Our Identity, Our Lives - A Responding and Reflecting Blog by Sierra Nelson-Liner

"They killed the flirt with whom folks called life"

-Paul D (Beloved, 128)

It seems natural for me to know who I am. For Sethe and for every other slave it was such an uncharted territory to recognize themselves. Their personalities. Their identities. They were taken away the moment they became owned.  For instance Baby Suggs refers to first moments as a freed woman and her realization that she “never had a map to discover what she was like”(pg 165).  In fact, our personalities and our identities are made from our memories and our experiences in life. Without our memories we would not be able to form opinions based off of previous schemas that we start developing as small children. As slaves were brought up that is all they knew that life was. Paul D refers to white men as people who “killed the flirt with whom folks called life”(128). This is just a small taste of what it really meant not to have a life of your own.

Throughout Beloved I have constantly tried to understand what it really meant to live a life as a slave. Toni Morrison tried her best to portray her writing for what the entity of slavery was. While watching an interview of Toni talking about Beloved I noticed that this was something she struggled with as well. Slavery is such a hard concept to imagine, let alone deeply feel. Something that Toni suggests to her students is to connect the characters directly to people in their lives. She similarly did as she was writing to portray the true feeling, the true language, for what was happening. In the interview she specifically talks about the scene where Sethe decided to murder her children. While writing the scene Toni, with a lot of difficulty, tried to imagine her own child. She revealed;“If I am going to imagine what it takes to kill... your baby... then I have to put in my arms my baby. As a result she was able to portray the scene for what it really was. She explained; “[Once I envisioned myself in Sethe’s position] then the language just pairs down. You don’t get ornamental with that. You get very still, very clean limbed, and very quiet because the event itself is bigger than language.” I thought this was very beautiful and despairing at the same time. That has also been my feeling towards Beloved itself. It is a tough read, but an important one. We will never be able to really understand what it meant to be ripped away from our family, to be sold or bought into slavery, to be without our natural rights and freedoms, but it is incredibly important to try to understand so we don’t repeat history.