Your country. How came it yours. Before the Pilgrims landed we were here. Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song- soft, stirring melody in an ill harmonized and unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness, conquer the soil, and lay the foundations of this vast economic empire two hundred years earlier than your weak hands could have done it; the third a gift of the spirit….. Would America have been America without her Negro people?
-W.E.B. Du Bois
The Souls of Black Folk.
It seems the best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time
Toni Morrison.
Toni Morrison's Beloved according to Carl Plasa; "meets the criteria outlined in the epigraph above, fusing as it does, a brilliant formal and linguistic complexity with a wider vision in which questions of slavery, race, gender, and the dilemmas of historical memory are compellingly posed" [1] . In Beloved Morrison moves back through history to a period that was unspeakable. The unspeakable was a collective pain shared by the black community who had been all but silenced by slavery's brutality and, "Those silences" as Morrison interjects, resonated "As an unspoken burden, almost as a ghost like presence" [2] .
The ghost- like presence permeating the pages of Morrison's novel manifests as the murdered Beloved and her presence signifies the horrors of a brutal past. According to Grewal; "She was conceived psychologically, fueled by the question of how to reclaim the freed self-body and soul" [3] .However, Morrison does not endeavor to fill the silences produced by repressed painful memories. Instead she seeks a recognition of the unspeakable, a way of making it possible to remember. She resorts to figural writing or as Derrida posits a form of "Hauntology" [4] . Derrida argues that Morrison sets out to "ontologize remains" and make them manifest or "present". This is achieved by "identifying the bodily remains" of slavery by "localizing the dead". According to Derrida, "all ontologization, all semanticiation- philosophical hermeneutical or psychoanaltical- finds itself caught up in a work of mourning" [5] .This mourning is signified by the "specter" [6] and the specter or ghost excavates all traces of traumatic experience.
The "specter" constructs the figural and artistic fabric of Beloved and succeeds in lifting the veil of something so unspeakable. Morrison's lyricism and prose succeeds in revealing the trauma of slavery and the power of the character Beloved extends to memories and individual stories of those traumatized by slavery. In this way Beloved becomes everyone's ghost, the repression of all the horrors suffered by the black community. Geoffrey Hartman, writing in Public Memory and Its Discontents, contends "she is that….. Which we have not entirely faced" [7] . Morrison herself pronounces Beloved as "Representative of all those that went through the middle passage whose stories have remained silent. She is a child, a girl. But she is also the men and the women….. All those people" [8] .
Morrison seems intent on revealing every aspect of slavery not only as Finck suggests, in its "qualitative" terms, through its cruelty, but also in its "quantatative" [9] approach. This involves presenting slavery "beyond the contingency of its present witnesses and survivors" [10] . To do this, Morrison must move back through history to the "sixty million and more" [11] , to those Derrida reveals as "revenants" [12] or ghosts. One way in which Morrison reveals or elucidates the traumatic experiences of these "revenants" is by juxtaposing the dead and dying. Morrison's specter exceeds human barriers, and communicates the indelible Middle Passage. Recounting her experience on the slave ship Beloved said;
When she cried no one heard her…Dead men lay on top of me, the man on my face is dead. Ghosts without skin stuck their fingers in me; they call me bitch in the night and Beloved in the light [13] .
The passage above shows how the character of Beloved crosses and re-crosses our consistent barriers of the time space continuum. She exists in numerous places and does not proffer an individual voice. Through the spirit of Beloved, those physically mistreated, raped, dehumanized and discarded discover a literal and figural voice.
Through the identification of Beloved with past "revenants" or ghosts, Morrison achieves success in bridging the ancestral gap. Beloved is the "symbolic compression of innumerable forgotten people into one miraculously resurrect being" [14] . She "historicizes" the personal and in doing so "emphasizes the role of personal and communal agency in building a home for the African American community" [15] . For Bjork, Morrison shows
That identity and place are found in the community and in the communal experience, and not in the transcendence of society in search for a single, private self…. Each communal variation, the community, the clan, the ancestor, is an intrinsic part of the self, and exists not merely as an altruistic concern [16] .
Ashraf H. A. Rushdy observed that in Morrison's novel, "memory exists as a communal property of friends, of family, of a people" [17] . In this way Morrison takes responsibility not only for healing emotionally fractured individuals but with healing a collective body of pain. The unexpected eruption of traumatic memory triggered by the appearance of Beloved re-opens invisible wounds and paves the way for those brutalized by slavery to re-examine their past lives and confront their pain. This historical excavation "takes another vital shift in Beloved history- making becomes a healing process for the characters, the reader, and the author" [18] . Morrison's Beloved indicates the significance of challenging, retrieving and altering history and, for Linda Krumholz, re-memory constructs "A parallel between the process of psychological recovery and a historical or national process" [19] . Morrison's narrative offers a vast and paradoxical set of characters that distinguish and exceptionalize memory. Sethe's caution to Denver about the past identifies memory as troublesome and cruel. Her re-memories embody her past experiences of slavery and illustrate the connection linking the self and historical unconscious.
If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place- the picture of it- stays, and not just in my re-memory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think it, 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. [20]
Morrison's objective is to challenge the indignity of slavery in the collective black consciousness and convert it into a source of healing and physic recovery. Rampersad in his examination of W.E.B. Dubois The Souls of Black Folks views historical recuperation as paramount to a universal and individual necessity. Dubois in his analysis is clear. "Only by grappling with the meaning and legacy of slavery can the imagination, recognizing finally the temporality of the institution, begin to transcend it" [21] .
Like Dubois in The Souls Of Black Folks Morrison posits the inheritance of slavery as a psycho-social national trauma and both authors persuasive work, according to Krumholz; "challenge the notion that the end of institutional slavery brings about freedom by depicting the emotional and psychological scars of slavery as well as the persistence of racism" [22] . It is Baby Suggs who posits that nothing but healing can begin to undo this "overwhelming legacy of psychological scars….. Terrors and traumas" [23] . To lay it all down, lay down the sword and shield" [24] Morrison, as Krumholz suggests, "Uses ritual as a model for the healing process" [25] .
The ritual of healing within the novel functions as a tripartite system in an endeavor to heal individual and communal pain. Seth's re-memory forces a confrontation with slavery's brutality, and the reader's recognition of that brutality, corresponds to the three sections of the novel. Firstly the appearance of Paul D, and the manifestation of the dead Beloved forces Sethe to confront a past, she pedantically fought "to beat back" [26] . Seths period of atonement then begins and she is forced to confront her irreconcilable function as slave and mother. Beloved's final exorcism "involves a personal reckoning with the history of slavery" [27] .
Paul D's appearance at 124 Bluestone Rd ushers in the formidable Beloved and his presence triggers or let's loose the implacable past. When he touches the scars on Seth's back the house erupts with the spirits vehemence and we witness the "force of Beloved's jealousy, her will to obstruct any living person from impropriety or mediating Seth's past, her guilt and her responsibility" [28] . After eighteen years of separation it is Paul D who fights the indiscernible antagonist and "he did not stop until everything was pitch quiet…. Until it was gone" [29] . Paul D's presence is encouraging to Seth and when he asks her "what about the inside?". She replies "I don't go inside". Paul D is reassuring and encourages Seth to "Go as far inside as you need to, I'll hold your ankles. Make sure you get back out" [30] . Sethes past like Paul D's rusted tobacco tin fuse images of a great discovery and this painful resurrection begins an arduous journey for Seth.
Beloved is the unresolved past that comes between them. Her appearance represents the second stage of healing as she becomes the physical embodiment of Sethes repressed memories. She juxtaposes a ruthless claim of the past upon the present, the pasts yearning to be accepted and possess the living, in order to realize a future pregnant with possibilities. She is a necessary disruption, and therefore to understand her disruptive role Morrison turns to her literary predecessor the trickster tale. The trickster tales allegorize as Carpio suggests, "the great imbalance of power between master and slaves and the way in which slaves found to sabotage it" [31] . Mel Watson notes "the tales probably represent the slaves most aggressive and cynical view of white America short of rebellion" [32] . The connection is worth pursuing for the light it sheds on the plots development. Beloved and the overwhelming presence of the trickster figure function as deconstructers to upend and invert established concepts and static world views. Levine argues the trickster tales are crucial to the healing process and "the propensity of Africans to utilize their folklore quite consciously to gain psychological release…. needs to be reiterated if the popularity and function of animal trickster tales is to be understood" [33] . The trickster represents the irrationality of life in the same way Beloved does. Both juxtapose healing and disruption.
Beloved's resurrection excavates a past Seth fervently tried to "beat back" and her eventual exorcism brings peace. It is the women of the community who rise up to aid Seth in the exorcism of Beloved because in many ways, she is their ghost too. As Richard Wright notes in Twelve Million Black Voices
Only a few of those who dance and sing with us suspect the rawness of life out of which our laughing-crying tunes and quick dance steps come; they do not know that our songs and dance are a banner of hope flung desperately up in the face of a world that has pushed us to the wall [34] .
The women's voices herald the end of an apocalyptic past and the birth of a new beginning. The community's creative capacity signifies a ritual rebirth from spiritual death and in contrast to the Gospel of St John which begins "In the beginning was the word" [35] ; the women bring Seth back to her creative power, a time of voices without words. Krumholz suggests "just as Baby Suggs rejected religious dicta, the spiritual power of the purgation ritual lies beyond the meaning of words, in the sound and sensation rather than in logical meaning and the logos" [36] Beloveds final banishment allows Seth to experience again the original scene of domination and act on her mother love as she would have chosen to initially. The cleansing is complete and Seth as Baby Suggs advocates "can finally lay down the sword" [37] .
Denver is the redemptive figure in the novel, the representative of both past and future and Morrison's precursor. In other words, she becomes an agent of recuperation and regeneration. Although Denver's role is to protect the Mother she loves and fears her story serves as a warning that trauma and degradation, like an infectious disease is communicable through generations. Denver who as a child swallowed her dead sister's blood becomes a stigmatized individual. Eventually Baby Suggs words provide her with the practical wisdom to risk herself, step off the porch and into the world. Her words according to Krumholz "conjure up the history of her family's struggle for survival and freedom as well as Baby Suggs own defeat against the horrors of slavery" [38] . Finally Denver asks her grandmother "But you said there was no defense. "There aint."Then what do I do? "Know it, and go on out the yard. Go on" [39] . For Denver, a time that was never hers she must now possess. She carries with her the understanding of African oral and cultural tradition and African American ideals to future generations.
As the inscribed dedication for the Sixty Million and more signify, writing Beloved into existence became for Morrison, an act of recompense. The author intended and indeed succeeded in opening psychic wounds necessary for apprehending the past. In Beloved as Grewal testifies, Morrison introduces "awe and reverence and mystery and magic" because she is "deadly serious about fidelity to the milieu out of which she writes and in which her ancestors lived" [40] . The narrative corresponds to the many fractured bodies and spirits of the survivors of slavery which can become whole through telling. Beloved, the elapsed spirit of the past must be loved, named, and irrefutably claimed even if she is "unlovable and elusive" [41] . As Morrison tells us in the end, "This is not a story to pass on". Pass on indicates both denial and acceptance. Beloveds story cannot recur, the narrative advises, cannot be allowed to transpire in the world again. The more evident meaning is powerfully inconsistent. While this is "not a story to pass on" [42] it is, as Morrison shows us, inescapable.
