1 / 16

Lecture One: A “Bench by the Road”: The Forgotten Slaves Introduction to Beloved

Lecture One: A “Bench by the Road”: The Forgotten Slaves Introduction to Beloved Brief biography of Morrison Morrison on the writing of Beloved Some facts about slavery Slaves versus Slavery with a capital ‘S’ The fusion of forms in the novel.

aimee-terrell
Download Presentation

Lecture One: A “Bench by the Road”: The Forgotten Slaves Introduction to Beloved

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Lecture One: • A “Bench by the Road”: The Forgotten Slaves • Introduction to Beloved • Brief biography of Morrison • Morrison on the writing of Beloved • Some facts about slavery • Slaves versus Slavery with a • capital ‘S’ • The fusion of forms in the novel

  2. Ghost-story, history lesson, mother-epic, incantation, folk and fairy-tale ― of lost children and men on horseback; a handsaw, an ice-pick, and a wishing well; Denver’s “emerald light” and Amy’s velvet; spiders and roosters and the madness of hummingbirds with needle beaks as dead babies are offered up to a shameful God; a devouring past of everything that is unforgiven and denied; a hunger to eat all the love in the world ― Beloved belongs on the highest shelf of our literature even if half a dozen canonised Wonder Bread Boys have to be elbowed off. I can’t now imagine our literature without it …. Where was this book that we’ve always needed? Without Beloved, our imagination of America has a heart-sized hole in it big enough to die from. (John Leonard, Toni Morrison Critical Perspectives Past and Present, 45)

  3. There is no place you or I can go, to think about or not think about, to summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of slaves; nothing that reminds us of the ones who made the journey and of those who did not make it. There is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby. There’s no 300 foot tower. There’s no small bench by the road. There is not even a tree scored, an initial I can visit or you can visit in Charleston or Savannah or New York or Providence or, better still, on the banks of the Mississippi. And because such a place does not exist (that I know of), the book had to. Toni Morrison, “A Bench by the Road” (1989) Quoted in Casebook p. 3

  4. Toni Morrison • Born 1931 in Lorrain, Ohio • Chloe Anthony Wofford • The Bluest Eye (1970) • Sula (1973) • Song of Solomon (1977) • Tar Baby (1981) • Beloved (1987) • Pulitzer Prize for Beloved in 1988 • Jazz (1992) • Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) • Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 • Paradise (1998) • Love (2003) • A Mercy (2008) • What Moves at the Margin(non fiction) May 2009 • Home (2012)

  5. I don’t want to write books that you can close … and walk off and read another one right away – like a television show, you know, where you flick the channel (Casebook, p. 11) • Slavery wasn’t in the literature at all. Part of that, I think, is because on moving from bondage into freedom which has been our goal, we got away from slavery and also from the slaves, there’s a difference. We have to re- inhabit those people. • Interview with Paul Gilroy in 1993, quoted in Linden Peach p. 95 • 813.54 MOR/PEA I will call them my people Which were not my people And her beloved Which was not beloved Romans 9:25

  6. A Bench by the RoadSullivan’s IslandSouth Carolina July 2008

  7. IzikoSlave LodgeAdderley Street, Cape Townwww.iziko.org.za • Dutch East India Company • Slave Lodge built in 1680 • Home to 500 slaves • In the 18th Century more slaves • than free people in the Cape

  8. Elmina Castle, Ghanaphotos: Nicky Ritchie (2007)

  9. The Atlantic Slave Trade andSlave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record Jerome S. Handler and Michael L. Tuite Jr. Gate of No ReturnCape Coast Castle, Ghana http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/index.php The approximately 1,235 images in this collection have been selected from a wide range of sources, most of them dating from the period of slavery. This collection is envisioned as a tool and a resource that can be used by teachers, researchers, students, and the general public - in brief, anyone interested in the experiences of Africans who were enslaved and transported to the Americas and the lives of their descendants in the slave societies of the New World.

  10. The Middle Passage One of the most famous images of the transatlantic slave trade. After the 1788 Regulation Act, the Brookes was allowed to carry 454 slaves, the approximate number shown in this illustration. However, in four earlier voyages (1781-86), she carried from 609 to 740 slaves so crowding was much worse than shown here. The Illustrated London News (Sept. 27, 1845)

  11. Iron Mask, Neck Collar, Leg Shackles, and Spurs, 18th cent. Thomas Branagan, The Penitential Tyrant; or, Slave Trader Reformed (New York, 1807) Results of Severe Whipping, 1863 Harper's Weekly, July 4, 1863

  12. The Life of OlaudahEquiano the African (1789) The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. The air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died… The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable. http://www.brycchancarey.com/equiano/index.htm Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) I do not recollect ever seeing my mother by the light of day. ... She would lie down with me, and get me to sleep, but long before I waked she was gone. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) I saw a mother lead seven children to the auction-block. She knew that some of them would be taken from her; but they took all... She begged the trader to tell her where he intended to take them; this he refused to do. How could he, when he knew he would sell them, one by one, wherever he could command the highest price? I met that mother in the street, and her wild, haggard face lives to-day in my mind.

  13. Twelve Years a Slave (1853) “12 Years a Slave and the roots of America's shameful past” Interview with the historical consultant, Harvard academic Henry Louis Gates “12 Years a Slave: in our 'post-racial' age the legacy of slavery lives on” Paul Gilroy theguardian.com 10 November 2013  “Why I won't be watching The Butler and 12 Years a Slave” Orville Lloyd Douglas theguardian.com12 September 2013 Andrew Anthony “12 Years a Slave fails to represent black resistance to enslavement” Carole Boyce Davies theguardian.com 10 January 2014 The Observer, 5 January 2014 “Torture porn” - ArmondWhite, NYFCC

  14. Over and over, the writers pull the narrative up short with a phrase such as, ‘but let us drop a veil over these proceedings too terrible to relate’. In shaping the experience to make it palatable to those who were in a position to alleviate it, they were silent about many things, and they ‘forgot’ many other things … But most importantly ― at least for me ― there was no mention of their interior life. … [The writer’s] job becomes how to rip the veil drawn over proceedings too terrible to relate … to find and expose a truth about the interior life of people who didn’t write it…. to fill in the blanks that the slave narratives left, to part the veil that was so frequently drawn … to implement the stories heard. “Site of Memory” Quoted in Casebook, p. 81

  15. “Site of Memory” If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic. I suppose I could dispense with the last four if I were not so deadly serious about fidelity to the milieu out of which I write and in which my ancestors actually lived. Infidelity to that milieu - the absence of the interior life, the deliberate excising of it from the records that the slaves themselves told - is precisely the problem in the discourse that proceeded without us. How I gain access to that interior life is what drives me …. It's a kind of literary archeology: On the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply. What makes it fiction is the nature of the imaginative act: my reliance on the image - on the remains – in addition to recollection, to yield up a kind of a truth. … All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory - what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our "flooding."

  16. Fusion of forms/genres • Historical accounts of slavery • First-person slave narratives • Psycho-analysis: the theoretical understandings of the processes of mourning, repression, repetition, remembering • African orature – folktale, song • African-American orature– folktale, song, the blues, the language of the pulpit, dialect • The Bible

More Related