Los fantasmas de Beloved

Abstract

Tony Morrison’s novel is inspired in the real story of a fugitive slave, Margaret Garner, and can be considered a ghost story belonging to the African American oral tradition as well as a slave narrative. In it, Morrison wants to break the silence around the dreadful events that took place in the lives of millions of black slaves in The United States of America. Her characters must learn to "speak the unspeakable" in order to exorcise the demons of slavery through "rememory", the painful remembrance of the past that haunts not only the black community but the whole history of this nation. Morrison’s intention may well be to write a "literary archaology", recovering the past in an original narrative mode that gives a voice to those that had been silenced for centuries.