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Posted: Monday January 31st, 2005 07:01 |
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Apologies for the late starting of this book discussion, I lost my post about 3 times. In addition I am going to have to wing it this morning as all of the book page numbers that I was going to use as quotes are at home...
You can tell that I am having one of those Monday mornings already 
In any case here are my thoughts on Beloved
Beloved, in my honest opinion is one of the best slavery narratives/ ghost stories that I have had the pleasure of reading.
It is an amazing book chatering the history of Sethe and the quasi family of the Sweet home men - and how there fragile existence in a humane plantation is destroyed by the arrival of Schoolteacher and his nephews, and the death of the plantation owner Mr Garner. An event that leads to events and circumstances that cause Sethe to feel that the only choice that she had was to kill her children...
She only managed to kill one child - Beloved...
A child who haunts her first as an apparition, and then takes human form - demanding Sethe not only to remember and confront the past... but forces her to appease her ghost child...
It brought up a few major questions for me...
The main question for myself is whether or not there is a justification strong enough to end the life of another human being?
And also what I would have done if I were in the same situation...
the rest of my thoughts and quotations are going to have to wait until I get home...
what are your thoughts?
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Cims
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Posted: Monday January 31st, 2005 08:58 |
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Ive read Beloved, I think about 3 times, and I also agree that it is a brilliant and though provoking story. The concept of killing one of my own children, overwhelmed me, but the way in which Toni Morrison, decribes the reasoning behind it, may not have convinced me Sethe, was right, but I understood why she did it. What she and the others went through at 'sweet home', was disturbing, and reading the descriptions haunted me and did in fact bring a tear to my eye on several occasions. The imagery of a man taking the milk for my children, was too deep, and this incident i feel was the fundamental reason behind sethe killing beloved. She believed she was saving her children from such treatment.
I have also sen the film version starring Oprah, Thandi Newton etc. I think that the incidents that it did show were portrayed were very good, but it left too much out, that led the story line to be quite difficult to follow. The book is MUCH better, and I would advise anyone thinking of seeing the film, to read the book first. 
Last edited on Monday January 31st, 2005 19:11 by Cims
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Posted: Monday January 31st, 2005 09:26 |
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Thanks for that Cims, I still have to see the film properly... but I am not always great for horror films and found it hard to sit through to the end...
But, you are right even up to now, I still cannot decide whether what Sethe did was right or wrong. But, what disturbed me also was the attitude of the residents of Bluestone Road, and the fact that they chose not to warn Sethe, or Baby Suggs that the slave catchers were coming...
The fact that in their minds Sethe thought that she was better than them... even their refusal to offer any moral support because she did not cry in front of them...
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LadyDay
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Posted: Monday January 31st, 2005 18:58 |
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| this book scared me whilst i was reading it but i still read it through i also saw the film too after the book that is. the histiory behind the book left me more in awe.
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Posted: Tuesday February 1st, 2005 08:07 |
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| Ladyday: which parts of the book scared you was it the descriptions of what happened to them during slavery... or Beloved herself?
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Posted: Tuesday February 1st, 2005 16:58 |
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| it was beloved her spirit etc . especially when they felt her presence and confronted it.
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NativeTongue
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Posted: Tuesday February 1st, 2005 17:08 |
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| hi, dont know if im allowed in this discussion as ive only seen the film, i was just wondering about the symbolism of beloved eating all those sweet things.there are obvious meanings to that, but what do you think were the lessobvious symbolisms to beloveds behaviour.
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Posted: Tuesday February 1st, 2005 18:52 |
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Sorry I should be more clear, although the book was voted on anyone and everyone who has read the book previously or for the book club is welcome to offer a comment!
Native tongue: glad to have your views
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Posted: Tuesday February 1st, 2005 18:58 |
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Native tongue, the film is something that I am yet to see but if you do get a chance to read the book as a baby beloved used to crave sweet things...
If you have a chance to read the book, their is the symbolism of water... and there is a part where beloved delivers a narrative but it is actually related to the middle passage... when I get a chance I will copy the excerpt for you... but the main reason why I prefer reading it... is that the horror that your mind creates is much more real than anything that you can see...
The worst part for me was the account where the Sweet home men attempted to escape and Sixo decided to jump into a bonfire and burn to death rather than be taken back as a slave... and the more subtle touches where you here slave narrative and although you only get a couple of lines of information... the images that it conjures up are horrendous...
Also I am not sure if you see it in the film, but there was a theme running through the book about milk... this was linked to the attack that schoolteaches nephew launch on Sethe... holding her down and drinking the breast milk that she had for beloved...
The book although fictional messed me up... I would go to bed and I could picture rebel slaves hanging from trees... hard reading... but it is a beautiful book...
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LadyDay
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Posted: Tuesday February 1st, 2005 19:12 |
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i remember my friend looked into this book and the real story of inspiration which is said to be the true story of slave margaret garner . i located this site http://www.luminarium.org/contemporary/tonimorrison/muckley.htm
its well worth a read if you want some historical history and story background to the story
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NativeTongue
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Posted: Tuesday February 1st, 2005 20:27 |
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hmm okay it seems the book is heavy with symbolism.
ive seen a couple of interviews with toni morrison and she comes across as extremely intelligent.
a great intellect.
how did people feel about paul d.were you generally sympahtetic towards him.
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Posted: Wednesday February 2nd, 2005 07:32 |
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I was very sympathetic toward Paul D, he was one of the few who had a genetic relative on a plantation... as we know that the normal practice was to separate children from their families straight away...
have his dignity taken away by schoolteacher... the bit
So to lose his brother...
To fight in the civil war...
then trapped as a prisoner of war... where there is physical abuse...
Escape, only to be sexually exploited by a woman old enough to be your aunt/ mother...
more than sympathetic, I would say tragic...
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Posted: Wednesday February 2nd, 2005 07:36 |
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| @Lady day: thanks for the link there is some really good information there... really depressing story though...
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NativeTongue
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Posted: Wednesday February 2nd, 2005 09:22 |
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yup free as much trauma as you see seth has gone through there is a real feeling that the man have suffered even more.
i think you really get the feeling of degradation.how disruptive it was to the black family and the relationship between black men and women.
free i wondered what you thought the tree on seths back and what you felt that represented.
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Posted: Wednesday February 2nd, 2005 09:36 |
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Native tongue the tree in Sethe's back was explained quite quickly in the book...
The tree in Sethe's back... were the marks from the whip that Schoolteacher used to beat her with... Quite horrific description... they dug a hole so they would not harm the baby in her stomach...
and then lashed her...
so much so that she bit through her tongue in the book, I am not sure if they mentioned this part in the film...
Lou, the girl who helped Sethe give birth to Denver called it a Chokecherry tree... and after that Sethe referred to the scars as a tree...
Last edited on Wednesday February 2nd, 2005 09:45 by free
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Posted: Wednesday February 2nd, 2005 11:08 |
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hmm, how did beloved change your perception of slavery free.
in a sense to me it represents the burden of the guilt of slavery for those who survived it, perhaps somewhat like those who survuved the holocaust.
in a sense the question is how can one memorialize genocide and yet esccape the burden of its history.
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Posted: Thursday February 3rd, 2005 07:59 |
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@Native tongue... I don't know if it really changed it as I always knew that slavery was a brutal institution...
However, it personalised the experience and gave a lot more humanity to see the individual psyche and damage that those who went through slavery suffered...
The thing about most information on Slavery, is that the factual information is like a dry reporting of facts and figures... so while the scale and level of destruction is obvious...
It does not seem sympathetic...
If you look at the true story link of Margaret Garner, there is nothing to really indicate what drove her as a person to do what she did... at least with Beloved... you understand and empathise...
I guess for me, it just made me revisit the full horror of what happened... but of all the fictional books that I have read about slavery, it is one of the most moving...
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Posted: Thursday February 3rd, 2005 16:09 |
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@ladyday thank you very much for puting up that link.
almost too painful to read.
@free, totally agree thats the great thing about fiction, its almost like watching a film in colour vs black and white it just fells in the gaps that raw statistics just cannot provide.
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Posted: Thursday February 3rd, 2005 18:40 |
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@Free. Beloved. Hmm. Powerful book, extremely well written and cleverly done. To your question. Well nothing new in what Morrison, wrote so I suppose how it hits you is dependent of your awareness of ever having thought about that kind of thing or being exposed to it. You can be battled hardened regretably by our experiences or thinking about it seriously.
Even though the accounts in Beloved make you shake. But remember Morrison is a heroine of many and mine for many things and it is her attitude to death and killing in the context of black oppression.
In one of her earliest books. Damn can't remember Sula, no and not Bluest Eye. Can't remember, but the mother kills her son by setting him alight when he slept He was not a man by her cultural definition and only a black man strong and on his game was going to survive a black male reality.
Her son could not cut it and hid behind drugs or whatever. His mother put him out of his misery.. This is Morrison for me at her most powerful. She is both woman at the highest in her senisilities as a woman, a mother and that type of energy and sensibiity. But she is also a creator of life and the ultimate warrior in the taking of it, as mother and creator . In many respects this is the African ideal of mothe hood personified and recoginsed by most legal systems. Only a mother could appeal the death sentence place on him,by a king not a father.
So once we understand these things about Morrison and what she implicitly sees as the ideal role of black women in a tight and unthinkable spot and woman or mother hood at its highest, then we can understand her actions and those of her characters; and also the actions of thousands of African women who did the same. The Congo and Yoruba women of Trinidad who poisoned their children, smashed their skulls in etc after the failure of mass slave uprising and realisng the men had been defeated and what was to come. The African women of Grenada who threw themeselves and their children in thier thousands off "Leapers Hil" or those in Antigua who threw themselves off Devils Bridge into the Atlantic. Nobody can swim in that water, dead in minutes.
Would I like to kill anybody. Nope, killing is base and defilement of god. Wouild I kill. No problem whatsoever under the correct circumstances and would not think about it and have been there and will go there again.
Would I kill my children or any other child not if there is humanly and reasonably any way around it. Failing that, yes.
Morrison's book is horrfiying on many levels, as too many of us are not aware of the deep suffering and brutality which has been handed down to our people in their millions and goes on today and the ugly and inhumane choice and alternatives we had and have to face and the types of things involved.
We kill to stop our enemies killing us. We kill to stop those who are injured from being harmed more and we kill to save our own from that which is subhuman and worse than eternal sleep.
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Posted: Thursday February 3rd, 2005 19:05 |
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Hey Fred B
Thank you for the contribution...
Good points that you raised about having to kill a child as there are no other reasonable alternatives... I just found the last part of the book amazing where Sethe spent night and day trying to appease Beloved...
The book you mentioned.. that is Sula, Lord God that book disturbed me... I read it years ago when I was locked out of the house so I spent a good few hours in the Library reading that one... Saw Toni Morrison on BBC4 last year... and I was very impressed by her as a person...
but back to Sula, bloody hell the mother was a tough nut... do you remember the part where she disappeared for a spell and came back with one leg missing and the speculation was that she deliberately let a train run over her leg so she could pick up the compensation...
But, to be honest in Sethe's case I viewed her actions as quietly desperate... she did it out of fear... But in Sula, the mother was coldly deliberate in her actions... she was like an automaton... Although there was love there, in Sula the woman seemed quite hardened...
You are right in the point that wanting to kill and having to kill are two different problems...
In the case of Beloved, still up until now I was amazed by the callous attitude of those on Bluestone Road... who chose not to tell Sethe the slave catchers were coming due to their ill feeling and jealously towards Baby Suggs...
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Posted: Thursday February 3rd, 2005 19:17 |
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Best book I have read for a darn long time? Its a tie between Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day and Small Island by Andrea Levy. Can't stop going on about those two because oftentimes you pick up a book and have to stop reading it by page 30 because its so darn dull. Worst writing I have come across - anything By Caryl Phillips and Fred D'aguiar. Why oh why do so many black writers approach the novel as if they're mixing concrete, instead of having great sex? BTW I dont consider anything produced by the X Press publishers as writing, daubings by spiritual dwarves more like.
One of my fav books must be "Harder they Come" by Michael Thelwell..better than the film!!
My tip for book buyers..buy anything that's been given a national prize in Britain, and then whatever is top of the bestsellers list. Simple really. Having studied for an English degree and read most caribbean/african novels out there I can tell you that our blackpeople are as good at writing classic novels as whites are as good at creating classic soul music.One or two of us are great, just like Teena Marie and Barbra Streisand can sing soul, but these exceptions are not the rule. I am yet to be convinced otherwise.
Last edited on Thursday February 3rd, 2005 19:18 by ramiie
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Posted: Thursday February 3rd, 2005 19:22 |
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haha rammie have to agree with you , there is some pretty dire black literature out there.
in terms of caribbean litrature i was wondering what you thought of jamaica kincaid, derek walcott and edwidge danticat (haitian author.)
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Posted: Thursday February 3rd, 2005 19:27 |
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what do you think of this list rammie.
http://snipurl.com/cis0
Last edited on Thursday February 3rd, 2005 19:41 by NativeTongue
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Posted: Thursday February 3rd, 2005 21:30 |
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I don`t know much about Jamiaca Kincaid (good name tho) and Dandicat is a failrly interesting talent, but its a good list you got there. Earl Lovelace's book is a great read..Fisheye is a wicked creation..Derek Walcott post his stupid,early sixties pre black power phase is a true master. Read "Ruins of a Great House" ; "Crusoe`s Journal "Crusoe`s Anvil" and bow down before him. As a human being Naipual is bad advertisement for colonial education, but he can write.J ean Rhys's book is really cool, and compassionate. Of course you know that ER Braiithwaite didn`t believe in "Wide Sargasso Sea" but I think its perfect and my first convincing introduction to modernism. VirginiaWoolf PAH! Now a lot of my fans and detractors on the internet know that I like to diss and run down jamaicans, but I still think that the very best Caribean writers have come out of Jamaica - Michael Thelwell, VS Reid, and now the truly great Andrea Levy.
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Posted: Friday February 4th, 2005 21:09 |
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@Free said"Hey Fred B
Thank you for the contribution...
No thank you my dear sister. I said I don't read much fiction,doesnt mean I haven't. But I have read most in not all the classics or works our our GREAT WRITERS AND THINKE |
