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A Tool Used to Give a Voice to the Voiceless=An Unlearning of Western-centric History (dominance)

Magical Realism in Beloved

The Passage

-Impressionistic

-Full of Shifts

-Poetic Form

-Experience of the Middle Passage

“I am not separate from her there is no place where I stop her face is my own and I want to be there in the place where her face is and to be looking at it too a hot thing”(248).

Impressionistic Diction+lack of punctuation-> Confusion

I was going to help you but clouds got in the way./There's no clouds here./If they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it/away” (254).

A Voice

Who Writes History?

-"Sixty Million and more"-->under or un-represented

-Beloved=baby girl+sixty million and more

-Analysis 248-266-->narrator change

Primary Sources

-The Middle Passage

-Lack of primary source accounts-->from slaves

-Why? And Why is it important?

Commercial goods

Enslaved Africans

THE WINNERS

What is magical realism and what elements of "Beloved" fit this description?

What is the function of magical realism in Toni Morrison's "Beloved"?

Fantasy

Magical realism is a decolonizing tool.

Fact

A Multi-generational Issue

Fact

Spirituality in Beloved

The Narrator

"124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom"

Fantasy

Sethe

How This is Illustrated in the Novel...

“Beloved, she my daughter. She mine. See. She come back to me of her own free will and I don't have to explain a thing.”

“It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath. In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart” (103).

-Matter of fact

-Magical realism-->Accept supernatural

-Spirituality=major for slaves

-Baby Suggs=spiritual leader-->POWER

-Spirituality=survival

A Means of Exploring the Multi-Generational Impact of Slavery= Long Term Effects of Colonialism

Supernatural Acceptance

"Whitegirl. That's what she called it. I've never seen it, never will. But that's what she said it looked like. A chokecherry tree. Trunk, branches and even leaves. Tiny little chokecherry leaves. But it was eighteen years ago. Could have cherries too now for all I know"(18).

-Sethe and Denver's relationship.

Characterizations:

-Sethe=physical --> Denver=mental

Denver

"Well, I think the baby got plans"(45).

And the wrought-iron maze he had explored in the kitchen like a gold-miner through pay dirt was in fact a revolting clump of scars. Not a tree, as she said"(25).

-No questions asked

-Lived through previous horrors

-Every single character

"What tree on your back?[...] I don't see nothing growing on your back"(18)

Paul D

Internal+External

A scar=forever

"Denver would not sleep in her old room after her brothers ran away"(23).

"You want to fight, come on! God Damn it! She got enough without you. She got enough"(22).

“She had to be safe and I put her where she could be safe”(236).

"Her steps and her gave were the cautious ones of a child"(35).

Denver's Personality+Origins

"Slowly, methodically, miserably she ate it"(23).

“So intent on her nursing that she forgot to eat or visit the emerald closet” (64).

Ella and Women of the Community

-Sheltered->stunted

-Age?

-"Your love is too thick" (193). ->Concrete-motif of novel

-"I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but daughter I am holding in my arms. No more running from nothing.[...] I took one journey and I paid for the ticket"(18)

“The devil-child was clever, they thought. And beautiful. It had taken the shape of a pregnant woman, naked and smiling in the heat of the afternoon sun” (308).

A Contrast Between Science and Faith=A Re- imagining/Repossession

“There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks”

Contrast of Science and supernatural

Manipulation of language

Epithet

Colonization Today

This contrast challenges what we know to be right and wrong->decolonization.

Baby Suggs

-Effects still felt-->Negatively

-Ethnic Rivalry

-Unequal Distribution of Resources

-Human Rights Violations

-Lack of Governmental Institutions

-Which is more widely accepted?

-Western views standards-->by colonialism

-Baby Suggs=personification of good

-Schoolteacher=personification of evil

-Large contrast

-Goodness

-Epithet "Baby Suggs, Holy"

Schoolteacher

"They called him onka. Had pretty manners all of them.[...]The kind of people that knew Jesus by his first name"(45).

-Embodiment of evil

-Beats Sethe, mammary rape

-Inhuman acts

-Scientific

-Conflict

“Clever, but schoolteacher beat him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined.”

Why is it important?

Decolonization is...

How and where does it begin?

“Decolonization is a dramatic re-imagining of relationships with land, people and the state. Much of this requires study, it requires conversation, it is a practice, it is an unlearning.”

-Syed Hussan

-Process+goal.

-Unlearning.+Undoing.

-Group Effort.

How does magical realism serve as a means of decolonization?

Small-->Large

Beloved-->Reality

Conclusion

-Beloved=small scale of MAJOR process

-Magical realism=Imagination

-Decolonization=Imagination

-What can you imagine?

-What can we imagine?

-The Future

Morrison, Toni. Beloved: A Novel. Print.

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