Postcolonial Experience in a Domestic

Context: Commodified Subjectivity in

Toni Morrison's Beloved.
by Mary Jane Suero Elliott
Many of the characters in Beloved are born into slavery and experience the imposed
objectivity of its commodifying ideology. Clearly, as we know from historical and
slave narratives, such objectivity does not exclude all possibility of experiencing some
degree of subjectivity. In Beloved, however, denial and oppression of black identity
by the larger slave-owning society leads to an internalization of this colonizing
discourse and subsequently to an inability for some, and for others a constant struggle,
to develop a self-empowered subjectivity when free from physical slavery. Thus,
although the end of slavery signals the beginning of a "post" colonial(1) period for
African Americans, their status continues to be defined by slavery's colonial
ideologies.(2) The imposed perception of themselves as commodified beings, when
internalized, results in their continued struggle to develop an empowered, agentive
sense of self.
In Yearning, bell hooks writes about black subjectivity as "an oppositional worldview,
a consciousness, an identity, a standpoint that exists not only as that struggle which
also opposes dehumanization but as that movement which enables creative, expansive
self-actualization" (15). For Sethe, Beloved's central character, self-actualization, or
the development of subjectivity, can be realized only outside the limits of a colonial
discourse and within a collectively defined alternate discourse signifying individual
empowerment. This alternative discourse, I argue, is found in the free black
community to which Sethe flees. But her subjectivity is realized only when she
becomes a full member of her community. Membership depends on both Sethe's and
the community's recognition of internalized ideologies of oppression. Morrison's text,
then, can be read as postcolonial(3) because it delineates a process of self-liberation
through communal support within the colonial context of slavery.
In a postcolonial analysis of Beloved, the work of Homi Bhabha(4) and Gloria
Anzaldua helps us to read Sethe's self-actualization as a resistive process against
objectifying colonial definitions of black identity. Anzaldua's definition of "mestiza
consciousness"(5) complements Bhabha's definition of the shifting positionalities
within the "colonial subject" and the formation of a colonial subjectivity through the
colonial fetish and stereotype. For Anzaldua, all women of color have the potential to
reflect a mestiza consciousness. As an oppressed woman of color, Sethe has this
potential. In Sethe, then, the text develops a mestiza character. Together, the theories
of Anzaldua and Bhabha serve to recontextualize Sethe's motivations for murdering
her child, the subsequent ostracism by her community, her obsessive love for Beloved,
and her final release from the ideological confines of colonial commodification. This
recontextualization of Sethe's story defines Beloved as a mestiza text.
Within the postcolonial framework through which I read Beloved,(6) resisting the
colonial perception of self as commodified inferior is part of what Satya P. Mohanty
terms "decolonization." Developing an empowered subjectivity involves learning to
define oneself through a perspective uninformed by dominant definitions of black
identity. Acquiring a perspective outside of colonial constructs of inferiorized subject
positions subverts these constructs and thus decolonizes the self. The process of
decolonization is an important part of this mestiza text because the main character
moves from a limiting "counterstance" position, signifying a mere inversion of
colonial roles, to mestiza consciousness, signifying an alternative discourse outside
colonial ideologies. Significantly, in Beloved decolonization occurs in a communal
context. The book's central characters begin to define themselves against a colonially
defined and internalized isolation, fear, or even pride only with the support of others
who also have experienced oppression. Attempts at self-liberation fail when they are
not founded on mutual trust between individuals or support from community.
Furthermore, decolonization is not only an individual process within a communal
context, but also a collective occurrence. The text's emphasis on "rememory" as
collective(7) as well as individual theorizes a process of collective decolonization.(8)
Linda Krumholz's definition of slavery begins to address the idea of collectivity as
conceptualized in Beloved. She defines slavery, and thus implicitly the nation's
colonialist history, as a "national trauma" (396) not limited to individuals or to African
Americans. I read Krumholz's concept of national trauma as specifically informed by
a colonialist past and a neocolonialist present. The national, historical process of
healing and rememory identified by Krumholz becomes, in my definition of
rememory, a process of collective decolonization.
Morrison's text implicitly speaks to the need for collective decolonization in its focus
on rememory and the necessity of confronting the past's unresolved issues. A
postcolonial reading highlights the implications of the text for alternative
conceptualizations of national history.(9) Reading slavery explicitly as a colonial
institution forces a certain kind of rememory: slavery is a historical reality for every
U.S. citizen, not just for contemporary African Americans. Importantly, Morrison's
historical revisioning, which calls for collective rememory, defines the U.S. as an
oppressive colonialist nation, thus challenging official historical narratives of
democratic benevolence. It also places the U.S. as a nation in a parallel position to
Sethe and slavery; Sethe and her relationship to slavery as a colonialist institution
embodies in microcosm a specifically postcolonial facet of Morrison's historical
rememory. In this equation, Sethe represents national identity as defined by colonial
constructs. Just as the colonialist nature of national history manifests itself through
the institutionalization of slavery, Sethe's act of infanticide manifests her
internalization of the oppressive ideologies that justify her enslavement. As a result,
her story is about learning how to resist effectively, how to develop an empowered
rather than a destructive subjectivity. Just as she needs to confront unresolved issues
in her past, the nation, in an act of collective decolonization, also must confront the
colonialist past in order to change the neocolonialist present.
Morrison's revisioning, read within a postcolonial framework, is radical in its
conclusion to the national narrative embodied in Sethe's story. Her decolonized
subjectivity does not signify power over others, but empowerment within a context of
communal support. Thus Morrison, in creating an alternative outside binary
colonialist constructs for Sethe's developing subjectivity, also creates an alternative
for U.S. history. She not only rewrites the past, but in a reading of Sethe as
representative of an alternative national identity, Morrison offers an alternative for the
national future. By this logic, the U.S. need not follow the colonialist trajectory it has
been simultaneously following and creating. Morrison thus denaturalizes ideologies
of nationhood that require an oppressive, strictly boundaried stance. Morrison's
concept of rememory, read as postcolonial, challenges and begins to redefine
traditional definitions of nationhood, of an isolated yet dominant imperialist power,
one boundaried both internationally and domestically. Sethe learns she cannot be truly
"free" without undergoing a process of decolonization, defined by the novel as
contextualized, necessarily, in her African American community. If Sethe learns to
decolonize herself through and within a communal context, then in the parallel
between Sethe and national identity, the nation must re-think its position in an
international context. At the very least, Morrison's historical revisioning speaks to the
need to alter national self-definitions, representations, and positionings in a global
"community."
The novel emphasizes Sethe's contact with slavery's commodification that results in
psychological, emotional, and spiritual damage. Bhabha's concept of the "colonial
subject" helps theorize the specific nature of this system:
The construction of the colonial subject in discourse, and the
exercise of
colonial power through discourse, demands an articulation of forms
of
difference--racial and sexual. Such an articulation becomes crucial
if it
is held that the body is always simultaneously (if conflictually)
inscribed
in both the economy of pleasure and desire and the economy of
discourse,
domination and power. (67)
Because in the colonial economy, of slavery the black woman, both metaphorically
and visually, embodies the interconnection between "the economy of pleasure and
desire" and "the economy of domination and power," she also represents the
"difference" demanded by colonial discourse. In Morrison's text, Sethe, the black
female slave, represents this difference as racial and sexual "other." This difference,
once created to justify colonial domination, must be continuously reiterated in order
to rationalize colonial force. This constructed difference is re-enacted through Sethe's
body by the schoolteacher and his nephews:
I am full God damn it of two boys with mossy teeth, one sucking on
my
breast the other holding me down, their book-reading teacher watching
and
writing it up. I don't want to know or have to remember that. I have
other
things to do: worry about tomorrow, about Denver, about Beloved,
about age
and sickness not to speak of love. But her brain was not interested
in the
future. (70)
Here we have white othering of a black woman and the resulting damage of a
fetishized identity. The schoolteacher observes Sethe's rape and makes it a discursive
act, exploiting Sethe as a racial and sexual other in order to re-write her identity as
that of a subhuman creature, bestial rather than human. Sethe, then, experiences the
fetishization of herself and her body by the schoolteacher and his nephews. In having
his nephews act out, on Sethe's body, the constructed degradation of one racially and
sexually othered, the schoolteacher reinforces slavery's colonial discourse through his
own, simultaneously enacted, discursivity. Sethe's personhood, as it has been allowed
to exist under slavery, is reduced further to animality. Bhabha differentiates between
the sexual fetish and the sexualized "fetish of colonial discourse" (78), locating the
latter in the ambivalent space (72) occupied by the colonized. This space is "in
between" an imposed identity and the reality of their humanity for the colonized and
between the recognized and the disavowed, between fear and desire for the colonizers.
The tropes of the sexual fetish are present in the colonial fetish, but syncretized with
certain tropes of colonialist experience and identity to embody the larger socio-
political context of colonial relations. In this context, the white schoolteacher inhabits
the in between space of the colonizer, thus needing to rationalize slavery's dominating
and oppressive ideologies in a discursive act that also serves to justify his position
within these ideologies. For Sethe, the fetishization of her body by the white
schoolteacher and his nephews causes psychic fragmentation that continues to thwart
the development of her subjectivity after she leaves slavery. Sethe wants to
concentrate on her future; however, her commodified status, dramatized
fetishistically, forms a barrier which prevents her from resisting objectifying colonial
influence.
Sethe's community both perpetuates the legacy of slavery, demonstrating a collective
internalization of the commodification discourse, and plays an important role in the
process of the development of her subjectivity against colonial lessons of
disempowerment. Morrison explains:
Sethe had had twenty-eight days ... of unslaved life.... Days of
healing,
ease and real-talk. Days of company: knowing the names of forty,
fifty
other Negroes, their views, habits; where they had been and what
done: of
feeling their fun and sorrow along with her own, which made it
better....
All taught her how it felt to wake up at dawn and decide what to do
with
the day.... Bit by bit ... along with the others, she had claimed
herself.
Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed
self was
another. (95)
Sethe lives an "unslaved life" for only twenty-eight days, although she never returns
to literal slavery. Consequently, Morrison defines an unslaved life as a life with the
freedom to develop one's subjectivity. This process is closely bound to inclusion in
and participation with one's community. Sethe frees herself, but she does not "claim
ownership of that freed self" alone. The past does not hold the power to frustrate the
growth of her subjectivity when development is part of a collective endeavor. Her
people "teach" her how to be herself because, until this moment, she learns, through
coercion, lessons of invisibility and silence. The necessary reciprocity of communal
living and the continuous learning experience of constant communication with others
help Sethe learn to see herself as an empowered subject within a supportive
community rather than the inferior other within colonial ideology. Morrison, however,
does not portray a simplistic image of communal perfection. She writes instead about
the warped codes of morality that eventually cause a collective desertion of Sethe
when she most needs support. Because the generous invitation to a bountiful feast at
Baby Suggs's is taken as a sign of pride, the community hopes and waits for Sethe's
downfall. The community, therefore, begins to withdraw its enveloping and
empowering support the day after the party:
nobody ran on ahead.... to say some new whitefolks with the Look
just rode
in. The righteous Look every Negro learned to recognize .... Like a
flag
hoisted this righteousness telegraphed and announced the faggot, the
whip,
the fist, the lie, long before it went public. Nobody warned them
... some
 ... thing--like ... meanness let them stand aside, or not pay
attention.
(157)
The people of the community tacitly withdraw their support by denying Sethe, without
warning, access to a system of communication developed by and for the community.
Because of the chronological order of events--the party, the silence of the community,
the appearance of the white schoolteacher at 124, Sethe's murder of her daughter, and
the subsequent ostracism of Sethe from the community--we can isolate the moment
when Sethe's troubles begin as the moment when the community decides to withdraw
its support. As Charles Scruggs points out, "Somehow the members of the black
community imagine that Baby Suggs has not suffered in slavery as they have suffered,
and this ignorance of their mutual history makes mutual trust impossible" (103).
Mutual trust is essential for the collective formation of an empowering alternate
discourse. Their mutual distrust both reflects the internalized lessons of
commodification and negates the mutual support necessary for the development of
individual and communal subjectivity. Because the concept of history is linked closely
in this text to slavery and the specific context of a colonized past, a denial of the
collective nature of this experience keeps them from challenging and restructuring
definitive ideologies as a community. Moreover, the community's need to see a
successful black family's downfall indirectly causes Sethe to perform the act for which
it cannot morally forgive her.
Why does Morrison so carefully outline and emphasize the communal responsibility
at which the community fails? Anzaldua's concept of borderlands, which parallels the
text's theorization of the relationship between self and community, helps address this
question. According to her definition, border culture is created by "the lifeblood of
two worlds merging to form a third[,] ... a border culture." Anzaldua explains:
[a] borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the
emotional
residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of
transition.... The only `legitimate' inhabitants are those in power,
the
whites and those who align themselves with whites. Tension[,] ...
ambivalence[,] and unrest reside there and death is no stranger. (3-
4)
The community in which Sethe lives is similar in several important aspects to the
"borderland" defined above. The free black community in the nineteenth century
represents a borderland between two more established cultures: the black slave culture
and the free white slave-owning culture. Like Anzaldua's borderland, the free black
community in Beloved has no fixed, institutionalized, organized moral and social
codes of behavior and thought. It can be defined as an "unnatural boundary" because
it is a relatively new community with no social precedents, whose vulnerable
existence is compounded by unrelenting white hatred and disrespect. Living "in
between" two conflicting cultures results in the tension, ambivalence, and unrest that
Anzaldua describes. Anzaldua also describes how "[t]ribal rights over those of the
individual insured the survival of the tribe.... The welfare of the family, the
community, and the tribe is more important than the welfare of the individual. The
individual exists first as kin--a sister, a father, a padrino--and last as self" (18).
Beloved's free black community can be compared to Anzaldua's tribe, to a culture that
needs to protect itself from, while existing within, a dominant colonial culture.
Compounding this problem is the fact that the colonial culture legitimizes only the
selfless state of slavery for blacks. The community, therefore, struggles constantly for
the right, the opportunity, and the freedom to exist. Paradoxically, it must continue
the process that the dominant culture has begun--the suppression of black individual
subjectivity--in order to validate its position in society and the choices it has made.
Thus, as I will argue below, Sethe is punished severely for trying to assert her own
and her daughter's rights to subjectivity by a community still operating within a ruling
ideology that commodifies black personhood.
Morrison articulates another motivation behind the communal ostracism of Sethe in
the following excerpt:
Whitepeople believed that ... under every dark skin was a jungle....
In a
way ... they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength
trying
to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how
human ...
the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn't
the
jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other
(livable)
place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. (198-99)
The continued internalization of being labeled "other" leads to the denial of black
individual voice and subjectivity, thereby twisting the free black community's moral
code to the point where it will turn on one of its own. Internalization of white fear and
hate intensifies the tension and ambivalence that Anzaldua describes as part of a
border culture. Because of the internalization of a white colonial morality and the
constant ambivalence of a border culture, the free black community self-destructively
measures and judges Sethe by a morality that denies subjectivity. The fact that Sethe's
community operates under an internalized system oppressive to black identity informs
her motivations for killing her child. Because her community chooses to withdraw its
support, it denies Sethe the opportunity to escape from the schoolteacher as he rides
to 124 with the sheriff. The community's inaction forces Sethe to try to save her
children from a life of imposed silence and denied selfhood by some other means.
Sethe "flew, snatching up her children like a hawk on the wing ... her face beaked ...
her hands worked like claws ... she collected them every which way ... into the
woodshed" (157) where she tries "to kill her children" (158). When Paul D learns
about Sethe's act, he is repulsed. He cannot understand that infanticide is the only
possibility, the only course of action open to Sethe within a colonial discourse. Her
internalization of the lessons of commodification encourages Sethe to act, in a highly
problematic attempt to save her children from commodification, as if they are not only
extensions of herself, but also her possessions. In an internal dialogue with Beloved,
Sethe thinks,
Some other way, he said. Let schoolteacher haul us away, I guess, to
measure your behind before he tore it up? I have felt what it felt
like and
nobody ... is going to make you feel it too. Not you, not none of
mine, and
when I tell you you mine, I also mean I'm yours. I wouldn't draw
breath
without my children.... My plan was to take us all to the other side
where
my own ma'am is. (203)
By killing Beloved, Sethe refuses to allow her daughter to be objectified and
commodified by a colonialist culture. To Sethe, killing her child saves her not only
from the physical suffering of slavery but also from its "measuring," which signifies
an appropriation of discourse and an oppression of black identity. Despite its
protective motivation, however, Sethe's act effectively denies her daughter the chance
to live. It signifies her appropriation of the potential of her daughter's yet unrealized
subjectivity. Bhabha's theory of the colonial subject defines Sethe's act as limited by
its reaction to a commodifying ideology. "It is always in relation to the place of the
Other that colonial desire is articulated: the phantasmic space of possession that no
one subject can singly or fixedly occupy, and therefore permits the dream of the
inversion of roles" (44). Through his theorization of the colonial subject, representing
both the colonized and the colonizer, Bhabha defines the colonial subject position as
shifting rather than fixed. In the creation of a colonial subjecthood, colonial discourse
forms a space in which the positionalities of master and slave not only define each
other, but can shift into an inversion of roles. Such an inversion of roles cannot be
subversive because it remains within and therefore defined by a colonialist paradigm
of domination and commodification. Although several critics read Sethe's act as
resistive,(10) Bhabha's concept of the colonial subject, which enables a colonial
contextualization of her act, defines her resistance as limited by the isolationist
ideologies of a Western colonialism. Bhabha's definition of a shifting colonial subject
positionality allows a reading of Sethe's identity in relation to the ruling colonial
paradigm by foregrounding Sethe's changing position within a colonially constructed
value system. In a reading of Beloved as postcolonial, Sethe's act becomes a desperate
attempt at liberation within a context of limited choices because of her community's
re-enactment of a colonial system's power relations.
In murdering her daughter, Sethe attempts, in Anzaldua's terms, a "counterstance"(11)
against the colonial forces that coercively have defined her as property and that
threaten to do the same to her children. Her counterstance exemplifies her attempt to
subvert the oppressive system by a kind of inversion of roles. In this case, Sethe tries
to control her children's fate by killing them, thus occupying the colonizer's
commodifying role. Subsequently, the community's manifestation of collective
internalization of an objectifying ideology (the ostracism of Sethe) creates a "domino
effect" which leads to Sethe's reinscription within the ideological confines of a
colonial discourse. As Morrison writes, "Those twenty-eight happy days were
followed by eighteen years of disapproval and a solitary life" (173). Sethe's "solitary
life" is static; there is no potential for personal growth. Sethe describes her life in those
eighteen years as "unlivable" (173). Because of her decision to kill her child and thus
protect her from the "unlivable" life of denied subjectivity in slavery, she herself
returns to a life in which she is unable to continue learning to "claim her freed self."
The redundant cyclicity of "eighteen years of solitary life" cannot end, and Sethe
cannot break through the stasis of her existence, until she can step outside the confines
of the dominant colonial discourse. She cannot do so without finding resolution to her
relationship with her daughter. Beloved returns to 124 for the same reason she has
haunted Sethe, to force her mother to confront her past. The act that ends her life, her
mother denying Beloved her own identity, begins a cycle from which neither mother
nor daughter can escape without some movement towards resolution. When Beloved
returns as a visible and tangible presence, Sethe no longer can ignore and deny her
painful past. Sethe is incapable of personal growth for many years because she refuses
to face her own commodification and its internalization. Instead, Sethe's denial of the
colonial forces in her life continues to block the development of her subjectivity.
Within the narrative, Beloved's physical presence and the ensuing interactive
relationship it begins between mother and daughter eventually force Sethe to
acknowledge the internalized colonization that she has hitherto ignored.
The first month Sethe and Beloved spend together seems idyllic (240). Soon, however,
the unresolved tension dominates the atmosphere: "it was Beloved who made
demands. Anything she wanted she got, and when Sethe ran out of things to give her,
Beloved invented desire.... the mood changed and the arguments began.... She took
the best of everything--first" (240-41). Beloved knows only desire; she knows only
what she lacks. But she cannot be satisfied; her unbalanced self, consisting only of
desire, is inexhaustibly hungry. Sethe responds by trying to satisfy Beloved's desire:
"Sethe played all the harder with Beloved, who never got enough of anything" (240).
Sethe is driven by the guilt of the past, by the memory of what she did to her daughter,
which causes her to focus obsessively on Beloved and neglect all other aspects of her
personality and her life:
Sethe pleaded for forgiveness, counting, listing again and again her
reasons: that Beloved was more important, meant more to her than her
own
life. That she would trade places any day. Give up her life, every
minute
and hour of it, to take back just one of Beloved's tears. (241-42)
Sethe's obsessive focus is as unbalanced as Beloved's desire. In trying to erase a past
that cannot be erased by wanting to exchange her life for Beloved's pain, she succeeds
only in re-emphasizing the limitation of her own subjectivity. Her obsession cannot
lead to a positive resolution between herself and Beloved because it mimics the binary
paradigms of a colonial discourse of commodification. While Sethe must deal with
her past, she cannot deal with it at the expense of her present existence and through
the continued denial of her own internalization of a commodifying ideology. Sethe
and Beloved are "locked in a love that wore everybody out" (243). The desperate
emotional interaction between Sethe and Beloved intensifies as they continue trapped
in a cycle with no relief. Sethe "sat in the chair licking her lips like a chastised child
while Beloved ate up her life, took it, swelled up with it, grew taller on it. And the
older woman yielded it up without a murmur" (250). Sethe still attempts to erase the
past, this time by taking the place of Beloved herself. The past and the objectifying
appropriation it represents, however, cannot be erased; Sethe must acknowledge her
own complicity in colonial appropriations within a binary system of violent
possession and only thus be enabled to create an alternate discourse of self-
empowerment.
Anzaldua's concept of the counterstance and Bhabha's definition of the colonial
subject help in reading the cloistering of Sethe and Beloved at 124. Because of the
specific consequences of her previous attempt at a counterstance, Sethe now plays the
role of slave to Beloved's master. Thus, in another shift of colonial subject positions,
Sethe no longer attempts subversion through an assumption of the colonizer's role, but
instead attempts to negate the consequences of her original counterstance on Beloved
and on herself by re-inverting the roles of colonizer and colonized within her
relationship with her daughter. She allows Beloved, in effect, to play the colonizer
and gradually redefine Sethe as her possession. In their individual inner monologues
(200-17), the significant phrase is "She is mine." This sentence is repeated
continuously by the two women as they desperately try to reach the other through a
discourse of ownership. Sethe has internalized the lessons of her reduction and
violation, and this internalization manifests itself in her relationship with Beloved.
According to Bhabha, the dominant being is at stake in the constructed field of the
dominated; the privileged being is always defined by the unprivileged position of the
dominated. When working within a colonial discourse of commodification, such as
slavery, in which human beings are divided into binary identities of owner and owned,
Sethe desperately tries to give her daughter subjectivity in ways metaphorized as
feeding, storytelling, placating, and serving. In trying to give her daughter the
subjectivity she took away, so that she herself may achieve some peace and therefore
perhaps a more fulfilled identity, Sethe re-enacts the master/slave relationship based
on binaries that she internalized as a child. Their dialectic relationship cannot succeed
in freeing either Sethe or Beloved from their past because it is based on a system in
which both positions are defined ultimately by oppression. Sethe cannot define herself
as a subject through this system. Instead, she must find an alternate discursive space
in which she can learn to become a subject.
How can Sethe escape the relentless definition of herself and her community as
property? How can she find an alternative to the colonial/slave system of binaries that
has infiltrated every part of her life? Through "sewing" metaphors, both Anzaldua and
Bhabha locate sites of resistance within the "in between" space of colonized
experience and identification appropriate to Sethe's position. Both Bhabha's metaphor
of the "sutured stereotype" (80) and Anzaldua's metaphor of the "interface" between
masks are characterized by ambivalence. The sutured stereotype, created and imposed
by colonial discourses, can result in the internalized ambivalence of Anzaldua's
interfaced masks.(12) This ambivalence, although a product of racist colonial
ideologies, is also a potential site for resistance. The transformative potential of
Anzaldua's "mestiza" identity can, in a cathartic or epiphanous moment, transform the
negative tension of ambivalence into an empowering source of resistance. Implicit in
Bhabha's definition of the sutured stereotype is the potential disruption of its
coherence.
In Beloved, this potential is realized when Sethe's community renews its support,
thereby enabling her to disrupt the hitherto totalizing influence of othering,
commodifying ideologies on her sense of self. It is through communal support that
Sethe is able to face the symbol of the colonial oppression in her life and thus enter
the empowering social and psychological space of a collectively defined discourse. In
this case, it is the women of the community that "came together" and "arrived at 124
... the first thing they saw was themselves.... there they were, young and happy,
playing in Baby Suggs' yard, not feeling the envy that surfaced the next day" (258).
In coming together to help one of their own, the women are able to envision the past
in which they had experienced a collectively empowering "mutual trust" with the
family of 124. Their positive common memory strengthens their communal resolve,
and they begin to pray for Sethe. "Then Ella hollered. Instantly the kneelers and the
standers joined her. They stopped praying and took a step back to the beginning. In
the beginning there were no words. In the beginning was the sound, and they all knew
what that sound sounded like" (254). In this case, the position of the community of
women reflects the unique position of black women vis a vis a colonialist social
system. Their role in Sethe's liberaton is part of the text's gendered revisioning of
history. Significantly, the disruptive discourse is defined by specifically racial and
gendered voices.
The women of the community use the "sound" to position themselves outside the
dominant discourse, a discourse defined and imposed by white colonizers. They need
to position themselves selves thus in order to reach Sethe. Because the communal
application of a morality warped by an internalization of inappropriate, oppressive
lessons results in Sethe's tragedy, using the dominant discourse to reach Sethe can
cause only more damage. The following occurs when Sethe hears the voices:
For Sethe it was as though the Clearing had come to her with all its
heat
 and simmering leaves, where the voices of women searched for the
right
combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of
words.
Building voice upon voice until they found it, and when they did it
was a
wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock pods off
chestnut
trees. It broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its
wash.
(261)
What succeeds in breaking through the cycle imprisoning Sethe and Beloved in its
redundant sterility is the sound of the community's voice. The use of a communal
voice to negate the effects of an oppressive discourse on Sethe's life serves to link her
once again to the community and to the potential to develop her subjectivity.(13) As
she trembles "like the baptized in its wash," it is as if Sethe has been reborn outside
of the confines of a limiting ideology and within an alternate, empowering communal
discourse.(14) Bhabha's discussion of postcolonial stereotypes and fetishes theorizes
sound's ability to break through the oppressive ideological barriers of colonial
discourse. In this case, the sound is located outside a dominant discourse informed by
a colonial power structure because it is outside or "beyond" the colonizer's language,
a language infiltrated and defined by a colonial discourse of domination. The fetish is
embodied by the stereotype through language; the stereotype is the linguistic
representation of the content of the fetish. Significantly, then, Sethe steps outside of
the colonial discourse through a simultaneous return to a collectively defined alternate
discourse. Examining the text through Bhabha's definition of the stereotype links
Sethe's fetishization by the school-teacher to her eventual disruption of the meaning
behind the fetishistic event. The concept of the sound, here representing communal
support, refers to the fetish through Bhabha's definition of the stereotype in relation to
language. Through sound, not language, Sethe is able to break away from the
oppressive hold of a colonially fetishized past.
As Sethe watches the women gathered around 124, Edward Bodwin, a white man,
rides towards the house. Sethe mistakes him for the schoolteacher. Her reaction to
what she perceives to be a threat, a symbol of slavery's objectification, signals a break
from the internalization of colonial influences:
he is coming into her yard and he is coming for her best thing....
And if
she thinks anything, it is no. No no. Nonono. She flies. The icepick
is not
in her hand; it is her hand. Standing alone on the porch, Beloved is
smiling. But now her hand is empty. Sethe is ... running into the
faces of
the people out there, joining them. (260-61)
With communal support, Sethe faces her internalization and re-enactment of colonial
paradigms instead of denying her own complicity and ignoring its consequences on
Beloved. In this way, Sethe realizes the potential inherent within her identity and,
instead of merely inverting colonial subject positions, positions herself against, rather
than within, colonial subjecthood. Anzaldua's definition of the mestiza further
explicates Sethe's new positionality vis a vis the colonial discourse: "The new mestiza
copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions. Not only does she sustain
contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else. She can be jarred out
of ambivalence by an intense ... emotional event which inverts ... the ambivalence"
(Borderlands 79). Sethe's inversion of a limiting ambivalence enables her to attack the
representation of the enslaving force in her life instead of turning, like the community
has in the past, on one of her own. She has an ice pick in her hand, but because she no
longer needs to repeat the past, she can attack the true source of her oppression instead
of Beloved. Sethe no longer attempts to exercise agency through a counterstance; she
has moved beyond attempting resistance by inverting binary roles in a colonial power
hierarchy. Her act is thus cathartic; it finally frees both Sethe and her daughter. The
support of the community, reaching Sethe through voice, acts as the catalyst for the
cathartic act that ends the vicious cycle from which Sethe and Beloved cannot break
out alone.
If positions in a relationship define one another, then Beloved's disappearance at the
conclusion of the text can be read as an act of resolution. Beloved's haunting of 124
is one stage in the relationship between Sethe and Beloved in which each of their
positions defines and thus affects the other profoundly. As long as Sethe cannot further
the development of her subjectivity because of the constraints of an internalized or
self-colonization, Beloved cannot find peace. Anzaldua's concept of the mestiza
suggests the kind of break Sethe has made away from oppressive colonial influences:
"By creating a new mythos--that is, a change in the way we perceive reality, the way
we see ourselves ...--la mestiza creates a new consciousness.... The work of mestiza
consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her prisoner"
(Borderlands 80). Beloved's disappearance mirrors Sethe's "birth" into a "new
consciousness."
Because developing subjectivity is a continuous process and one is never a completed
subject, the text does not conclude with total resolution. By the end of the novel,
however, the characters are no longer trapped in a static, redundant pattern of
existence. Sethe now can work towards an empowered subjectivity because she has
broken through limitations imposed by slavery, by communal ostracism, and by
severed or thwarted familial relationships. Although the interrelationships between
Sethe, her community, and her daughter have been damaged by a colonized past, it is
through these familial and communal bonds that Sethe disrupts the ideologies of a
commodifying culture, and, with her community, restructures a definitive communal
discourse.
Because Beloved's community is defined implicitly by the text as an internal colony,
theories of postcolonialism serve to highlight colonial structures embedded in the text.
Furthermore, a postcolonial contextualization permits certain metaphorizations of
Sethe's character and her relationship to colonial constructs. In the parallel identified
earlier, Sethe, as representative of national identity, both embodies the problematic
history of the U.S. as a colonizing, slave-holding culture and exemplifies an
alternative for the national future. Sethe's act of infanticide, a destructive attempt at
resistance, is instructive as a metaphor for problematic power dynamics at a national
level. Her act of resistance is ultimately ineffective because it does not "free" either
herself or Beloved. As an act appropriated from the colonial social order and
appropriating another's subjectivity, it only serves to enslave further both Sethe and
her daughter. Later, Sethe's ability to re-enter her community in a mutually
empowering way and thus to become truly "free" through the process of
decolonization points to a necessary decolonization at a national level. A
neocolonialist present exposes the nation's unresolved colonialist history.
The alternative discourse created in the text by the free black community can be
translated to national ideologies. The novel's liberatory potential lies in its
embodiment of mestiza identity and consciousness. Through the concept of
rememory, the text calls for a process of decolonization that is communal rather than
isolated and individualized. As a mestiza text, Beloved crosses borders and
transgresses boundaries; within the text, Sethe learns to transcend the boundaries
between self and other and, as a whole, the novel forces readers to cross borders
through a definition of rememory that signifies collective decolonization. Through
Sethe's story of colonization, internalized colonial paradigms, ineffective attempts at
resistance, and eventual decolonization in a communal context, Morrison speaks to
the need for collective decolonization before the "national trauma" can reach
resolution. Beloved, then, is a "voice" that, by disrupting the dominant discourse of
national history, serves as an alternative ideological model for all descendents of a
colonialist history.
Notes
(1.) I use the prefix "post" to suggest both the literal meaning "after" (in this case,
"after" the political liberation of a nation from imperialist rule as well as "after" the
termination of the institution of slavery by the U.S. government), and to suggest the
meaning advanced by the prefix "neo" (a continued economic and ideological
oppression).
(2.) For a discussion on the internal colonialism of the U.S., see Wald.
(3.) My reading of the text differs from most readings in its definition of Sethe's
community as a colonized group. Many critics interpret the text through
psychoanalysis. These include Ferguson, Fitzgerald, Hirsch, Mathieson, Schapiro,
and Wyatt. Some of these also focus on Morrison's definition of "rememory"
(Henderson, Hirsch's "Maternity and Rememory," Jablon, Mobley, and Rody). Non-
psychoanalytic interpretations include examinations of the role of myth, especially
Biblical legends, within the text (Davis, Jones, and Warner). Other analyses examine
the role of history and the process of historical recovery (Goldman, Henderson,
Horvitz, and House). House, Moglen, and Schmudde address the concept of the
supernatural. Generally, most readings that define Sethe and her community through
a discourse of commodification contextualze this discourse within the national
boundaries of U.S. history.
(4.) In the introduction to his volume of essays, The Location of Culture, Bhabha
offers one of a few postcolonial readings of Beloved. My study differs from that of
Bhabha in its more extensive emphasis on the commodification discourse as the
definitive postcolonial paradigm operating within the narrative.
(5.) As other feminist critics have noted, one of the limitations of Bhabha's work is
his failure to address gender issues. It is therefore necessary to incorporate the
experience of women in reading a postcolonial text such as Beloved through Bhabha's
theories.
(6.) In "Colonial Legacies," and "The Epistemic Status," Satya P. Mohanty also reads
Beloved as postcolonial. In contrast to the argument I present here, however, he
interprets Morrison's revisioning of history and Sethe's development of subjectivity
through an alternative theory of identity.
(7.) For Morrison, the concept of rememory has implications beyond the personal.
Sethe articulates these implications in the following passage: "even if I die, the picture
of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened."
The past, then, is not individually contained. Rather, in Beloved, memories of the past
are defined as pictures "out there, in the world ... floating around ... outside my head"
(36). Krumholz extends these implications to include the historical and the national.
For more general discussions on the concept of rememory and collectivity, see
Halbwachs, Knapp, and Nora.
(8.) For the most part, critics who focus on the idea of "collective" rememory in
Beloved limit their discussions to African Americans and their need to deal with issues
of the national past. Krumholz writes, "Sethe's process of healing in Beloved, her
process of learning to live with her past, is a model for the readers who must confront
Sethe's past as part of our own past, a collective past that lives right here where we
live." She argues that "Morrison constructs a parallel between the individual processes
of psychological recovery and a historical or national process" (395). According to
Krumholz, the rememory of a suppressed, fragmented history is a psychological
necessity for author, readers, and characters (395). She does not extend this definition
of collectivity, however, to a metaphorization of national identity through individual
subjectivity.
(9.) Keenan contextualizes her reading of the text in a general postcolonial framework
and positions the text as a rewriting of history in a transnational framework: "Beloved
ha[s] assumed a central place within current writing by African Americans which
insists on an examination of U.S. culture and history, one that takes account of the
processes of `internal colonization'" (46). According to Keenan, the revisioning of
U.S. history as one internally colonized is also a "recasting of our understanding of
the past which resonates beyond the borders of [the North American] continent" (46).
Her contextualization of the novel, however, remains focused on African American
history and the role of the African Diaspora.
(10.) Wyatt reads Sethe's murderous act as an extreme manifestation of the maternal
bond. Keenan sees Sethe's resistive maternal identity as an integral part of her
developing subjectivity (66). I would argue instead that Sethe's maternal resistance is
limited by the internalized violence by which it is informed. Ledbetter interprets
Sethe's act of infanticide as counter-resistive to the fetishization of her body through
the symbolics of maternity by the school-teacher and his nephews. The schoolteacher
and the white men who witness the consequences of Sethe's act experience a loss of
control, and thus of pleasure and satisfaction. Sethe's violence, then, can be read as a
powerful, albeit problematic act of resistance. Fitzgerald also defines Sethe's act
through maternal resistance. Sethe "refutes the position as object in the discourse of
slavery by asserting her position as subject in the discourse of the good mother. But
the version of motherhood she articulates offers an exaggerated, idealized view of
exclusive maternal responsibility" (677).
(11.) "A counterstance locks one into a duel of oppressor and oppressed ... both are
reduced to a common denominator of violence. The counterstance refutes the
dominant culture's views and beliefs, and, for this, is proudly defiant. [However,] [a]ll
reaction is limited by ... what it is reacting.... At some point, on our way to a new
consciousness, we will have to.... disengage from the dominant culture ... and cross
the border into a wholly new and separate territory" (Anzaldua, Borderlands 78-79).
(12.) According to Anzaldua,
`interfacing' means sewing a piece of material between two pieces of
fabric
to provide support and stability to collar, cuff, yoke. Between the
masks
we've internalized ... are our interfaces. The masks are already
steeped
with self-hatred and other internalized oppressions. However, it
is... the
interface ... between the masks that provides the space from which
we can
thrust out and crack the masks. ("Introduction" xv)
Anzaldua defines masks as different "faces" adopted that can "pass" and thus make
women of color "less vulnerable to ... oppressors" ("Introduction" xv). For Anzaldua,
then, the developed "in between" spaces are both a source of ambivalence and a
potential source of resistance and eventual self-empowerment. (13.) Sitter primarily
focuses on Paul D's story, arguing that Paul D and Sethe's stories are interdependent.
For both, communal support enables freedom from the past, from the distorting self-
images imposed on them by slavery.
(14.) Krumholz reads the climactic scene in which the community of black women
help Sethe save herself in ways similar to my interpretation. For Krumholz, this event
represents a cleansing and a re-birth. Krumholz, however, emphasizes a
psychoanalytical reading through the notion of historical recovery as ritual, while I
stress the decolonization process the catharsis represents.
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Mary Jane Suero Elliott teaches literature and writing in the English Department at
Seattle University. She specializes in Latino fiction and currently is working on a book
examining representations of Latina transmigratory subjectivity in contemporary
Chicana, Puerto Rican, and Cuban-American women's novels.

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Publication Information: Article Title: Postcolonial Experience in a Domestic Context: Commodified Subjectivity in Toni
Morrison's Beloved. Contributors: Mary Jane Suero Elliott - author. Journal Title: MELUS. Publication Year: 2000. Page
Number: 181. COPYRIGHT 2000 The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnics Literature of the United States