Beloved by Toni Morrison

After a quick detour to a world of romantic nonsense, I’m back to my favourite genre – Great American Novel.  My colleague was rooting for me to try some of Toni Morrison’s books for ages and finally my best friend Amazon (and tax evading bastard that it is) sent me a copy of Beloved - a sensational book about slavery and racism in America. The characters were inspired by the story of Margaret Garner, a woman who escaped slavery and later killed her two year old daughter rather than let her to be enslaved again under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

The novel is well known, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 and the movie starring Oprah Winfrey (hard to imagine her in it) came out in 1998. Toni Morrison is the first black Nobel (1993) laureate for literature!

I have to say it’s not a page turner or a light read, but Toni’s writing is exquisite and very imaginative. The portrayal of slavery and its vengeful effects on everyone is heartbreaking and convincing, but not moralising. What could have been a sad sentimental story bringing you to tears, is much too real, too convincing, with the characters forced to harden when everyone they love are abused by white men. The sadistic slave-owners and the methods of torture are not spelled out, but by forcing readers to connect the dots, author strengthens the overall impact of the novel and its brutal discoveries.

Beloved’s lead protagonist Sethe is a mother of four, living in a haunted house with her daughter Denver, an isolated teenager whose social interactions have dwindled down to only her mother and the ghost of her long-dead sister. There is also Paul D, a slave from the same plantation as Sethe, who shows up one day at her house and stays there. And of course there is Beloved, a centrepiece of the book. Her elusive identity is the key to understand the novel.  Beloved is the embodied spirit of Sethe’s dead daughter, first appearing soaking wet, as though newly born, with a long scar under her chin where her death-wound would have been, and her breath smells like milk. She could also be the spirit of Sethe’s mother or a representative of all of slavery’s victims.

Beloved is a story of ghosts – haunting Sethe and all of us. I think the idea behind this book was to show the harmony, that black communities had, to let go of their past, no matter how painful it was, and move ahead.And it's a lesson for us all.