HAUNTING BELOVED: RE-MEMORY IN TONI MORRISON’S BELOVED

African American female writers use memory to speak out the traumatic experiences of slavery and to consciously reveal the unconscious pains of being black in a white dominated society. Memory becomes a crucial device through which the detrimental effects of past are struggled to be made up for. Multifaceted nature of memory forbids any fixed definition; however, the duality of memory provides a new entrance to understanding which stands against the cold knowledge offered by Western historiography. Beloved is a novel dealing with recollections, with the things that characters remember, with the memories of slavery, and with the act of remembering itself. The present paper puts forth an argument on how re-memory operates as a process of transcending the haunting memories of the past in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. This novel reflects the process of memory which is the actual act of remembering through the porosity of characters’ consciousness and leaving out of different time frames. Examining memory element in this novel, it is concluded that memory looms large at the hands of African American female writers since through memory narratives they recover the black history ignored by dominant western tradition and revive the lost personal memories and communal traditions.

Keywords:

haunting memory , re-memory