Beloved by Toni Morrison: A brilliant book about Trauma

Today I was engaged in a debate that I've been having for two years now. It is a debate I always welcome with anyone and it concerns a topic I'm very passionate about. While Toni Morrison's Beloved won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize, many of my friends and fellow students believe the novel is undeserving of the award, that it is far too pretentious, and that it is a vanity piece in that it merely displays how clever Morrison is.

I respectfully disagree.

Toni Morrison is my favourite author and Beloved is my favourite book of all time (Drown by Junot Diaz is a strong contender). While I can hardly call the writing simplistic, I refuse to acknowledge it as pretentious. I believe the writing is intelligent and that if the author were a white man rather than a Black woman and if the book's subject had nothing to do with enslavement, it would be considered as such. Of course, I have heard theories that Morrison only won the Pulitzer because of the fact that Beloved is about enslavement; these theories usually come from my white friends who find the book an uncomfortable/frustrating read because they feel as if the book is merely "another" story detailing how white people have marginalized and "screwed over" (as they say) African Americans. My response to them is twofold.

One: enslavement is a very big part of American history and it is not an event you can merely wish away just to make yourself feel more comfortable; it is not an event we should or can forget especially since the traumas of enslavement are ongoing considering that even today, African Americans are very much a marginalized group. Second: the purpose of Beloved really isn't to point fingers. It is a book about trauma. I cannot stress this enough. The novel is about how a Black family, how a Black community, tries to find happiness, independence and identity but the effects, the traumas, and the mere memories of enslavement constantly hinder their attempts to advance. Beloved concentrates on Black characters and details the ways they try to cope with a horrific experience that psychologically and emotionally broke them; the depravity of the white "slave" masters is not the focus.

But even if the inequitable and barbaric power dynamic between the white masters and Black enslaved peoples was the focus, that should not and would not render the novel bad. For those who think it would, perhaps they should analyze why they are unable to read about a book portraying true historical facts.