A review by sinogaze
Beloved by Toni Morrison

challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

5.0

I think I find this book incredibly heartbreaking and that Toni Morrison really, really encapsulates the experience of "time and being a human" well. It reads like poetry because every single word feels very purposeful and intentional. It's nonlinear, which makes it interesting-- because, as my professor was saying: the trauma disrupts the narrative and jolts us back into the past. In my heart of hearts, I want Beloved to be that omniscient narrator who inhabits the house but can also inhabit the minds of everyone connected to 124 and the town. She is the ghost of a baby, she is the house, and when she materializes in corporality: she is a child in the body of a woman, who is intent on understanding how her mother can love her and hurt her in one breath. And her childishness-- she has been stunted, forced to remain powerless and infantile in her afterlife: coming back gives her the opportunity to grow and learn.

What I find particularly devastating is how, although the historical aspect of this book and the horrors of slavery are not something that is necessarily a common experience for my generation, the exploration of generational trauma and the way that traumas of the past affect the present, and the future, is so apt. Sethe undeniably loves Beloved, despite whatever she has done to wrong Beloved. And Beloved just doesn't understand because she is a child who has been hurt immeasurably. It takes an intense exploration of Sethe's psyche, the history of 124, the involvement of the community, and explaining to Beloved over and over and over again before she can finally be put to rest. But I hope in the end she understands. 

Personal shit because I have to put it somewhere:

I think this book being majorly in Sethe's perspective (maybe through the lense of Beloved, at least that's what I want to believe) really has forced me to understand my own experiences with my parents. While I cannot, at all, claim to understand the lasting effects of slavery on Black families at all, to some degree Morrison helps me understand that life has, for a long time, been really hard and our parents have felt that. Their actions are informed by their own trauma and hope for their children to never have to experience it. I think that Beloved's anger, and love, really hit home for me. I think that her being stuck in the mind of a damaged child is just... strikingly familiar.