Revisions of History in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Revisions of History in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Toni Morrison, a writer with a very strong historical sense, has always been conscious of the importance of coming to terms with the past and of the empowering value of history to African Americans. Having noticed that black Americans had long been cut off from their past, she set out to edit The Black Book (1974), an illustrative compendium of three centuries of black American life. 1 It is, to quote Morrison, a 'genuine Black history book,' aiming not to romanticize or glorify the African past or the American past, but rather to 'recollect' 300 years of black life as 'lived' experience ('Behind' 89). To Morrison, history is an important form of knowledge through which blacks can reclaim or reconstruct their past, which has long been silenced, repressed, or erased by the white dominant culture. Morrison's concern with history has not only driven her to edit black history books such as The Black Book, but to write black history into her novels. Like Ralph Ellison and other black cultural nationalists, she constantly returns to history to find something for her art. As she told Bessie Jones, '[W]hat makes one write anyway is something in the past that is haunting, that is not explained or wasn't clear so that you are almost constantly rediscovering the past. I am geared toward the past, I think, because it is important to me; it is living history' (Jones and Vinson 127). With the characters being both subjects of and subject to history, Morrison's novels, all ingrained in African American history, serve to 'bear witness and identify that which is useful from the past and that which ought to be discarded' (Morrison, 'Memory' 389). They have examined black life spanning from the beginning of African American history to its living present. Black experiences in such different historical periods as the Middle Passage, slavery, the Civil War, the Reconstruction, World War I, the great Depression, World War II, and the contemporary, have found expression in Morrison's novels, and her depiction of the impacts of racial oppression and historical change on ordinary black people is particularly compelling.