Text and Context in the Art of Toni Morrison (cont)

Morrison’ work participates in the “dominant” in a number of ways. She tells LeClair in the interview referred to above, that she writes within the tragic mode and that her writing offers “catharsis” and “revelation.”³⁷ In this respect, one could also say that Morrison takes on the mantle of the African griot who healed through her stories.³⁸ In Woman Native Other, Trinh T Minh-Ha speaks about how a woman gifted with the hu and the evu ³⁹can take on the role of storyteller, sorceress, magician and healer for the community and also serve as its repository of tribal wisdom.⁴⁰ In an interview  with Nellie Mckay, Morrison refers to the role of the African griot,  and we wonder if she is taking on the same role herself.⁴¹  The strong historical orientation of her writing  brings  with it its own healing through the telling and retelling of traumatic events, effecting the purging of excess emotions, often residual in a people that have suffered a dehumanizing and dispossessed  history.

The process of catharsis is enacted through the haunting that the novel provides. 

Beloved reminds one of the Oresteia which contains similar instances of child murder and haunting. In the Oresteia, children are killed to square an outraged husband’s anger over his brother’s infidelity with his wife and the effects of this act continue through generations in the form of a dark and implacable fate. However, in Beloved, the choice to kill is made by the mother, rather than the father, and it is a choice that is historically conditioned. Slavery denied slaves the right to form families. As Baby Suggs tells Sethe,

My first –born. All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread. Can you beat that? Eight children and that’s all I remember.⁴²