her tree on her back. She does not feel anything, but she is marked by the history of slavery, written with scars on her back.

[AC] Beloved watches two turtles copulate. Is it a love act?

[TM] (Laughter) I don’t know. I wanted her to look outside herself for a moment, to see something that was not hers. The reason I chose turtles was because of the contradiction between these big shells that are impenetrable and rough and unromantic, and the two heads so vulnerable and tender. The female head pops out and pats the male’s head as he mounts her. Beloved’s seduction of Paul D is to get him out, to get rid of anybody that Sethe might be interested in. that scene takes place before the seduction, before she tells Paul D “Call me my name.” She moves him out of the house; so I wanted to introduce sexuality and sensuality in her mind and, of course, there is a hint that she’s been reared by somebody who used her sexually.

[AC] A prevailing sense in the book is a sense of loss.

[TM] And possibilities. Loss is the overwhelming pain and then, cut through it in small ways, there is the possibility between Sethe and Paul D of regaining life. After going through all the trauma, he comes back. He’s horrified because of what Sethe did but, even knowing that, he comes back to the house to look for her. He really does love her. So with a man like that, and a woman like that, there is a sense of possibility. Things go on. We did get through it.

[AC] Does Beloved play a cathartic role for the Afro-American people?

[TM] Yes, the book in general is a kind of way in which we can approach these things. I think there should be a lot of things written about all this, about the middle passage. We can’t just wipe it out. There is a lot in there. And art can do it. Songs, music, paintings, poetry, or novels could concentrate on that period. And it is our job; it is not the white people’s job. This one is ours. Black people have to do it.

[AC] Don’t you think that white people could write about the period of the middle passage as well?

[TM] Maybe yes, from their point of view. I would love to see a book by a white person in which the author imagines the situation. A captain on a slave ship, a person that makes it intelligible to me, instead of rationalizing it and defending it. Asking “What was it really like?” I would love to see a contemporary novel by a white woman revealing what it was like to be a slaveowner’s wife. But to write about it honestly, not in a grandiose way or a glamorous way, but in a way that explores the interior of life. In fact there is a book that has been written called Middle Passage, which I haven’t read yet but that I’m very interested in, not because of the historical data, which I don’t care about, but because of the interior life.

[AC] And how this affects the present, how the past can be clarified.

[TM] That’s right. There will always be a stumbling block, not just racial subknowledge, if you try to forget all that. But nobody wants to do it. Nobody wants to go back and try to remember all that stuff. You think that you might be devastated. When I was writing the book I thought that some parts were going to be too difficult to deal with. But in those moments I kept saying to myself: “All I have to do is to think about the people who lived there, who lived through it. If they could live it, I could write about it.”