The Debt of Memory: Reparations, Imagination, and History in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Abstract

essay focuses Toni Morrison's groundbreaking novel Beloved and examines issue of reparations in economic, affective, and historical terms. Beloved, I claim, addresses these debts via fiction by delving into recesses of traumatic memory. Debt is overriding metaphor of our time, a quintessential^ modernizing state and activity that weaves inequalities into fabric and practice of capital. To incur debt is to enter into an interpolative arrangement in which capital confers recognition through repetitive consumption. Morrison's novel redirects our contemporary dependence and understanding of debt from a tangible economic figure or amount to a cumulative colonial deficit spanning space and time of slavery. In this sense, contemporary economic debt functions as a recurring sign in longue duree of racial history, which calls for layered forms of reparations. When Morrison states, at end of novel, This is not a story to pass on ( 1987,274), she asks reader to confront debt assumed by traumas of slavery to enable us to transform this inheritance into a beloved future. To pass this story down is to forge a new repository of memory upon which a severely incurred debt-mnemonic, social, and material-can begin to be defrayed. Therefore fiction, for Morrison, compels reader to reimagine a concealed past as a reparative starting point, which not only summons ghastly foundations of Americas but in so doing, initiates conversations surrounding what was lost, established, and still owed.Indeed, idea of reparations has seen various iterations since end of slavery. Not only did President Lincoln favor some sort of reparations for newly freed slaves but several decades later, in 1915, Cornelius J. Jones brought a lawsuit demanding sixty-eight million dollars in reparative compensation for unpaid slave labor. In 1944 Gunnar Myrdal, Swedish economist and Nobel laureate, in his book An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, argued for parcels of former plantations to be made available to ex-slaves through manageable, longterm installment plans. The call for reparations continued in 1960s, when activist James Forman, in his controversial Black Manifesto, boldly proposed five hundred million dollars in damages. Moreover, in 1972, in The Case for Black Reparations, Yale Law School professor Boris Bittker asserted that a history of race-based discrimination from slavery to Jim Crow, spanning over three centuries, caused undue social and economic injury to African Americans and suggested creation of a program to distribute resources to America's descendants of slaves. Finally, in a more recent text, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, Randall Robinson makes case for a national economic response that would effectively close the yawning gap between blacks and whites (Robinson 2000, 204).1 However, Robinson's argument marks a shift from a reductive, if necessary and just, economic discussion to a more wide-ranging cultural, historic, and psychic understanding of debt.2As he argues: But only slavery, with its sadistic patience, asphyxiated memory, and smothered cultures, has hulled empty a whole race of people with inter-generational efficiency. Every artifact of victims' past cultures, every custom, every ritual, every god, every language, every trace element of a people's whole heredity identity, wrenched from them and ground into a sharpe choking dust. It is a human rights crime without parallel in modern world. For it produces its victims ad infinitum, long after active statge of crime has ended (Robinson 2000, 216). In absence of economic reparations, Robinson proposes a black renaissance (237-47), a dynamic return to knowledge, memory, and creativity as a formula to halt production of victims generated by aftereffects of slavery and colonialism. Thus, Robinson compels reader to confront varying dimensions of debt as, one hand, virulent conjunction of economic processes-centuries of forced and unpaid labor-and other, imposed erasure of memory and culture. …