Abstract
The relationship of gender and race to identity formation has an apocalyptic dimension in Toni Morrison’s text Beloved. 2 Characters see and understand themselves and the world most profoundly when in the grip of terror. Using traditional, apocalyptic language, the restoration of self develops through a spiritual journey that involves violence and chaos which take characters to the extremes of human endurance and, in turn, allows, even forces, self-discovery.
I have been raped because I have been wrong the wrong sex the wrong age the wrong skin the wrong nose the wrong hair the wrong need the wrong dream the wrong geographic the wrong sartorial I I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name My name is my own my own my own and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this but I can tell you that from now on my resistance my simple and daily and nightly self-determination may very well cost you your life. June Jordan, ‘Poem About My People’1
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Notes
June Jordan, ‘Poem about My People’, in Passion: New Poems, 1977–80 (Boston, Mass.: Beacon, 1980), p. 89.
Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: New American Library, 1987). All future references are to this text and are parenthetically referenced in essay.
Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) p. 10.
For an extended discussion of these ideas, see Rosemary Radford Ruether, ‘Eschatology and Feminism’, in Lift Every Voice: Constructing Christian Theologies from the Underside, ed. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite and Mary Potter Engel (San Francisco, Cal.: Harper & Row, 1990).
An excellent discussion of the role of Eve is found in Mieke Bal’s essay, ‘Sexuality, Sin, and Sorrow: the Emergence of Female Character (a Reading of Genesis 1–3)’, in Susan Suleiman, The Female Body in Western Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985) pp. 317–38.
I am aware that at this point in my essay I have become as ideological in terms of race and gender as those ideologies I so strongly oppose. Let me give some defence, meagre though it may be, of my position. My own claim, in this case to a certain political, rhetorical strategy, is not a move towards the empowerment of an other gender or an other race. To me, it appears that power is the problem; therefore, to pass power around is only to perpetuate the problem. What I am suggesting is ‘chosen vulnerability’, which may have powerful dimensions to it, but power is not its goal. And while I do think that my reading and interpretation of these issues are responsible, I am by no means suggesting that they are right and am more than willing to remain silent in the face of understandings and approaches other than my own, in particular those of persons of an other race and/or gender.
I wish to suggest here that ‘otherness’ is horrible when it threatens existing and comfortable patterns of existence or, in politic terms, existing, privileged power structures.
The most fascinating dimension of the Genesis story, to me, is that the serpent’s promise comes true. In Genesis 3: 5, the serpent says that if you eat of the fruit, ‘you will be like God’. And in Genesis 3: 22, God says, ‘See, the man has become like one of us.’ The human creature now knows good and evil. Indeed, Sethe and Paul D have gained knowledge from the tree on Sethe’s back.
Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: ‘The Invisible Institution’ in the Antebellum South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978) pp. 36.
Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Random House, 1976) p. 199.
Tillie Olsen, Silences (New York: Dell, 1965) p. 6.
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© 1996 Mark Ledbetter
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Ledbetter, M. (1996). An Apocalypse of Race and Gender: Body Violence and Forming Identity in Toni Morrison’s Beloved . In: Victims and the Postmodern Narrative or Doing Violence to the Body. Studies in Literature and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24590-1_3
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