Surviving the Pandemic: Necessary Lessons from Morrison's <em>Beloved</em>

Abstract

152 CLA JOURNAL Surviving the Pandemic: Necessary Lessons from Morrison’s Beloved Angelyn Mitchell “Won’t You Celebrate with Me” —Lucille Clifton won’t you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed. From Phillis Wheatley’s eighteenth-century historic witness to Jesmyn Ward’s twenty first-century southern witness, the gifts of Black women writers are legion. One of their many gifts in their cultural productions is their unapologetic proclamation that Black lives do indeed matter. By centering Black life as vital, Black women writers also offer survival strategies because, as Lucille Clifton writes, “everyday / something has tried to kill [us] / and has failed” (25). Embedded in her poem of origins is a poetic of survival. Clifton’s invitation to celebrate her survival may be read as generative as it posits joy as central to survival. This reminder is important, especially at this time; joy may be eschewed in the CLA JOURNAL 153 Surviving the Pandemic: Necessary Lessons from Morrison’s Beloved grip of survival. Clifton’s generous invitation to celebrate situates the Black self as capable of survival, which offers hope, and worthy of celebration, which invokes joy. The agency of both—survival and joy—is a daily choice, Clifton reminds. Reminding her reader that the celebration is as important as the survival, Clifton uses the word“celebrate” three times in this short poem. Clifton’s poem, like much of Black women’s writing, is just one of many examples of what Toni Morrison calls, in her Nobel lecture, the “life sustaining properties” of language: language that “arcs toward the places where meaning may lie” (20). In our present moment of life-threatening events, Black women writers and their gifts of “life sustaining properties” seem especially essential. Our classrooms are both sites of threat (because they challenge the status quo) and sites of sustenance. Historically, it is in our classrooms, as well as in our scholarship, that critical discussions of race and its significance in American life occur—we’ve been doing what is currently popularly termed “anti-racism” work in teaching African American literary and cultural studies. Quite frankly, the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately ravaged Black and Brown communities in terms of all quality of life indices, including health, safety, education, employment, housing, and nutrition. Concomitantly, violently racist policing, especially its embrace of extralegal, state sanction executions, continue to terrorize Black and Brown communities. The intersection of these two clear and present dangers—one immediate, fueled by systemic inequities; the other systemic, demanding lifethreatening protests—highlights how precarious Black life is in racialized America. The dialectical conversation between these two traumas situates Black life today as existing in both Saidiya Hartman’s“afterlife of slavery”and Christina Sharpe’s“the wake,” simultaneously. As “subversive intellectuals,” to use Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s term, those of us who work in African American studies and return to our classrooms this fall might consider how Black women writers might help us navigate these twin crises (101). Their lessons of resilience, perseverance, and hope can guide us as these “something[s]” try to kill us” (Clifton, line 14). Unquestionably, there are many lessons of resilience, perseverance, and hope in the archive of African American literature, from Harriet Jacobs’s “loophole of retreat” (114) to Jesmyn Ward’s hurricane. And there is, of course, Toni Morrison, our most celebrated of writers, whose works, especially Beloved (1987), offer many sites of generative instruction for times like ours. To my mind, Morrison’s Beloved provides a unique opportunity to explore key examples of resilience, perseverance, and hope—all needed to advance possibilities for survival. At first glance, one might think surviving slavery is the lesson of Beloved, but Morrison expands our understanding of surviving horrific 154 CLA JOURNAL Angelyn Mitchell experiences emanating from slavery in its aftermath by revealing how trauma is cyclic and...