The Impact of Slavery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved: From the Communal to the Individual

Mahameed Mohammed

doi:10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.7n.6p.48

Abstract

Slavery is a condition of extreme physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual deprivation, a kind of hellish life. This paper aims at exploring how the culture of white racism sanctioned not only official systems of discrimination but a complex code of speech, behavior, and social practices designed to make white supremacy not only legitimate but natural and inevitable. In her masterpiece, Beloved (1987), Toni Morrison portrays the dehumanizing effects of slavery on the past and memory of her heroine. Morrison has dedicated her literary career to ensuring that black experience under, and as a result of, slavery would not be left to interpretations solely at the dictates of whites. This study shows how Toni Morrison has succeeded in revealing the physical and psychological damage inflicted on African American people by the brutal inhumanity that constituted American slavery. The paper, in this context, investigates how the memory and the past of the heroine act as destroyers of her motherly existence.

Highlights

IntroductionThe Africa-American experience started when colonists bought twenty black people from “a Dutch
Slave narratives are important for the fact they enrich and diversify African American literature, and because they reveal the complexities of the dialogue betweenWhites and Blacks
Attention is converged upon discussion of the influence of slavery on the collective past of the community and the memory of the individual through the experience of motherhood

Summary

Introduction

The Africa-American experience started when colonists bought twenty black people from “a Dutch. White prejudice started to emerge as the introduction of racial laws became viable. In 1664, officials of Maryland ordered: “that all Negroes or other Slaves... The state of Virginia, given the fact that they had brought people who had every reason to be defiant, endorsed in the late 1600s and early 1700s laws castigating the Blacks to be punished more severely than others for “being a brutish sort of people and reckoned as goods and chattels”. With these inhuman laws Virginians did not spare any chance to oppress the black slaves by denying them even basic rights and inflicting upon them severe punishments

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Discussion

Conclusion