Revolutionary Suicide in Toni Morrison's Fiction - Critical Essay

African American Review, Fall, 2000 by Katy Ryan

This "longing for another shore" characterizes Morrison's use of suicide, resonating most powerfully with Beloved's desire to cross over to the other side, to "join" with the woman whose face she has lost. Morrison has referred to the loss of African lives during the Atlantic crossing as a "whole nation that is under the sea," [9] and she dedicated Beloved to this other nation, the "sixty million and more." [10] The Middle Passage, as Barbara Christian argues in "Fixing Methodologies," hovers at the margins of cultural discourse; it "has practically disappeared from American cultural memory" (7). When, in Beloved, an unnamed woman jumps into the Atlantic Ocean, suicide becomes an act of staggering communal significance, another story that is not to be passed on. Christian correctly calls attention to the marginalization of the Atlantic Crossing in theory and in culture, but even her essay does not address this other unspeakable act. If Beloved is a "fixing ceremony" for the disremembered, as Christian convinc ingly argues, the "fixing" includes the memory of a woman who left a girl longing for her return.

The questions of responsibility and choice that surround Sethe's story of love and murder extend to Beloved's memory of the slaveship and to the act of suicide that emerges amid spatial gaps and signs. The figure of Beloved is as haunted by "the woman with my face" who disappeared on the Middle Passage as Sethe is by the daughter whom she killed. Beloved's lyrical monologues (210-17) coalesce with the ongoing experience of a girl crushed in a slaveship: "All of it is now it is always now there will never be a time when I am not crouching and watching others who are crouching too" (210). This fragmented account provides a glimpse into slave vessels that routinely exceeded the fatally high number of "cargo" legally permitted. Dr. Alexander Falconbridge, a surgeon on four slaving voyages, testified in Parliament that there was " 'not so much room as a man in his coffin either in length or breadth' " (qtd. in Cowley and Mannix 100-01). Captain Ernest H. Pentecost laments the lack of sensibility in Africans, who, "notwithstanding the strictest injunction against it," "cannot always be prevented from the filthy habit of depositing their natural excretions upon the spot where they sleep" (xxv). Unable to cry or vomit, Beloved explains, "some who eat nasty themselves I do not eat" (210). In 1629, the wife of a British governor recorded that one ship had been "'so pestered with people and goods; so full of infection that after a while they saw little but throwing people overboard'" (qtd. in Pentecost xxvii).

For women, the violence of the Middle Passage included rape, sexual torment, and assault. [11] When Sethe tells Beloved and Denver what little she knows of her own mother's life, Sethe begins to remember "something she had forgotten she knew. Something privately shameful that had seeped into a slit in her mind" (61). The act of telling revives the past; as Lynne Pearce argues, the past in Beloved is "reconstituted through dialogue" (187). But the past is also, as Laura Doyle demonstrates, reconstituted through bodies. The materiality of words and the semiotics of touch move Sethe's childhood memory into consciousness. Through a "slit" in her mind, Sethe recalls what she had learned from Nan after Sethe had tried to identify her mother's dead body among those killed on the plantation. Nan had taken Sethe's hand and "yanked her away from the pile before she could make out the mark"--the circle and cross burnt on her mother's rib. Nan told her in a language Sethe could no longer remember that she and her mother were on the sea together. "Both were taken up many times by the crew. 'She threw them all away but you,'" Nan had said. Sethe's father was the only one her mother had "'put her arms around'"(62). This assertion of the past, of "something privately shameful," forces Sethe to confront her mother's repeated rapes on the ship. The shame felt by the surviving daughter conveys the terrorist effects of sexual violence, even a generation removed. The forgotten language, the yanking hand, the choosing arms return Sethe to her mother's life, and, as Deborah Horvitz writes, "if Sethe remembers her mother, she must also remember that she believes her mother deserted her" (159). In this storytelling moment and double rememory, the child Sethe's desire to identify her dead mother coexists with the desire of the listening Beloved to recognize the face of a woman who jumped from the ship: "Sethe's is the face that left me," she concludes (214). But neither Sethe nor Beloved can find her beloved in the pile of bodies that is lost to history.