JUNOT DÍAZ
I READ TONI MORRISON for the first time when I was a student at Rutgers. I owe my university many things, and I’m indebted to my professors for a multitude of reasons, but if I had to narrow down the greatest gratitude of my university years, it would be reading Toni Morrison—specifically, reading Beloved. Perhaps more than any other text, Beloved made me the person I am. It’s the book that altered my personal and creative DNA.
I was nineteen years old, and coming to terms with my experience as an immigrant, both as a person from the Dominican Republic, and as a person of African descent in a country that has very simplistic notions of what the African diaspora is. So I was reckoning with my personal history as well as the larger communal history of (to say it in the most synoptic terms) my people. I encountered Beloved in the middle of that transformation, in the middle of that historical, philosophical, ontological storm.
This is a novel about slavery. The horrific cataclysm we call slavery has transpired, and this postapocalyptic narrative is about trying to live with its aftereffects. That, of course, is also a description of the United States right now, and one reason this book continues to have such power is because it demonstrates the way those temporally distant circumstances are still intimately close to us. What is so vital about Beloved, and why it continues to shine inside of me, to burn like a star, is the argument it makes about the amnesia with which we view the institution of slavery.
For those of us of African descent, the reconstruction never ended. This idea that it was a discrete moment in history—something that you check off, and then progress past—is absurd. We’re still attempting, all of us, whether you’re of African descent or not, to pick up the pieces. But as a country we want to say that the past is the past, that no crime has been committed. We want to claim ourselves healthy without doing the hard, necessary work of healing. And this is why the ghosts of our past continue to possess us so violently.
The characters in this novel are possessed by this nightmare of our history the same way our society is possessed by a nightmare history we don’t want to acknowledge. Beloved’s thesis is that, until a real and honest relationship with the past is achieved—until we’ve pierced the collective amnesia, overcome the level upon level of denial—it is impossible for us to have a future. The only time this book begins to talk about the future is when these characters have finally begun to come to terms with their past.
As Morrison writes at one point in the novel, “Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” Beloved’s central question is: How do the people who have been shattered by this nightmare history—as individuals, as a community—assemble, reassemble, and reconstruct themselves in a meaningful way?
This question is addressed directly in the last pages of the penultimate chapter, in a final conversation between Sethe and Paul D, our protagonists, survivors of the brutal Sweet Home plantation (of America, in a way). After all that has happened to her, Sethe is at a breaking point—in total despair, unable to leave her bed. As he tries to encourage Sethe to keep going, and as he tries to articulate his own feelings about her, Paul D remembers the way his friend Sixo described the woman he loved. Sixo, who routinely risked his life on a thirty-mile journey, between the end of work Saturday and the start of Monday morning, just to see her for an hour. Of the Thirty-Mile Woman Sixo says:
She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.
This reassembling, this act of creating a self from the shattered pieces, is not something one can take on individually—Sixo needed the Thirty-Mile Woman to help him do it. The passage reinforces the idea that any kind of healing, whether it’s individual or communal, has to take place in collaboration with other people. Healing is relational. We like to think that one can heal oneself just by force of will, but my experience certainly aligns with the argument the passage makes: We need other people. We need relationships. We need to feel in communion.
But this passage not only describes the larger kind of philosophical work that is important to the text. It also describes what a monumental work of art does: takes the pieces of you, reassembles them, and hands them back to you in all the right order. Literature can also heal us relationally. If a relationship with a person, someone we know for just a short time, can forever alter our lives, then why not a book?
As a Dominican immigrant and person of African descent, it was not easy to find a “friend of my mind” in literature—to find someone who, somewhere and somehow, wasn’t hostile to my existence. You’d be amazed how common an experience it was to read a book and realize that ultimately the text was not a friend, that it did not hold people like me in esteem, and in fact reflected many of the prejudices, many of the political and rhetorical violences, that afflict us as people and as communities. This was before I really dove into my college experience, before I started reading books by people of color. I was more or less reading in the mainstream, and the mainstream was very hostile to people like me. Book after book, text after text, I’d come across a joke that would turn my stomach or a passage that would stab me in the heart. I had tons of friends of color, I lived in a community of color, yet when I would read there would always be this dull pain that every now and then spiked into an agony—a realization that the writers and their texts I was consuming, they were not my friend.
When I first read this passage, I realized that I had sought a friend of my mind all those years: someone who didn’t see me as a problem or a monster, someone who didn’t erase me, someone who considered me central and important. Morrison was the first friend of my mind that I ever felt sure of. And I’ve sought to reproduce, as an artist, the gift Beloved gave me. I’ve sought to create books that, hopefully, for some people and for some communities, will be a friend of their mind. I write in the hope that someone will realize—yes, they are not alone, there is community in literature the same way we have community in our lived experience.
In many ways, Beloved provided me with the first fragment of a map of a vast literature to which, until that moment, I had very little access. It’s not as if I was some sort of neutral, blank slate when I encountered Morrison. I had a lot of the stupidities and prejudice that this culture tends to foist on people. Like the idea that great literature resides in places where there are not poor people, where there are not folks of color, where there are not immigrants. That’s the work, that’s the great work, of art I love and am interested in: to open up spaces that society would rather not even exist.
It is not insignificant that Morrison’s prototypical friend of the mind is a “she.” Morrison partakes in the tradition of black women writers, of women of color writers, and I don’t think you can say enough about the foundational importance of African diasporic women, of women of color artists, in giving us the tools that we need as a culture to describe and explore and problematize ourselves and our communities. The philosophies, the lives, that women of color have created in reaction to the societies that marginalize and demonize and attempt to destroy them have transformed citizenship, ethics, literature, reason, being. They are absolutely essential, absolutely invaluable—to all of us.
Toni Morrison allowed me to trace back a tradition, because she, too, was a member of a community, had found support and such friendship in other texts. So many women of color writers, so many African diasporic women, have been a friend of the mind to me, have helped me reassemble, have guided me in this journey. Whether we’re talking about Toni Morrison, or Cherríe Moraga, or Gloria Anzaldúa, or Gloria Naylor, or Gish Jen, Maxine Hong Kingston, Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, Sandra Cisneros, Arundhati Roy, Audre Lorde—those certainly, in a literary context, are the friends of my mind and with them and their work I’ve maintained a life-sustaining dialogue.
But to finish with Beloved. As Paul D consoles Sethe in the novel’s final scene, she is lamenting that she lost her “best thing”—her child, Beloved, whom she killed in an effort to save her from slavers. But after recalling Sixo’s words about the Thirty-Mile Woman, Paul D realizes:
He wants to put his story next to hers.
“Sethe,” he says, “me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.”
He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. “You your best thing, Sethe. You are.” His holding fingers are holding hers.
“Me? Me?”
For me, in these troubled times, this is a passage I return to again and again. That final question at the end of Beloved—“Me? Me?”—which the novel does not answer but the reader must—clearly has multiple meanings. To me it seemed that the novel was asking “Me? Me?” not just of Sethe but of all us people of African descent—are we willing to engage in the hard work of healing in order for us to have a tomorrow? The first step of healing is to admit that there has been an illness, to assess, and to do an accounting of the wrongs. That Beloved addressed this question not only to its characters but to its readers was really, really valuable to me. Until that point I did not understand the kind of work that a novel, that a piece of literature, can ask of a reader. Until that point I did not understand that a reader could be anything other than a passive consumer of a text. Morrison taught me that literature can invite readers to partake not only in worldmaking but in deeper acts, such as healing. That a book written by and for a people shattered by history could be a space of healing was nothing I could imagine before Beloved.
After I read this novel, I was no longer the person I was. I had made my thirty-mile journey and I had returned changed. And when I think about my aesthetic aspirations—what I want from a work of art, and what I most wish to make as someone who is creative—it is Beloved that guides me.