'Beloved': ideologies in conflict, improvised subjects

African American Review, Spring, 1999 by Arlene R. Keizer

As critic Barbara Christian argues in "Fixing Methodologies: Beloved," "In not being able to remember, name, and feed those who passed on in the Middle Passage, those who survived had to abandon their living dead to the worst possible fate that could befall a West African: complete annihilation" (13). Citing John Mbiti's African Religions and Philosophy, Christian writes,

. . . Mbiti warns us that, in traditional West African societies, Africans do not worship their ancestors. Rather, they believe that when a person passes (and this phrase is important, as it is still consistently used by African Americans), that is, "dies," in the Western sense, they do not disappear as long as someone remembers them, their name, their character . . . . The acts of feeding the dead and pouring libations are meant as symbols, active symbols of communion, fellowship, and renewal. Thus continuity, not only of genes but also of active remembering, is critical to a West African's sense of her or his own personal being and, beyond that, of the beingness of the group.

Mbiti also points out that the ancestors are associated with their land, the piece of Nature they inhabit. The people are the land, the land is the people. He tells us: ". . . to remove Africans by force from their land is an act of such great injustice that no foreigner can fathom it." (11-12)

By calling our attention to the African belief systems that were violently disrupted by the slave trade and the North American and Caribbean system of forced labor, Christian illuminates the cultural conflict at work in slavery and represented by Morrison in Beloved. The African cultural referents in Beloved have indeed been ignored by most critics, probably because of the dearth of knowledge in the West about the actual religious practices and philosophical traditions of African peoples. Despite a growing body of literary, historical, anthropological, and theological work produced in the past thirty to forty years, Africa still remains a "dark continent" to many, if not most, Western readers; few expect to find respectful evocations of African philosophy and spirituality in a book that is being touted as a new classic in American literature. Too often, slaves are still seen as Western subjects manque, whose sense of themselves was constructed primarily in terms of Eurocentric or Anglocentric concepts of self.(11) Morrison's inclusion of African characters, belief systems, and practices in Beloved illuminates the hidden lives of the slaves, the mental attitudes and rituals that allowed some slaves to survive and to resist their bondage.(12)

Despite the power of the master's interpellations, Sethe and Paul D are also being claimed by this broken but not entirely erased world of West African cultural and spiritual practices. This alternative world view is represented in the novel by Nan (the woman who took care of the young Sethe), Sethe's mother, and Sixo. These three are African by birth, survivors of the Middle Passage. They continue in the observance of cultural and spiritual practices from their homelands, as far as their enslaved condition allows. Nan and Sethe's mother are among the slaves on the plantation where Sethe was born who dance "the antelope" and other dances of African origin, as well as speaking to one another in their native tongue. Sixo dances among the trees at night "to keep his bloodlines open," (25) and maintains his connection to his native language (though he seems to have no one with whom to speak it - it's not clear if the Thirty-Mile Woman is from his ethnic group, or even African by birth). For Nan, Sethe's mother, and Sixo, observances that were once part of a hegemonic interpellating system in their native countries have become, in the land of their exile and enslavement, subversive. These African characters are engaged in resistance to the dismembering logic of the white-capitalist, patriarchal system of domination. Their resistance is produced not as a mere effect of the relation of domination, but as a result of the subjugation of one ideology by another incompatible ideology.