toni morrison the site of memory essay

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The Graduate Blog, Columbia College Chicago

The Site of Memory

“What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction” by Toni Morrison

“…[ T]he act of imagination is bound up with memory. You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. ‘Floods’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory—what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our ‘flooding’.”

In Toni Morrison’s essay “ The Site of Memory ,” she says that she is trying to tell the truth, or rather that her responsibility is not to lie. She also distinguishes truth from fact. The need to expose a truth about the interior life of a person may not be based in facts—facts have no emotional memory. In truth, facts can lie. There exists a sort of liminal space between fiction and non-fiction that speaks to this idea of truth telling sans “facts.”

I feel that this is the place in which my current work lives. In my efforts to describe the nature of my recent performance project, I was at a loss for how to articulate that it was not fiction, because it was based on the lives of my maternal ancestors. Yet, it was not non-fiction, because, though I had some “facts”—some memory recollections of those who knew them and some personal memories—I also needed to fill in the blanks with creative writing in order to tell their stories. “Creative nonfiction” didn’t seem to be a complete descriptor to me, either.

Toni Morrison calls it literary archeology—“on the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork, you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply.” The way that she steps onto this path is through the image. As a visual artist, the image has always been the lens through which I have interpreted and portrayed my personal interior life and the world around me.

I mentioned in a previous blog post , about an air  that is captured in a photograph. It is this air , which is captured in the image, that led me deeper into the stories held by these women (my ancestors), made me wish to imagine their lives, their interior lives, and made me want to tell their “truth.”

Of course, they do not speak my words, but I hope they speak through my words. I hope my words lend truth to who they were. I hope my words are a type of literary archeology of the interior lives of these women who I find remarkable. I find them remarkable for their steadfastness and their indomitable spirits—or for their absolute and resolute love and their ability to put that love in action despite the conditions of the world in which they found themselves. I hope my words remember them.

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Toni Morrison remains the most influential theorist of the black past in contemporary letters. Since the publication of Beloved and its companion essay “The Site of Memory” in 1987, Morrison has provided the impetus and vocabulary for those wishing to claim that the past is never past but always present. Indeed, the closest thing to a prevailing method in African American literary criticism could be described as the Morrisonian imperative to read how the past haunts the present, making itself known and felt among the living in ways both explicit and subtle. The field’s current keywords—aftermath, afterlife, repetition, and return—reflect that orientation. Christina Sharpe has gone so far as to describe the object of African American criticism as “the ditto ditto in the archives of the present.” [1]

Ironically, what’s been forgotten in this canonization of the Morrison of 1987 is that she began to formulate her engagement with the black past over a decade earlier, in a project for which she served as editor and makeshift curator of objects. In 1974 Random House brought out a book that Morrison had spent 18 months assembling with four collectors of black memorabilia. Though already a twice-published novelist, Morrison used her status as an influential editor at Random House to see the project through. The result was The Black Book : a 200-page, oversized compendium that conveys the story of African and African-descended people in the New World, from the era of colonization, through the age of chattel slavery, and up to the waning days of Jim Crow. “Conveys” because The Black Book does not offer a textual narrative of events. Instead, it relies on pictures—that is, photographic reproductions of specific objects Morrison culled from her collaborators’ collections—to evoke what Sharpe has called the “total climate” of blacks’ experience of transatlantic slavery and its aftermath. [2] The pictures tell their own story, one that is impressionistic rather than authoritative, fragmentary rather than whole. And that is the point. Unlike books written by academic historians, which tend to ascribe a telos to narratives about the past (i.e., from slavery to freedom), Morrison envisioned her work as a “genuine Black history book—one that simply recollected Black Life as lived.” [3] This notion of recollection—of literally re-collecting and figuratively recollecting “Black history”—is the forgotten materialist basis of what Morrison would famously term “rememory” in 1987.

Though a wide body of scholarship has been built up around Morrison, surprisingly little has been written about The Black Book . The oversight is odd since putting the volume together not only launched Morrison’s theorization of the black past but also introduced her to the source material for her best-known work. A nondescript clipping from the February 1856 issue of the American Baptist relates the story of an enslaved woman, Margaret Garner, who tried to kill her young children rather than have them grow up in bondage. Recounted by the Reverend P. S. Bassett, the episode is didactic, highlighting for a white abolitionist readership the impossible decisions enslaved people were compelled to make between freedom and survival. While this story has long been recognized as the inspiration for Beloved , only the critic Cheryl A. Wall has devoted more than passing attention to its place in The Black Book . Yet even she contends that the clipping’s significance lies in the way it prefigures Beloved ’s imperative to read the past in the present. [4] This despite the fact that the excerpt appears early in the book (page 10), when the reading experience is most disorienting, and is easily missed among two densely packed facing pages of clippings and text. Fifteen independent items—some photo-reproduced from original sources, others quoted and set in uniform type—crowd the layout. Smudges and other errors from the copying process further diminish the readability of the text. In the actual composition of The Black Book , nothing makes Garner’s story stand out, which, again, is the point: it is merely one piece of the dizzying puzzle of history.

What was distinctive about Morrison’s engagement with the black past in 1974? How might a historicist obsession with 1987 obscure what she set out to do in The Black Book ? I take a first step toward answering these questions in what follows. I propose that The Black Book advances a more contingent and discontinuous view of history than the one usually attributed to Morrison. This view, I argue, owes much to the book’s composition, which is pictorial and iconic rather than textual and discursive. By “flattening” history into a series of decontextualized images, The Black Book encourages glossing, skipping pages, reading out of order, and finding meaning only in visual or “surface” resemblances. These (non-)reading practices are further encouraged by the fact that Morrison does not discriminate when it comes to identifying things that evoke the black past. Examples of black ingenuity and perseverance appear alongside those of racial parody and animus, while handcrafted wares and mass-produced commodities vie for attention in the same span of pages, confusing the distinction between folk and market. In short, The Black Book gives one access to the black past only through an inquisitive perusal—an actual looking at things. Accordingly, its view of history is premised on an awareness that readers’ grounding in the present is far from certain. Not everyone can or will want to engage The Black Book ’s arrangement of things. What matters for Morrison, here and in her work to come, is not the fact of recovery but the question of how one re-collects the past at all.

The first thing to note about The Black Book is that it’s chock-full of text. Captions and explanatory notes appear underneath or alongside most pictures. Several types of documents—letters, certificates, applications—naturally feature handwritten or printed text. And newspaper clippings and other text-heavy ephemera take up a lot of space in the book, especially early on. Still, I would maintain that The Black Book ’s composition is essentially pictorial insofar as it decouples “understanding” the text from reading it closely. Morrison lends meaning to any given thing by how she associates it with other things—on a single page, over facing pages, or across successive pages. Think of it like reading a museum catalog: the point is to get the gist of its visual organization, not to linger over every word.

At a pictorial level, certain layouts in The Black Book give a fairly coherent impression of the meaning behind the assembled artifacts. One facing-page layout, for example, combines the following: five fugitive slave ads printed in 1790; two undated classifieds, likely from the mid-1800s; W. H. Siebert’s 1896 historical map “‘Underground’ Routes to Canada”; Samuel Rowse’s 1850 lithograph The Resurrection of Henry Box Brown at Philadelphia ; and an 1857 letter from William Brinkl[e]y, one of Harriet Tubman’s associates in Delaware. All of these things appear under the bold heading “I rode a railroad that had no track. ” [5] True, the individual pictures are decontextualized (supporting information on the lithograph and Brinkley do not appear in The Black Book ), with only Brown’s fugitive plot given an explanatory note. Still, the layout’s overall composition conveys the resolve and resourcefulness of fugitives from slavery as they ran toward freedom, as well as the desperate efforts of white enslavers to retrieve them. Sides are drawn, sympathies are channeled, and the “goal,” Canada, is clearly delineated. In this way, Morrison’s things not only document something called the Underground Railroad; they also evoke, in the present tense, what it would have meant and felt like for an enslaved person to take flight.

Yet the coherence of this particular display is a rarity in The Black Book . Discordant juxtapositions are far more common, such that any impression of historical perspective is immediately undercut with confounding, contingent details. One page, for example, has a small photograph that shows a black woman holding a white infant in her lap. The original caption reads “Slave and Friend.” But printed next to this image are lyrics for “All the Pretty Little Horses,” and underneath both is Morrison’s clarification that the song is “an authentic slave lullaby [that] reveals the bitter feelings of Negro mothers who had to watch over their white charges while neglecting their own children.” Trying to exert a measure of control over the artifact and its description, Morrison inserts another artifact whose narrativization is supposed to guide the reader toward a “correct” reading of the image. Yet the page’s pictorial composition is irreducible to that gesture, for underneath this tableau are antebellum newspaper clippings addressing black westward expansion (one from the New York Tribune , the other from the Liberator ) and a maniculed notice prohibiting “the employment of free colored persons on water-craft navigating the rivers of [Arkansas].” [6] What these artifacts have to do with each other from a historical perspective is a mystery. But their visual organization does elicit wonderfully weird associations, as one might detect between the white baby’s hand (clasped over the black woman’s) and the indexical manicule.

This narratively incoherent but visually abundant mélange is not just a function of single-page compositions. It can be seen in facing-page layouts, as when a handwritten letter by Frederick Douglass defending his right to marry “a lady a few shades lighter in complexion than [himself]” appears directly opposite ledgers that list the human property of black enslaver John C. Stanley. It can be seen in successive pages, as is the case with the 16-page color insert, where minstrel-inspired advertising for commodities such as soap and baking powder gives way to photographs of the folk art and handiwork of enslaved people. And, perhaps most spectacularly, it can be seen on the front cover of the book itself (Figure 1): a riot of color and black-and-white images—36 in all—that practically asks (or begs) the question, What is this “black” in The Black Book ? [7]

In earlier versions of this essay, I was tempted to read such confounding pictorial juxtapositions against the grain of Morrison’s intentions for the project. I assumed she had gathered these different things to make them useful to the present, only to find that their recombination failed to do so. I now think this reading is a mistake, an imposition of the way critics historicize Morrison circa 1987 onto her earlier, far more experimental, engagement with the black past. I now believe that the contingency and discontinuity of The Black Book —in short, its refusal to make a teleological narrative available to readers—is its raison d’être . Morrison was well aware that many of the things she had gathered from collections would perplex readers. But rather than force these artifacts into a historical arc, she made their achronicity, or their out-of-timeness, a feature of the book itself. How else can one explain its strange juxtapositions? They were by design, not some unintended consequence of a historicist project.

Morrison said as much in her contemporaneous essays on the project. In them she identified at least two ways in which her work departed from academic historiography. First, it questioned the ideological limitations of historians’ primary research site: the archive. The problem with conventional histories, Morrison implied, was that they were bound to the legitimizing procedures of institutional archives. As such, histories that relied on archives would inevitably reflect the interests and concerns of the powerful, or those deemed worthy of having their effects saved for posterity. By contrast, Morrison wanted The Black Book to give voice to the masses, or “people who had always been viewed only as percentages.” To do that, she turned her attention from scholars to collectors—that is, “people who had the original raw material documenting our life: posters, letters, newspapers, advertising cards, sheet music, photographs, movie frames, books, artifacts and mementos.” Collectors Middleton “Spike” Harris, Morris Levitt, Roger Furman, and Ernest Smith were respected keepers of such “raw material,” and so they became her preferred entry point into the black past. Morrison paid her collaborators the highest compliment she could think of when she said all four possessed “an intense love for black expression and a zest wholly free of academic careerism.” [8]

The second way Morrison departs from historiography followed from the first. By operating at the margins of institutional legitimation, collectors risked being cut off from institutional recognition. It was debatable whether collectors had a legitimate claim to history at all. Doesn’t The Black Book ultimately only reflect what four collectors of varying interests and dispositions had made available to Morrison? The volume’s most outspoken critic, cultural nationalist Kalamu Ya Salaam, made a similar point when he complained, “[T]o throw all of these images and documents together without a text to explain the meaning, context and original intent does not serve to help us truely [sic] understand what our history, our real history of struggle is about.” [9] Yet Morrison would have welcomed the idea that Salaam did not glean “history,” much less a “history of struggle,” from her book. Historians, Morrison wrote, “habitually leave out life lived by everyday people”; in their writing, they seemed more concerned with “defend[ing] a new idea or destroy[ing] and old one.” [10] She wanted The Black Book to convey something messier, murkier, less institutionally recognized about the black experience in the New World. Rather than a history, she aimed to put together a work of memory.

This goal helps explain The Black Book ’s artifactual resemblance to a scrapbook. Although the print-heavy layout does suggest a catalog, the variety of pictorial forms—iconic, indexical, textual, and otherwise—makes the volume reminiscent of a collection of ephemera. This perception is lent further credence by the book’s introduction, in which none other than Bill Cosby muses:

Suppose a three-hundred-year-old black man had decided, oh, say when he was about ten, to keep a scrapbook—a record of what it was like for himself and his people in these United States. He would keep newspaper articles that interested him, old family photos, trading cards, advertisements, letters, handbills, dreambooks, and posters—all sorts of stuff.

“No such man kept such a book,” Cosby observes, before adding, wryly, “But it’s okay—because it’s here, anyway.” [11] As if passed down through time by a mythic ancestor, The Black Book arrives in the contemporary reader’s hands like an anonymous scrapbook. It contains remnants that are random, ephemeral, incomplete—and, precisely because of that, it comes as close as possible to documenting “Black Life as lived.” The illusion being broached here is that of ordinary remembering, or everyday recollection. A scrapbook is indifferent to the sweeps and arcs (much less teloses) of capital “H” history. All it does is keep what an amateur historian decides to set down as worthy of recalling in the moment of composition. This is why when we “read” a scrapbook, we approach it not as a bird’s-eye chronicle but as what Pierre Nora has called a “site of memory” ( lieu de mémoire ). [12]

Morrison’s commitment to ordinary remembering is so thoroughgoing that her name appears nowhere on or in The Black Book . The collectors are credited with putting the book together, but even their names are absented from the cover. This is by design, of course, as it supports the illusion that the volume is authorless, the product of a collective mythos rather than a single guiding hand. The one decidedly personal indulgence Morrison allows herself is to insert an oval-shaped, black-and-white portrait of her mother, Ramah Wofford, on the front cover and in an illustrated tableau of anonymous subjects’ portraits. [13] Nothing calls attention to her mother’s figure in either of these locations, or indeed to the fact that it is the ghost editor’s mother. Though she stares out at the reader, so do a number of the other figures among whom she is clustered. Thus, Wofford blends into the composition as just another picture in the collection. She is one memory among many.

Since 1987, critics have interpreted Morrisonian memory, or rememory, as Beloved terms it, as a charge to read the past in the present. The ethos of such criticism presumes a standpoint that can identify how contemporary circumstances are but an extension, or repetitive realization, of the past. Yet, having traced Morrison’s theorization of memory back to The Black Book , I think this is only a partially correct reading of her work. Morrison did believe in something like collective memory, a sense of the past that bound people to one another in the present. But she consistently refused an absolute knowledge of the past, one that confirms what we believe we already know (Sharpe’s ditto ditto, for example). Instead, Morrison supposed that people could access collective memory only through fragments, traces, the detritus and hauntings of history. This stuff, for Morrison, possessed its own historical weight and was not assimilable to confident determinations of the past. In making The Black Book , her intention was not to integrate readers into a discourse of “their history” but to confront them with buried memories—things in which they might not even recognize themselves. [14]

It may be fitting that, as I revised this essay for publication, The Black Book went out of and came back into print. The original 1974 edition had long been out of print, but the 2009 35th anniversary edition followed course in the late 2010s. That second disappearance turned The Black Book into something like one of the things it reproduces—a relic of the past, a memory among other memories. For a period, copies of the 2009 edition cost upwards of $150, and as much as $2,500, from online and antiquarian booksellers. Yet The Black Book ’s obsolescence was short-lived. With the passing of Morrison in 2018 there came renewed demand for her work, including this long-overlooked book.

The most recent edition (2019) is an artifact of our times. An image of the original cover, showing noticeable shelfwear, is set within a gray frame. The look approximates a well-worn family photo, as if the book itself is being memorialized. Morrison’s name appears front and top-center, her behind-the-scenes work on the project now highlighted in yellow. Yet there is one element that is ghosted from the previous editions: Bill Cosby’s introduction. The reasons for this are obvious, even though the exclusion is unannounced in the text. That the change was made at all—silently, posthumously—confirms Morrison’s intuition that history is not ditto ditto but contingent and discontinuous. Reading The Black Book today is not the same as reading it in 1974, and that is the abiding point.

[1] Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 82. Sharpe’s application of “ditto ditto” to the concept of the archive is adapted from her reading of M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008).

[2] Sharpe, 104-5.

[3] Toni Morrison, “Behind the Making of The Black Book ,” Black World , February 1974, 89.

[4] Cheryl A. Wall, “Reading The Black Book : Between the Lines of History,” Arizona Quarterly 68, no. 4 (2012): 105-30.

[5] Middleton Harris, et al., The Black Book (New York: Random House, 1974), 68-69.

[6] Ibid., 65.

[7] Ibid., 24-25, 89-104, front cover. The last part of this paragraph riffs on Stuart Hall’s field-shaping essay, “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?,” in Black Popular Culture , ed. Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 21-33.

[8] Toni Morrison, “Rediscovering Black History,” New York Times Book Review , August 11, 1974, 16.

[9] Kalamu ya Salaam, review of The Black Book , by Middleton Harris, et al., Black Books Bulletin 3, no. 1 (1975): 73.

[10] Morrison, “Behind,” 88.

[11] Bill Cosby, “Introduction,” in The Black Book , v.

[12] Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations no. 26 (1989): 7-24. The subtitle of my essay, and the distinction between history and memory I draw on here, is indebted to this piece.

[13] Harris, front cover, 196-97.

[14] This point about (non-)recognition echoes Christopher Freeburg’s analysis of The Black Book as fostering a “personalized and contingent” black interiority rather than subjecting readers to a predetermined historical script. Christopher Freeburg, Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017), 130.

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Thing Theory in Literary Studies

Sarah Wasserman

Patrick Moran

That things capture our imagination is hardly news. As Andrew Cole wrote in a 2016 issue of October , "materialism is as old as the hills." Cole claims that new approaches to studying things allow us to find similarities where we have too often found difference, and that this method dates back at least to Hegel and Marx. The study of matter has proceeded under a number of names: dialectical materialism, material culture studies, and, more recently, vibrant materialism, and object-oriented ontology. The scope of such studies has likewise been expansive, ranging from the sub-atomic to the galactic, from Lucretius to Latour.

Nevertheless, "thing theory," a term that loosely bundles together a range of approaches to studying material culture, began to gain critical traction in literature departments in the early 2000s. It gave many literary scholars a new way of looking at old things. For some this included tracing the material histories of objects within books (Elaine Freedgood and John Plotz) or tracing the history of the book as material object (Leah Price and Peter Stallybrass). For others, it meant pondering the ways that language and narrative reorganize subject-object relations in the minds of readers (Bill Brown and Allan Hepburn). Not simply a way of tracking the fate of snuffboxes, stamp collections, and kaleidoscopes, thing theory allowed scholars to consider what our relationships to these items reveal.

By now, thing theory may seem to name an academic trend long past, but the expansion of object studies and various post-humanisms across disciplines suggests that it remains as relevant as ever. Many of the most urgent problems of the twenty-first century reveal an entanglement between humans and things. Climate change, biotechnology, intellectual property, drought and famine, even terrorism and war can hardly be discussed without addressing such entanglement. Recent work in affect theory, animal studies, and the environmental humanities (to name just a few contemporary approaches) shares a commitment to thinking of the human subject alongside the object world. This commitment produces deeply interdisciplinary work. Reading the objects in literature and the object of literature has always involved attention to modes of production, consumption, and perception. Earlier work in thing theory and literary studies borrowed methods from anthropology, archeology, and art history; now these disciplines are borrowing back. Anthropologists such as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing ( The Mushroom at the End of the World , 2015) and Kristin Peterson ( Speculative Markets , 2014), art historians like Caroline A. Jones ( The Global Work of Art , 2017) and Jennifer Roberts ( Transporting Visions , 2014) and media archeologists like Johanna Drucker ( Graphesis , 2014) and John Durham Peters ( The Marvelous Clouds , 2015) provide rigorous accounts of materiality; they also attend to the narrative, meaning-making capacities of that materiality.

This Colloquy highlights innovative work situated at the intersection of literary and material culture studies. Weaving together insights from different periods and different disciplines, the scholars whose work is presented here study the particularity of things in order to address larger concerns. Literary things can make human desires, narrative forms, historical contexts, and patterns of circulation legible. New methods and approaches may be taking shape; the thing endures. But as scholars of the Anthropocene have made clear, just how long some of our most precious objects can endure still depends upon human stewardship or disregard. Thinking about the agency of things alongside our own has raised a series of ontological concerns that cross disciplinary boundaries. But literature, which can interrogate things as they are and as they might be, has the capacity to point in new directions. Many questions animate the conversation assembled here: what does it mean to "read" an object across disciplinary perspectives?  How do literary movements (i.e. realism, postmodernism) and literary periods (i.e. Victorian, twentieth-century) stage things differently? Does thing theory entail close or surface reading: what is its relationship to post-critical methods and the descriptive turn? Can thing theory grant us access to narratives of exclusion, marginalization, and subjugation that might otherwise remain invisible? Is there an ethical or political danger in dissolving the subject-object divide? Where can the thing lead us today? What stories does it have left to tell? 

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Morrison’s infinity knots: sites of memory at princeton, the review’s review.

The art and life of Mark di Suvero

Handwritten manuscript page from The Bluest Eye , and other Morrison papers. Toni Morrison Papers, Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Photograph courtesy of the Princeton University Library.

Visiting Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory , on exhibit at Princeton University’s Firestone Library from now through June 4, 2023, is like going to a sauna. You enter a warm, windowless space, and as you rotate your way through each experience, you find you’re dunked suddenly into something that barrages the senses—fire-singed early drafts, a detailed map, alternate endings for Beloved , the photograph that inspired Jazz . But it’s also like taking a cold plunge: you’re carried along on the continuous current of Morrison’s voice and work, and you duck out refreshed, tingling, alive with more possibilities than you’d realized there could be. 

The exhibit pays careful attention to the geography of imagined space, as well as the processes by which Morrison’s novels—which seem so inevitable in their final form—took years of wrangling, revising, discarding, drafting, and re-forming. In her essay “The Site of Memory,” Morrison writes:

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory—what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our “flooding.”

Curated by Autumn Womack, associate professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton, the exhibit is divided into six sections that flow chronologically but are meant to be experienced in a Morrisonian infinity knot, snaking in and around each other, distinct yet inextricably interlocked. “Beginnings,” “Writing Time,” “Thereness-ness,” “Wonderings and Wanderings,” “Genealogies of Black Feminism,” and “Speculative Futures”—each of these titles bears multiple meanings. “Writing Time,” for instance, refers not only to the interstitial moments in which Morrison squeezed novel-writing into her full-time job as an editor, around her off-the-clock family and social life—but also to her writings that are  of and about time. Morrison took copious notes in the blank pages of her day planner, inscribing a kind of ancestral time into the calendrical present.

“Paradise,” visual schematic. Toni Morrison Papers, Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Photograph courtesy of the Princeton University Library Digital Imaging Studio.

Princeton itself is a site of Morrisonian memory. She taught at the university for seventeen years. In 2008, I had the insane good luck to take one of her final literature courses. The seminar was called “The Foreigner’s Home,” its apostrophe bearing layers: the foreigner who  is home, the home that the foreigner possesses, and the paradox of the foreigner by definition both having a home and not being there. Morrison spun a master class on the interconnectedness of exile and writing, on the nature of “home” and “possession” in literature, and—ultimately—on how to be a human being. As we read authors Morrison loved—Coetzee, Hemingway, Ondaatje—she kept us grounded in the troubled site of Princeton, our own foreign home. 

My primary sense memory from that class is the sound of Morrison’s voice: that throaty purr sure as a mountain spring. Her hypnotic tones were best when we could coax her into reading aloud from whatever text we were discussing that week, and better still when we could get her to read from her own work. For Womack, a crucial component of “Sites of Memory” is that Morrison narrates the experience. Morrison’s voice provides the soundtrack—no matter where you are in the space, you hear her speaking. A screen at the omphalos of the exhibit plays a continuous loop of two hours of footage that Womack culled from an eight-hour interview conducted with Morrison in 1987 at Boston University, just before Beloved was published. Drop in at any point and you’ll be mesmerized—I caught, for example, Morrison describing her oldest son spilling orange juice on the pages of something she was writing. Instead of stopping to clean it up, she wrote around the stain. “I wasn’t sure the sentence would last,” she said, “but I knew there would be more orange juice.” As you get closer and farther from the site of her voice, you experience a kind of Doppler effect: her words fade in and out of intelligibility, but her cadences concatenate. 

Womack confessed to me, “I have two favorite children [in this exhibit].” One is personal: b ecause her favorite Morrison book is Paradise , she loves the point-of-view diagrams for the novel, which resemble schematic galaxies. The other is a feat of pure archival magic. Morrison’s physical legacy does not lack for breadth—Womack and her team combed over two hundred linear feet of material—but a 1993 fire in Morrison’s upstate New York house damaged or destroyed many more papers. Until recently, scholars believed that all early notes for Song of Solomon had been lost in that fire. But in August 2021, as Womack and her team were finishing their research, they came across singed day planners that included mentions of characters from that novel: scrawled meditations on Milkman Dead’s name, in the forms both of memos and of preliminary dialogue, in blue ink and in black. Practical details from Morrison’s life bleed through the paper, a palimpsest of her life and the book’s timeline. These cherished documents appear as a spine down the center of the exhibit, laid out carefully like dinosaur bones, in the shape of the animal. 

My own favorite child lives in the “Speculative Futures” section: it is an outline in which Morrison envisions Beloved as a nine-hundred-page trilogy spanning from the mid-nineteenth century up to the eighties. What if the finished novel itself is just a scrap in the Morrison archive, one that somehow continues to expand? Sites of Memory  shows us that the finished products are but one form that her writing could have taken. The Bluest Eye began as a potential play or short story;  Paradise first existed as architectural blueprints—the books weren’t the stories’ only possible manifestations. The forms they ultimately took are perfect and decisive, but what this exhibit reminds us is that perfect isn’t inevitable, decisions aren’t made in isolation, and fixed doesn’t mean locked. These might be the forms of the works we have today, but they exist in context, and they continue to live and breathe, as organisms with pasts, presents, and futures. 

I also love a piece that’s not in the Sites of Memory exhibition but just across the hall. Princeton’s Firestone Library also houses the Cotsen Children’s Library, an amazing magical space complete with a Narnia lamppost and climbing tree, which has organized a small parallel exhibit, They’ve Got Game: The Children’s Books of Toni and Slade Morrison. They’ve Got Game showcases the eight children’s books that Morrison wrote in collaboration with her son. Among the items is a delicious correspondence with the illustrator Pascal Lemaître, in which Slade suggests that the early sketches of a lion looked like Toni. Both exhibits not only permit but demand the freedom to immerse oneself in Morrison’s work on all levels: to, rather than be afraid of the titan of letters she symbolizes, understand her legacy as one of attention and engagement, of rigorously breaking down assumptions and paying closer attention, of remembering to create time and space so that joy can flood back in.

Adrienne Raphel is the author of  Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them . Her latest collection of poetry,  Our Dark Academia , was published by Rescue Press.

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Toni Morrison: Site and Memory 1

Plan détaillé, texte intégral.

Consciousness and memory cancel each other out. (Freud, letter to Fliess, 1896)

Memory (the deliberate act of remembering) is a form of willed creation. (Morrison, 1984, 384)

1 Critics of Toni Morrison's novels have often dealt with the theme of memory (in German Gedächtnis and Errinerung ) that is central to creation in her work (Andrews, 1999; Fabre, 1993). Remembering shapes the narrative that espouses the ceaseless returns to the not-so distant past, the comings and the goings between now and then, and ultimately the circular motion of the production of memories. The literary text inscribes the tribulations of individual and collective history in and through what memory both holds up and passes on. The question is: can one shed light on Morrison's writing starting from a reflection on memory? To do so, I intend to look at the excerpt that describes what she calls “rememory” in order to understand to what extent the staging of the workings of memory is akin to a fantasy. Morrison's coinage is derived from the Black English “to memory” or “to remember”; it can be read as a “the narrative of a fable”, or “fabulation”, that figures the return of the repressed.

2 The main character of Beloved , the slave Sethe – with a possible word play on Lethe, the river of oblivion – willfully buries the memory of her infanticide. Only a hurtful process – “anything dead coming back to life hurts” (B, 35) – that requires wording can make it present to memory. 2 Beloved can then be said to be a novel about the necessity of remembering in its relation to History's trauma: the Middle Passage and slavery in America. Trying to forget may help one survive. Yet surviving means being able to confront that traumatic memory in the very process of reconstructing the scene of its happening. This figuration, that bears the weight of the return of memory, opens the way for its transcendence. It then permits one to “pass on” to something else, to take up the verb that stigmatizes intransitivity in the novel: “This is not a story to pass on” (B, 275). The “story” halts transmission. Conversely, transmission can only happen through the paradoxical telling of that story as “no-story”, as trauma.

1. Memory/creation: fantasy and reality

3 Beloved deals with collective as much as with individual memory, with America's amnesia about its past of slavery and the slave trade. Morrison has not written an autobiography but autobiographical elements enter the composition of her novels. In an essay entitled “The Site of Memory” she explains that the point is not to remember things precisely, but the creation of a character, or of a scene, finds its origin in an impression, an association, a concentration. One could even go so far as to use the Freudian term “condensation”. “Pieces” coalesce to form a “part”. For the writer the act of creation is akin to archeological research:

It is a kind of literary archeology: on the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply. (SM, 302) 3

4 The metaphor of the site is explicit: it is an archeological site, loaded with the possibility of History, a necessarily incomplete History: fragments, remnants. These “remains” retain in their very “remanence” what cannot and will not be wholly erased. Starting from these remains, the construction of the past that finds its source in the imagination can begin. In the creation of fiction, the writer mingles “re-collection” with imagination, as well as with the feelings associated with the image:

What makes it fiction is the nature of the imaginative act: my reliance on the image – on the remains – in addition to recollection, to yield up a kind of truth. By “image”, of course, I don’t mean “symbol”, I simply mean “picture” and the feelings that accompany the picture. (SM, 302)

5 No wonder that the metaphor of the veil, so recurrent in Black American literature – the veil of self-censorship in slave narratives, among others – should come back under Morrison's pen. She wants to tear that veil: “My job becomes how to rip that veil drawn over ‘proceedings too terrible to relate’” (SM, 302). In another section of the text, she uses the word “part” again, this time with the meaning of parting, lifting, putting aside:

If I’m trying to fill in the blanks that the slave narratives left – to part the veil that was so frequently drawn, to implement that stories that I heard – then the approach that’s most productive and most trustworthy for me is the recollection that moves from the image to the text. Not the text to the image. (SM, 303, italics mine)

6 The “picture” comes before the memory; it tells what the memory means; it informs it. That definition is close to a psychoanalytical definition of memory in so far as it is linked to the visual. Like the patient who confides all he or she knows together with what he or she does not know, the image gives access to memory as soon as it appears. One can also take up the metaphor of the magic slate that Freud used in 1925 to describe the process of memory. The writer proceeds as follows: from the image, she moves to the meaning, and finally to the text. To illustrate this motion, she takes the example of the corn on the cob “that she sees” when she is working on the manuscript of Beloved (cf. Harding and Martin, 1994):

I’m trying to write a particular kind of scene, and I see com on the cob. To “see” com on the cob does not mean that it suddenly hovers; it only means that it keeps coming back. And in trying to figure out “What is all this com doing?” I discover what it is doing. (SM, 304)

7 The image keeps coming back, a sign that compulsion towards repetition is linked to memory, but in this case, not in a morbid way since the repetition is acknowledged. The image as picture imposes itself; it is linked to childhood memories. Here is the narrative of these memories:

I see the house where I grew up in Lorain, Ohio. My parents had a garden some distance from our house, and they didn’t welcome me and my sister there, when we were young, because we were not able to distinguish between the things they wanted to grow and the things that they didn’t. So we were not able to hoe, or weed, until much later. I see them walking, together, away from me. I’m looking at their backs and what they are carrying in their arms: their tools, and maybe a peck basket. Sometimes when they walk away from me they hold hands, and they go to this other place in the garden. They have to cross some railroad tracks to get there. I also am aware that my mother and my father sleep at odd hours because my father works many jobs and works at night. And these naps are times of pleasure for me and my sister because nobody’s giving us chores, or telling us what to do, or nagging us in any way. In addition to which, there is some feeling of pleasure in them that I’m only vaguely aware of. They’re very rested when they take these naps. And later on in the summer we have an opportunity to eat corn, which is the one plant that I can distinguish from the others, and which is the harvest that I like the best; the others are the food that no children likes – the collards, the okra, the strong, violent vegetables that I would give a great deal for now. But I do like the corn because it’s sweet, and because we all sit down to eat it, and it’s finger food, and it’s hot, and it’s even good cold, and there are neighbors in, and there are uncles in, and it’s easy, and it’s nice. The picture of the corn and the nimbus of emotion surrounding it became a powerful one in the manuscript I am now completing.

8 Unmistakenly, the personal memory of the family garden from which the children are excluded points to sexual difference, a distinction only faintly veiled in the little girls' inability to tell what can be eaten from what cannot. They cannot tell the edible, what can be consumed, from the inedible weeds. The parents' sexuality, already implicitly present earlier, resurfaces in the vision of their joined hands and of the reserved territory that is barred by the railroad tracks: “that other place in the garden”, or that place of the Other. The opposition has been gradually built up by the motion from the vegetable garden to the sexual space. In the next sequence, the children play while the parents take a nap. Transgression is then possible. There is no law, which is what is spelt out, among other things, by the inversion between day (sleep) and night (work). The parents' “disappearance”, their absence, also signals lawlessness, since, not being there, they cannot forbid anything. Two taboos, the sexual, and what stands for it in Morrison's memory, the vegetable garden, are juxtaposed. Both spaces are fordidden to the children. In the narrative reconstructed through memory the garden yields fruit, sensual sweet warm finger food. The memory also tells that it is adult food. From that space of exclusion emerges the possibility of a collective (adult and children) gathering imbued with sensuality.

9 Although Morrison does not explicitly link that childhood memory to a particular scene in Beloved, summertime, the family garden, the parents' nap, the food shared with the neighbors, the uncles, and the extended family, suggest the passage in which Sethe and Paul D remember the time when Sethe and Halle, then slaves on Garner's plantation, made love in a corn field. From the image of the food that one seizes with one's fingers (“finger food”), the writer frees a complex erotic scene. The ear of corn is both food one shares, but also food of partition. Slave work, fieldwork, the separation of the cob from its sheath and its threads, calls forth in its association to food, sexual intercourse, in the same way as both elements were linked in the writer's childhood memory. The taboo of sexual intercourse is exposed at the same time as the food taboo is transgressed. That forbiddance is doubled up for the slaves by a dictate for procreation since sexual coupling was imposed by the logic of chattel slavery. Moreover, Paul D and his companions steal corn from their master. Their jouisssance takes place within that space, that of theft and of the consumption of food that does not belong to them. The space of theft is also that of metaphor. Metaphor, that displacement from one space to another, allows the subtraction and the appropriation of what necessarily belongs to the other. Morrison also writes that eating corn is never what it appears to be, that metaphor signals theft, freedom, “flight”, precisely within a controlled space.

10 The ears of corn from the writer's memory become in the text of Beloved Sethe's memory in which Halle's body melts with cast away husks and silk threads torn off from the cob: “[Sethe] remembered that some of the corn stalks broke, folded down over Halle's back, and among the things her fingers clutched were husk and cornsilk hair” (B, 27). There is a mise en abyme of autobiographical memory, relayed by the character who does the remembering. In love as they are with Sethe, the other slaves' voyeurism is elaborated textually starting from the gradual disclosing of the cob, the baring of the kernels of unsheathed corn: “corn shucking”.

11 In Morrison's memory, the little girls were also excluded from their parents' sexuality, from their parents' garden. In the fictive scene, secretive sexual intercourse becomes public knowledge. One cannot not see the space created by the broken and folded down stalks in the field. The text constructs the scene starting from the autobiographical memory and by following a logic of inversion: “The jealous admiration of the watching men melted with the feast of the new corn they allowed themselves that night” (B, 27). From sexual intercourse one moves without transition to food whereas the garden and its produce appear before the parents' nap in the childhood memory. Corn is a metonym for sexual intercourse and conversely, sexual intercourse is nothing but a displacement from the infants' first relationship to food, that of need. The genital stage replaces the oral stage; the oral stage is substituted to the genital.

12 The memory is also that of Paul D, as if sharing food had to be translated in the text into the sharing of memories: “... now Paul D could not remember how they'd cooked those ears too young to eat. What he did remember was parting the hair to get to the tip, the edge of his fingernail just under, so as not to graze a single kernel” (B, 27, italics mine). The task becomes an act of sharing, of parting, which recalls in its very expression the veil ripped over the unspeakable. The male character parts so as not to hurt, not to scratch, not to graze. Excessive youth, immaturity, both topos and symptom in a novel whose central theme is the murder of a little girl is evoked by this food which should not be consumed. The ambivalence between the cob and the body persists through the use of the word “hair”. The following sentence is written from Sethe's point of view; she cannot help associating the sharp noise of the sheath, when it is taken off, to physical pain: “The pulling down of the tight sheath, the ripping sound always convinced her it hurt” (B, 27). The text then moves abruptly to Paul D's point of view: “As soon as one strip of husk was down, the rest obeyed and the ear yielded up to him its shy rows, exposed at last” (B, 27). Through the creation of characters who symbolise “male” and “female” in their relationship to sexual intercourse, the act of writing inscribes sexual difference in alternating semantic doubles: protection vs exposure, untouchability vs physical pain, shyness vs experience. The omniscient narrator passes from one to the other and thus shares with the reader the workings of difference within the slaves' imaginary, what Morrison calls: “the unwritten interior life of these people” (SM, 302). The advent of writing consists in this deployment of this register of images from the core of the childhood memory.

13 In an excess of sensuality and explicit correspondences, poetic evocation translates into a promise of freedom, chanted in the text like the lyrics of a song. The refrain calls for freedom in crescendo variations. The reader does not know whether they are uttered by one character, by both, by all the characters mentioned, all the slaves working for Garner, or indeed by the omniscient narrator: “How loose the silk. How jailed down the juice”.... “How loose the silk. How quick the jailed-up flavor ran free”.... “How loose the silk. How fine and loose and free” (B, 27). The narrative deliberately blurs the different points of view and re-calls the presence of sexual metaphor in the slaves' worksongs. The text exposes and enacts the reappropriation of this ability to tell without telling that the slaves have always possessed. 4 Freedom, jouissance, spaces not controlled by the Master find in the metonymie play of corn their ideal expression. The feast stands at the antipodes of the horrors described by slave narratives, yet it also comes close to the horror for one touches at this point in the text upon the unspeakable of jouissance.

14 This example of the workings of an image that transforms itself into text after a series of displacements illustrates the creative process at the core of writing. Contrary to analytical recollection or to an impulse that might want to reach the goal of an exhaustive description of the past, the act of creation rests content, so to speak, with details yielded up by the act of remembering:

I have a memory of [a woman called Hannah Peace], and it’s like this: the color of her skin – the mat quality of it. Something purple around her. Also eyes not completely open. There emanated from her an aloofness that seemed to me kindly disposed. But most of all I remember her name – or the way people pronounced it – never Hannah or Miss Peace – always Hannah Peace. (T, 386) 5

15 In the essay “The Site of Memory”, Morrison also mentions the creation process at work in Sula and the place of memory in the composition of that novel:

I began to write my second book, which was called Sula, because of my preoccupation with a picture of a woman and the way in which I heard her name pronounced. Her name was Hannah, and I think she was a friend of my mother’s. I don’t remember seeing her very much, but what I do remember is the color around her – a kind of violet, a suffusion of violet – and her eyes, which appeared to be half closed. But what I remember most is how the women said her name: how they said “Hannah Peace” and smiled to themselves, and there was some secret about her that they knew, which they didn’t talk about, at least not in my hearing, but it seems loaded in the way they said her name. And I suspected that she was a little bit of an outlaw but they approved in some way. (SM, 304)

16 Within the act of creation, memory and its agregate of emotions are what matters: “What is useful – definitive – is the galaxy of emotions that accompanied the woman as I pursued my memory of her, not the woman herself” (T, 386, italics mine). Creation is memory work, work that stems from memory. Creative imagination is part and parcel of the strength of remembering: “The act of imagination is bound up with memory” (SM, 304).

17 Morrison closes her essay on the site of memory with the metaphor of the Mississippi floods. In stormy weather the river goes back to its old bed even when dikes have tamed it. Old Man River remembers his original place and reconquers violently what man's work and willpower had taken away from him. The memory of water, fluidity and infiltration, flooding and remembering share the movements of overflow and access. The excess which makes both go back to the origin, the primal site before the detour because taming means breaking down, redressing, making right, straightening. A writer's memory is wild like the river flow.

2. Remembering/"rememory": the site of the scene in fantasy

18 In Morrison's syntax the word “rememory” changes category: from verb it becomes a noun whereas the noun “memory” becomes a verb. 6 It is a reminiscence? A mnemic trace? A screen memory? Or more than that in the novel’s poetic universe? Sethe explains to her daughter Denver that a memory is linked to a certain space where it dwells while the location has been transformed not to leave any trace of human presence, no imprint or sign that might feed memory. The dialogue between Sethe and Denver, after the latter has seen her mother hug the white-robed ghost who looks like her, is a series of interrogations. Denver asks her mother to tell her what she was saying:

“I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone but the place – the picture of it – stays, but not just in my rememory, 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.” “Can other people see it?” asked Denver. “Oh yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. And it’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It’s never going away. Even if the whole farm, every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what’s more if you go there – you who never was there – if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. So, Denver, you can’t never go there. Never. Because even though it’s all over – over and done with – it’s goin to always be there waiting for you.” (B, 35-36, italics mine)

19 Sethe first mentions a time made of loss. The reader cannot help but link the passing of time to the sentence which, when transitive, paradoxically closes and does not close the narrative: “It was not a story to pass on” (B, 275). But time is also made up of what remains (“stay”). Time is both parting and staying, disappearing and remaining, flight and “being there”. Sethe describes the workings of memory, a combination of forgetting and traces, an alternative placed under the sign of the cycle, of re-turn: “ re- memory”. Remembering gives way to “recalling”, a process whose crucial role in the psychoanalytic cure Freud underlined:

[The doctor’s] goal is to recall memory in the old way, its reproduction in the psychic realm. This goal, he pursues it even when he realizes that the old technique does not enable him to reach it. In order to maintain on the psychic terrain impulses that the patient would like to enact, he undertakes, against the latter’s will, a neverending struggle and when he succeeds, thanks to the work of rememoration, to get rid of what the patient would like to ease himself from through action, he considers this result as a triumph of the cure. (Freud, 1997, 112, translation mine)

20 The fantasy articulated around memory is stated in Morrison's text as the reality of places: “Places. Places are still there”. Time is scansion. Constitutive of the workings of memory and consubstantive with it it is made of forgetting, memory lapses, remembering, recalling. It makes room for space, or rather for place. Fantasy is anchored there, in a “being there” of place. The character of Sethe describes in fact the motion from individual to collective memory. The house burns, but the place remains, or rather the picture of the place. The irreducible quality of fantasy translates into a passage from inside to outside. Sethe seems to be naming in this dilaogue the fondamental fantasy of the link between place and experience. The scene of the trauma is inscribed within space. Indeed, Freud spoke of “exhuming” memories. One could say that a “territorialisation” of memory takes place, a link to the soil is established in the motion from individual to collective memory. Individual memory is objectified in order to be fixed down. The scene of the trauma thus moves from its presentation in the individual psyche to a presentation without a subject. The text effectively passes from “ my rememory”, a rememoration which is that of the singular subject, to “Place”, to “The picture of the place”. Indeed, psychoanalyst Gérard Miller sums up the articulation of the subject to fantasy as follows:

The reflection on fantasy is constructed upon the subject of the unconscious. Fantasy is actually the necessary consequence of the subject at the same time as it constitutes the limits of the symbolic functioning of the speaking subject. There is no subject without fantasy, but fantasy is what allows the subject to think that it can escape the supremacy of the signifier. (1987, 112)

21 Freud's statements describes the three phases of fantasy as follows: 1) “A child is being beaten”; 2) “I am being beaten by the father”; 3) “The father is beating a child that I hate”. Transposed to Sethe's fiction, this “core of individual myth of the neurotic,” to take up Lacan's words, or fundamental fantasy, seems to make the trace of the subject disappear behind the visual impact of the image of the place, and ultimately behind that place itself. One could even read this passage as an allegory of the notion of screen memory. The irreducible quality of fantasy translates into the fading of the subject behind the place of the trauma: “A house has been burnt out there” (cf. Β , 36) which becomes in Sethe's mind: “A child has been killed out there”. The primacy of place is written in the passage from the singular to the plural. Collective memory is constituted upon the fundamental fantasy of the link of the place to the scene of trauma: in the present case, Sethe's rape, her torture, the murder of her daughter. Thus this fable that stresses the fundamentally external character of memory tells the fantasy of a soil which maintains its link to an inter-subjective collective memory.

22 This mythological narrativisation of the process of memory leads to a foregrounding of the fundamentally exernal and indelible character of fantasy: “Out there” is repeated several times. It is what fantasy bumps into. Sethe describes a visualisation which is such that memory becomes a mental image, a “thought picture”. Memory detaches itself from the subject to subsist, stay, remain permanently in the place (in place) of its experience. How can that memory be “out there,” be “outside” to such a degree as to no longer belong to the subject? This aspect of Sethe's memory mirrors Zora Neale Hurston's inner memories (“memories within”) and could then be understood as outside memories or “memories without” (1984, 3). However, how can “memory” be both the outcome of Sethe's introspection-or her inner gaze-and be located, “stuck” to the very place of the experience which produced it? That place reaches then a degree of utmost reality: “That place is real,” Sethe tells her daughter. “The real,” writes Lacan, “is what is missing in its place.”

23 One may also read this passage as the fantasy of the link to the mother's body, that “real” place of origin: the body of the mother and southern soil. Sethe's infanticide would then be placed in relation to the mass murder of the slave trade. The subject's individual story, shaped by the muder of a child, parallels a people's History constructed upon the non-being and the animal nature at the core of the practice of slavery.

24 Let us go back to the scene of fantasy in Beloved. In Jean-Daniel Nasio's words, fantasy is “a narrative that depicts an imagined scene with its places, its colors, its time, its light and its sounds” (1994, 168). In Sethe's narrative memory becomes an object; it is external to the subject to the point of turning into an object. From process, memory becomes the production of a series of image-objects: “thought pictures.” These objects, as outside traces of a subject's memory, become obstacles into which another subject happens to bump. The object “picture” has first become bound to a subject's consciousness to then turn into an object for an other consciousness. This brutal encounter acts as a figuration of the cure in which the analytical relation – “that space in-between that encloses and absorbs the two analytical partners” (Nasio, 1994, 133) – contains both the analyst and the analysand.

25 Sethe describes a scene in which the other speaker in the dialogue is struck: he or she sees, hears, feels something that assails him or her since it belongs to that place, the “already there” of the subjectivity that produced it. The formal matrix of fantasy contains four elements, a subject, an object, a signifier, and images: “ Everything is ordered according to a precise, generally perverse scenario, generally through a sentence in the patient's narrative” (Nasio, 1994, 171). In the present case, the one who remembers becomes memory. The subject becomes a process of remembering. He or she gives rise to a hybrid object: a mental image, a “thought picture.” From a psychoanalytical perspective, one is indeed dealing with fantasy: i.e. with what one loses. The mise en abyme of fantasy leads to fundamental fantasy (Nasio, 1994, 172). At its deepest level, Sethe's fantasy is articulated around the death of her child. Yet at the beginning of the novel, she also loses her memory: "[S]he could not remember remembering" (B, 39). In this radical staging of the process of memory, Sethe loses what she owns, what is hers only (“ her rememory”) in order for that object to become somebody else's (“a rememory that belongs to someone else”).

26 The sentence in the patient's narrative around which fantasy is articulated would be in the present case, if one transposes the Freudian statement to Morrison's text: “You bump into a rememory that belong to someone else.” Like the verb “to beat” in the fantasy analysed by Freud, the verb at the core of this fantasy is “to bump.” The sudden, chance blow received when one bumps into somebody else's memory may be turned around. The memory that belongs to the other hurts; it strikes one, makes one fall down. These blows of the memory of the other are violent, indelible, “stuck” to the scene: “The picture is still there” (B, 36). The motionlessness, the fixedness of the picture pierce through the notion of the “always already there” of rememory. Memory's repetition does not take place within an individual conciousness but memory, that has now become a process, is watching/waiting for the other subject, ready to catch up with him/her, as if the familiar phrase “it will catch up with you one day or another”– in French: “ Tu ne perds rien pour attendre ” – were to be taken literally: “If you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you.... It's going to always be there, waiting for you” (B, 36, italics mine). The “always” of this waiting, halfway between pursuit and desire, its enactment in the blow and the enigma of its happening point to the subject of Beloved. Like fantasy, the ghost is a hybrid being. In a letter to Fliess, Freud describes fantasy as a half-breed, a being who does not specifically belong to either of the worlds from which he springs. Like a psychic formation in constant motion, fantasy is both conscious and unconscious. He called it the “black-white to show that fantasy changes register in the comings and goings between consciousness and the unconscious” (Nasio, 1994, 172).

27 At the end of her “mythological” narrative on memory, Sethe utters the sentence that justifies the murder of her child when placed back within the context of the novel: “That's how I had to get all my children out. No matter what” (B, 36) She wanted to take her children out of the grip of these phantoms/fantasies that were on the look out for them, ready to assail them, to take them out of the site of memory, of the memory of the site. If one paraphrases the Freudian fantasy of the beaten child, the depths of the murderous act can be spelt as follows: “There, a (female) child is being beaten/There, a (female) child is being killed.” Fantasy is acted on but within it, the child's murder can only be told in the following paradoxical way: “I am taking my child from the place – site of death/site of life – of her certain death, threatened as she is by the other's reminiscences and I take her into a place where she shall be free from these assaults: i. e. death”. Indeed, Denver talks about her mother as a murderer: “There sure is something in her that makes it all right to kill her own” (B, 205).

28 If remembering is taboo in the sense that Sethe refuses to remember, Beloved follows the meanderings of memory’s journey to consciousness as a mechanical process where things are re-ordered after having been misplaced: “The click had clicked; things were where they ought to be or poised and ready to glide in” (B, 176). The moment of remembering is presented as a a series of concentric circles that Sethe describes physically around Paul D and mentally around the subject. Incidentally, Freud uses the same metaphor of circles for memory:

She knew that the circle she was making around the room, him, the subject, would remain one. That she could never close in, pin it down for anybody who had to ask.... The truth was simple.... Simple: she was squatting in the garden and when she saw them coming and recognized schoolteacher’s hat, she heard wings. Little hummingbirds stuck their needle beaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat their wings. And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil , out, away, over there where noone could hurt them. Over there. Outside this place, where they would be safe. And the hummingbird wings beat on. (B, 163, italics mine)

29 To the traditional “out there” of the scene of memory’s fantasy corresponds the “over there” of the moment of the murder that is superimposed to flight: Sethe’s flight to the free states, but also her flight into death described here as a passage “through the veil”. For the metaphor of the veil returns to echo that veil of prudishness, of censureship that the writer wanted to lift, to part in order to invent the slaves’ inner lives. Sethe takes her children beyond the veil, to the other side of the veil, and she performs that act literally if one thinks of the dead child. This dead child whose name nobody can remember at the end of the novel cannot be “reclaimed”, re-called. At this point, one comes up against the play on transitivity and literalisation which the French translates as reflexiveness ( se rappeler ).

30 The metaphor of that mother who collects her life’s most precious fragments mimicks memory’s effort to gather, to cull, to recollect, to give that memory a shelter. It is also akin to the creative act in the relation between pieces and parts. The “yes, yes, yes” of fantasy that inscribes the indelible character of the object-souvenir, its remanence and permanency, echoes in this passage the “nonono” of refusal, the rejection of violence, or its acceptance in the name of a withdrawal from a greater violence. The circle cannot be closed even if it tries to narrow down its subject. It inscribes in its center the void of the unspeakable, what writing cannot spell. Whereas the memory-object blocks, fills in, clogs, the re-call of the murder of the daughter points to a void, a hole, a place that has been emptied out, both loss and excess (Raynaud, 1993).

3. Narrative/re-creation: the color of memory

31 The narrative creates reality and substitutes for it several times in the novel through the character of Beloved. The ghost, this phantom, acts as the return of the repressed. Sethe’s second daughter Denver spins a web of words the better to hold up her fleeing sister, running away like water, who showed up one fine day without warning. The two sisters love to recreate in their dialogue the story of Denver’s miraculous birth, a narrative that only the mother can tell since she is the only one to have experienced birthgiving, a “delivery”:

The two did the best they could to create what really happened , how it really was, something only Sethe knew because she alone had the mind for it and the time afterward to shape it: the quality of Amy’s voice, her breath like burning wood. The quick-change weather up in those hills – cool at night, hot in the day, sudden fog. (B, 78, italics mine)

32 To tell one’s story is described as an a posteriori recreation of experience, an act of figuration which takes time. But the metaphor of abrupt change (“quick”, “sudden”) and this switching between hot and cold recall the fog of that day, a necessary blurring, a liminal state between liquid and solid, “condensation”. The unspeakable of voice and breath, the narrative of birth become the birth of the subjet in the alienation of language. It is symptomatic of the novel that Denver should ask to hear it several times and that the sisters should generate the tale of the birth of the latter through the words of the dead other. Their mother Sethe also learns that listening can be appeasing, can bring satisfaction:

Sethe learned the profound satisfaction that Beloved got from storytelling. It amazed Sethe (as much as it pleased Beloved) because very mention of her past life hurt. Everything in it was painful or lost... But as she began telling about her earrings, she found herself wanting it liking it. Perhaps it was Beloved’s distance from the events itself or her thirst for hearing it – in any case it was an unexpected pleasure, (italics mine,)

33 In the narrative of the past that Beloved demands, Sethe’s pain gives way to pleasure. The loss inscribed in the memory of events changes into the production of a narrative for the other that is motivated by desire ( want ) and an unexpected pleasure found in storytelling. The objectification of the other must happen for pain and suffering to give way to pleasure.

34 Further on, the text describes the surprising eruption of this memory that one thought was lost, but that is still there. Sethe folds and refolds a sheet after Paul D’s visit:

Then she folded, refolded and double folded it. She took another. Neither was completely dry but the folding was too fine to stop. She had to do something with her hands because she was remembering something she had forgotten she knew. Something privately shameful that had seeped into a slit in her mind right behind the slap on her face and the circled cross, (italics mine) 7

35 In Study on Hysteria Freud reports the following exchange. He tells Lucy R.: “But since you have said that you did not like the professor”. Lucy answers: “I did not know it, or rather I did not want to know it, I wanted to chase it from my mind, never think of it, I think I managed quite well lately”. Like Sethe, whose task consists in resisting the removal of the repressed once the latter has come back to consciousness, the patient does not wnat to know (that she knows). The removal of the repressed, as in the case of any defense mechanism, consists in acknowledging that one always already knew and to go through other - in the present case traumatic- memories. They are indeed inscribed within Sethe’s flesh; the slap her mother gives her on the one hand and, on the other, the symbol of the circle and the cross (the circled cross) which is the Master’s mark. The trace that serves for the daughter’s recognition of the mother is at the same time the mark of her “chattel” status.

36 The folds and the refolds, the double folds of the sheets converge to support the analysis of a multilayered memory, akin to the folds in the sheets of the washerwoman or the ironing woman. The iron of slavery’s schackles can be heard in the English metaphor whereas the French tells of the comings and goings, the passing of the iron: “ repasser ”. Memory lapses must be added to the irreductible loss of the mothertongue. Sethe no longer remembers: “What Nan told her she had forgotten , along with the language she told it in. The same language her ma’am spoke, and which would never come back. But the message – that was and had been there all along” (B,). It is litterally a language of no-return since the words are no longer there and the African soil has been lost. The return of the trauma (“re-memory”) is spelt in the text precisely in opposition to the impossibility to recover this original language. Sethe’s first traumatic memory is that of being raped, deprived of her mother’s milk by Schoolteacher’s nephews. Mother’s milk – essential food and answer to need – runs into blood: but is it the blood of life (genealogy) or the blood of death (murder)? The bleeding child with the slit throat symbolically translates into self-mutilation. The infanticide is that other moment that Sethe cannot put into words, in place, around which she describes concentric circles.

37 Following a progress that contrasts with Sethe's remembering, Halle’s mother, Baby Suggs, once a courageous and powerful woman, a female preacher for unloved bodies, gradually locks herself into a gray and black universe, a colorless world. She gives up her struggle. Her mental evolution towards death is described as a process in which she forces herself to think of colors, to go through the colors of the rainbow, one by one in her head to reach red, a color she will fail to get at: the impossible color of murder. “Pondering color” () means both to weigh the burden of color or race, while thinking what makes one go from one to the other while maintaining that unstable balance. Dividing colors into discreet entitiesledas to an impossible abstraction. What is white when white is so white that it becomes blue, and blue so dark that it becomes black? That will be one of the questions asked about Beloved's eyes which were wells of darkness. Baby Suggs dies before the moment when she could have reached red. Paul D will reach it at the bottom of a heart: “Red heart”. Amy yearns for the color red of the velvet material sold in Boston: “In Boston they got all the colors. Carmine. That means red but when you talk about velvet you’ve got to say ‘carmine’”(B, 33). Stamp Paid fishes from the river the red ribbon to which still clings a bit of scalp: a macabre souvenir, a fetished fragment of memory:

Tying his flatbed up on the bank of the Licking River, securing it the best he could, he caught sight of something red in its bottom. Reaching for it, he thought it was a cardinal feather stuck to his boat. He tugged and what came loose in his hand was a red ribbon knotted around a curl of wet wholly hair, clinging still to its bit of scalp. ( Β ,)

38 Stamp keeps this ribbon:

He kept this ribbon; the skin smell nagged him, and his weakened marrow made him dwell on Baby Suggs’ wish to consider what in the world was harmless. He hoped she stuck to blue, yellow, maybe green, and never fixed on red. (B, 181)

39 Sethe, who had failed to understand the meaning of the old woman's retreat, enters her bedroom and analyses this process. She herself in her desire to maintain a certain distance with her past, or in her words “to [keep] the past at bay” (B, 42), had reached a stage where she could no longer percieve colors:

Sethe looked at her hands, her bottle-green sleeves, and thought how little color there was in the house and how strange that she had not missed it the way Baby did. Deliberate, she thought, it must be deliberate, because the last color she remembered was the pink chips in the headstone of her baby girl. After that she became as color conscious as a hen. Every dawn she worked at fruit pies, potato dishes and vegetables while the cook did the soup, meat and all the rest. And she could not remember remembering a molly apple or a yellow squash. Every dawn, she saw the dawn, but she never acknowledged or remarked its color. It was as if one day she saw red baby blood, another day pink gravestone chips, and that was the last of it. (B, 39, italics mine)

40 The process of repression is described as a mise en abyme of remembering. Sethe does not remember the fact that she could remember. What is lost is the ability to remember; she cannot remember the workings of memory. The visual aspects of memories also fail her. Dawn is colorless. Two colors forbid the process of remembering: the red of her child's blood and the pink of the marble tombstone on which she has had her daughter’s name engraved: “Beloved.” Sethe passes from red to pink, ans stops there. This process is the reverse of Baby Suggs'. To remember means to allow the memory of the narrative of the child's murder, of her child's blood that she herself has shed, to come back to her consciousness.

41 At the end of her essay on the “site” of memory –as one speaks of an archeological site– Morrison defines her inner memories as follows: “These ‘memories within’ are the subsoil of my work”, taking up the words of her literary foremother Zora Neale Hurston at the beginning of Dust Tracks on a Road. Hurston uses the comparison with apparently dead rocks whose apparent coldness nonetheless contains the material of the “I”: “Like the dead seeming cold rocks I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me” (1984, 3). It is within the enigma of this death-in- life that memory works on creative imagination. The geological metaphor is nothing but innocent. It yokes the “myth” of memory as it relates to the soil (“formation” of a nation, of a people, “sites” of memory) to the metaphorical process at work in Black American literature.

Bibliographie

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Works cited

Andrews, William and Nellie McKay, 1999. Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Oxford: Oxford UP.

Fabre, Geneviève and Claudine Raynaud Eds. 1993. Beloved, She is Mine. Essais sur Beloved de Toni Morrison. Paris: Presses Universitaire de la Sorbonne Nouvelle.

Freud, Sigmund, [1953] 1997. La Technique psychanalytique, chapitre Χ, “Remémoration, répétition, et perlaboration”. Paris: PUF.

Harding, Wendy and Jacky Martin, 1994. “Reading at the Cultural Interface: The Corn Symbolism of Beloved ”, MELUS, The Journal of the Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 19, 85-97.

Hurston, Zora Neale, [1942] 1984. Dust Tracks on a Road. Urbana-Champaign, IL: Illinois UP.

Levine, Lawrence, 1977. Black Culture and Black Consciousness. New York: Oxford UP.

Miller, Gérard, 1987. Lacan. Paris: Bordas.

Morrison, Toni, 1984. “Memory, Creation, and Writing”, Thought 59, n° 235, December, 385-390.

----, 1987. “The Site of Memory” in William Zinsser Ed. Inventing the Truth: The art and Craft of Memoir. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 103-124.

Nasio, Jean-Daniel, [1992] 1994. Cinq leçons sur la théorie de Jacques Lacan. Paris: Payot.

Raynaud, Claudine, 1993. “Figures of Excess in Morrioson’s Beloved ” in Fabre 1993,139-150.

----, 1997. “ Looking for Langston : Dream, Desire, Deferral”, in Claudine Raynaud, ed. Sexualités américaines: Regards théoriques, réponses institutionnelles. Actes du Congrès de l’AFEA, Tours 1996, GRAAT 17, 193-208

----, 2001. “Toni Morrison: le lieu et la mémoire” in Josiane Paccaud-Huguet et Michèle Rivoire Eds. Etudes de poétique, Presses Universitaires de Lyon 11,45-63.

Notes de bas de page

1 An earlier version of this essay appeared in French in Etudes de poétique (Raynaud, 2001).

2 Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Picador, 1987). Hereafter cited as B.

3 Toni Morrison,“The Site of Memory” in William Zinsser Ed. Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987, 103-124. Hereafter cited in the text as SM.

4 "Slaves not only picked cotton but planted rice, husked corn, rowed boats, rocked babies, cooked food, indeed performed almost every conceivable task to the accompaniement of song with an intensity and style that continually licited the comments of the whites around them" (Levine, 1977, 6). Levine refers to these songs which accompanied that specific task as "corn shucking songs" (Levine, 1977, 16).

5 Toni Morrison, “Memory, Creation, and Writing”, Thought 59, n° 235 (December, 1984) 385-390. Hereafter cited in the text as T.

6 In the monologue when she addresses Beloved, Sethe remembers and asks her daughter to remember, but she was too small at the time: “But you were there and even if you too young to memory it, I can tell it to you. The grape harbor. You memory that?” (B, 202, italics mine).

7 Another narrative instance of the difficulty in remembering linked to the fragmented body is exemplified by Ella who links the loss of her tooth and that of her child: “She remembered the bottom teeth she had lost to the brake and the scars from the bell were thick as rope round her waist. She had delivered but could not nurse, a hairy white thing, fathered by 'the lowest yet'. It lived five days never making a sound. The idea of that pup coming back to whip her too set her jaw working, and Ella hollered” (B, 258-259, italics mine). Beloved's body is also dismembered: “Beloved. It is difficult keeping her head on her neck, her hips attached to her hips when she is by herself. Among the things she could not remember was when she first knew that she could wake up any day and find herself in pieces. She had two dreams: exploding or being swallowed” (B, 133, italics mine).

Université François Rabelais, Tours

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books . Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

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Avant propos, avant-propos, dead ends of desire in dubliners , introduction: "violences, silences and metissages", hybridization and marginality: autobiographical writings by african-american women writers, introduction. sex, gender, sexualities: theoretical and political quests, institutional responses.

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• Raynaud, Claudine. (2020) Gold and Bones: Remains of the Quest in Song of Solomon. Études anglaises , Vol. 72. DOI: 10.3917/etan.724.0452

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On Excavating the Novel and “Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory”

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Moments and Memories with Toni Morrison

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Quincy Troupe, Margaret Porter Troupe, and Ishmael Reed offer their memories of Toni Morrison.

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke ,  Quincy Troupe ,  Margaret Porter Troupe ,  Ishmael Reed Aug 22, 2019

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Discovering Toni Morrison

• Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory
• Who Was Toni Morrison?
• They've Got Game: The Children's Books of Toni & Slade Morrison
• Morrison in the Press
• Exhibitions & Events at Princeton
• How to Visit
• Discovering and Accessing the Toni Morrison Papers

Part 3: Thereness-ness

In “the site of memory,” morrison describes her writing process as “a kind of literary archeology”: “on the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply.” as part of reconstructing worlds in literature, worlds that had been overlooked or erased by dominant narratives and histories, morrison developed her own system of mapping space and time. beginning in the 1980s, she sketched blueprints, rendered diagrammatic timelines, and drafted hand-drawn maps of her novels’ key spaces, places, and character arcs. in the process, she quite literally reconstructed and constructed the worlds that her characters would inhabit., “thereness-ness,” a term that morrison coined in her revision process, names the wide imagination she had for spaces, places, and how we move through them. “thereness-ness” registers her careful and precise attention to geography and topography; it demands that we reconsider the centrality of place, mapping, and patterns of movement in her work and to her writing process. “thereness-ness” also draws attention to the unique and graphically based systems of notation that she used to image narrative perspective and to imagine how characters would inhabit invented territories..

“They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out here. They are seventeen miles from a town which has ninety miles between it and any other. Hiding places will be plenty in the Convent, but there is time and the day has just begun.” Toni Morrison, Paradise

Geography underpins Morrison’s practice in quieter and less obvious ways. In a handwritten response to a query from a copy editor working on Beloved (1987), Morrison describes geography and distance as precise but also “rounded off.” Here, mileage is as much an exact figure as it is a feeling. A detailed map of Jazz’s (1992) Vesper County, Virginia accounts for the distance between neighborhoods and settings. Naming a place was as important as pinning it down on a map. An early draft of Beloved shows Morrison carefully crossing out the word “plantation” and replacing it with “farm” to describe Sweet Home, the work’s key site of enslavement. And hand-drawn graphics for the novels Paradise (1998) and Love (2003) evince her unique system of visually mapping narrative perspective.

House Sketch for Beloved

Princeton University Library Special Collections

“Easily she stepped into the told story that lay before her eyes on the path she followed away from the window. There was only one door to the house and to get to it from the back you had to walk all the way around to the front of 124, past the storeroom, past the cold house, the privy, the shed, on around to the porch.”

Toni Morrison, Beloved

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Outline of the Convent for Paradise

Paradise (1998) is set between Ruby, a fictional all-Black town in Oklahoma, and a former convent that is home to a group of women who become one another’s chosen family. This preliminary sketch shows Morrison beginning to imagine the shape of the convent, which is also the site of the novel’s opening murders.

Detailed Map of the Convent for Paradise

A detailed, hand-drawn line rendering of the convent. Here, Morrison fills in the initial outline with character’s sightlines and begins plotting where and how the novel’s opening moments and movements will take place.

Description of the Convent for Paradise

Typed and handwritten

Hand-written and typed descriptions of the convent’s rooms relating each space to significant moments in the lives and histories of Paradise’s characters.

Photographs of Oklahoma

Frederick E. Cammersell, III

Morrison wrote to her friend who was traveling through Oklahoma, asking him to take photographs of the landscape for her reference and affixed plot ideas and dialogue to specific images.

Map of Ruby #1 and #2

While drafting Paradise , Morrison created a series of maps and architectural renderings for the work’s key settings and locations. These two hand-drawn street maps detail the central district of Ruby, Oklahoma, the fictional Black town at the center of the novel.

Description of Ruby

A handwritten description of Ruby, its history, and how characters might move through its streets.

Description of Ruby’s Highway

Morrison was incredibly precise about geography in her novels. In this handwritten draft, she writes that the “road between Convent and Ruby is 15 miles of tarmac” and calculates how long it would take to walk it (“5 hours”). A small hand-drawn map of the tarmac in the lower corner underscores how critical mapping was to her creative process.

Editorial Correspondence on Beloved Page Proofs

April 27, 1999

Map of Vesper County

Notes and drafts, beloved, point of view graphics, paradise, notes and drafts, love.

See Full Finding Aid Record, 1

See Full Finding Aid Record, 2

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The Pursuit of Memory

• Published: August 2014
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Using a psychoanalytic framework and an artful deployment of Morrison’s essay, “The Site of Memory,” Claudine Raynaud draws on memory as “the return of the repressed” in Beloved . She argues that the staging of the workings of memory is akin to phantasm and that Morrison’s “rememory” can be read as a “the narrative of a fable”—or “fabulation”—that figures the return of the repressed Whether bumping into to a rememory that belongs to someone else, or the haunting of a house by a phantasm that re-presents the traumatic (or catatonic) memory of the infanticide, Raynaud links the “geological metaphor” (of literary archeology) of a spatially-oriented “myth of memory” to “the metaphoric process at work in Black American literature.” In a third movement that concentrates on the color of memory, she shows how repression is described as a mise en abyme of remembering: Sethe cannot remember the workings of memory. (140 words)

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Sites of Memory: Proceedings too Terrible to Relate

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• Emilie M. Townes  

Part of the book series: Black Religion / Womanist Thought / Social Justice ((BRWT))

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In her essay “The Site of Memory” Toni Morrison explains how her work can be situated within the genre of the memoir. Her essay helps introduce several major themes of this chapter and the book as a whole: imagination, history, the fantastic, the power of images, and memory. She begins her discussion with slave narratives that, she notes, say two things: “This is my historical life—my singular, special example that is personal, but it also represents the race” and “I write this text to persuade other people—you, the reader, who is probably not black—that we are human beings worthy of God’s grace and the immediate abandonment of slavery.” 1

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Robert O’Meally and Geneviève Fabre, “Introduction,” in History and Memory in African-American Culture , ed. Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994 ), 5.

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Carolyn Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays in Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion ( New York: Zone Books, 1991 ), 9–10.

Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory , ed. and trans. with intro. Lewis A. Coser ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 ).

Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Aurora, CO: The Davies Group Publishers, 1995; Fortress Press, 1986 ), 151.

Barbara Christian, From the Inside Out: Afro-American Women’s Literary Tradition and the State ( Minneapolis: Center for Humanistic Studies, 1984 ), 4.

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© 2006 Emilie M. Townes

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Townes, E.M. (2006). Sites of Memory: Proceedings too Terrible to Relate. In: Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil. Black Religion / Womanist Thought / Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230601628_2

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The Site of Memory Toni Morrison

Hey Viewers! Literature Desire welcomes you back to another mind-blowing and engaging blog post. Our topic of interest today is “The Site of Memory Toni Morrison.” Stick with me until the end. I hope you will enjoy the read.

This article explores the significance of memory in Toni Morrison’s works. It examines its thematic importance and the profound impact it has on readers. Toni Morrison, an acclaimed American author, had a rare talent for delving into the depths of human experience through her rich and captivating storytelling. In her works, Morrison masterfully weaves together themes of history, identity, race, and memory, creating a literary landscape that resonates with readers on a profound level . One of the recurring motifs in her writings is the concept of “the site of memory.”

Table of Contents

The Site of Memory by Toni Morrison: A Powerful Literary Landscape

Defining the site of memory.

At its core, the site of memory refers to a place or moment that holds deep personal or collective significance. It represents a reservoir of memories that shape individual and communal identities. Toni Morrison’s exploration of the site of memory delves into the layers of history, culture, and personal experiences that influence and shape one’s understanding of the world.

The Role of the Site of Memory in Morrison’s Works

In Morrison’s literary universe, the site of memory functions as a powerful tool for storytelling and character development. It serves as a conduit through which the characters navigate their past, confront their present, and envision their future. By anchoring her narratives in these sites of memory, Morrison brings her readers into a vivid and palpable world, immersing them in the emotions and experiences of her characters.

Unearthing the Buried Past

One remarkable aspect of Morrison’s portrayal of the site of memory is her ability to bring to light buried and forgotten histories. Her evocative prose uncovers untold stories and experiences of marginalized communities. Through this, she sheds light on their struggles, resilience, and triumphs. The site of memory becomes a platform for reclaiming and preserving cultural heritage that might otherwise be erased or ignored.

Reconstructing Personal Narratives

Morrison’s characters often embark on journeys of self-discovery and self-actualization, with the site of memory acting as a catalyst for these transformative experiences. It becomes a space where characters grapple with their personal narratives, confront their traumas, and find healing and redemption. The site of memory allows individuals to reconstruct their identities and reclaim agency over their lives.

Collective Memory and Cultural Identity

Morrison’s exploration of the site of memory extends beyond the individual level and encompasses collective memory and cultural identity. She delves into the complex interplay between personal and communal histories, highlighting how shared memories shape group consciousness and contribute to the fabric of cultural identity. By examining the site of memory from this broader perspective, Morrison underscores the importance of acknowledging and honoring collective experiences.

The Site of Memory in Toni Morrison’s Key Works

Beloved: an unforgettable encounter.

In her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “ Beloved ,” Toni Morrison delves deep into the haunting legacy of slavery and its enduring impact on individuals and communities. Sethe, the protagonist, is haunted by the memory of her enslaved past, which manifests in the form of a ghostly presence. The site of memory, in this case, becomes a physical space—Sethe’s house—imbued with the weight of history and trauma. Through Sethe’s journey, Morrison explores the complexities of memory, freedom, and the indomitable power of love.

Song of Solomon: Soaring on the Wings of History

In “ Song of Solomon ,” Morrison takes her readers on an epic journey that spans generations, exploring themes of ancestral heritage, self-discovery, and the search for identity. In this novel, the site of memory is rich and multifaceted. It includes a tapestry woven from family stories, songs, and legends that have been passed down through generations. It becomes a vital link connecting the characters to their roots and allowing them to transcend societal limitations.

Jazz: The Rhythm of Memory

In “ Jazz ,” Morrison employs a lyrical and improvisational narrative style to paint a vibrant portrait of the Harlem Renaissance era. The site of memory in this novel is the city itself—Harlem—an epicenter of African American culture and creativity. Through the interplay of multiple perspectives and fragmented storytelling, Morrison captures the essence of a time and place while exploring themes of love, desire, and the complexities of human relationships.

Conclusion: The Site of Memory Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison’s exploration of the site of memory in her works demonstrates her prowess as a storyteller. It also reflects her deep understanding of the human experience. Through her evocative narratives, she invites readers to delve into the layers of memory, history, and identity. Her writing urges us to confront the past, embrace our complexities, and strive towards shaping a more inclusive future. The site of memory continues to resonate with readers. It reminds us of the transformative power of literature and the enduring legacy of Toni Morrison’s extraordinary body of work.

This is all of our blog on “The Site of Memory Toni Morrison.” I hope all of you have enjoyed the read. Thank you for reading, and stay tuned for more mind-blowing and engaging blogs from Literature Desire!

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Essay Winners Announced

12 Writers Powerfully Capture Ms. Morrison’s Enduring Legacy   February 17, 2021

Community Foundation of Lorain County is proud to announce the 2021 Toni Morrison Scholars. Honoring the Nobel Prize-winning late author and Lorain County native, the Community Foundation received more than 80 essay submissions from local elementary through college student writers. 

“It is a joy and privilege for the Community Foundation to host this essay contest for Lorain County youth,” said Brittany Lovett, Marketing and Communications Officer at the Community Foundation. “Toni Morrison is our hometown hero who challenged and inspired people worldwide to share their unique experiences. It’s our honor to connect the younger generation to her captivating stories while encouraging them to create their own.”   

The 2021 winners are:  

The writing prompt for this year’s contest “ The Site of Memory ”, based on Morrison’s storytelling that paints vivid pictures of the people, places, family, and the familiar details of everyday people’s extraordinary lives. Students received the prompt to reflect on how people and places have informed and sustained them during the COVID-19 pandemic.  

Established in 2020, the Lorain County Toni Morrison Essay Contest for Young People sought to harness the energy, creativity, and initiative of Ms. Morrison. In December 2020, Ohio proclaimed her birthday, February 18 th , as Toni Morrison Day to honor the award-winning author, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 

To honor the late Nobel Prize winner, Today All Day, an extension of the TODAY Show hosted “ A Celebration of Toni Morrison, ” which featured eight of the 2020 Toni Morrison essay contest winners. The program is available on Today All Day,  Today.com , or YouTube.  

The essay contest is a collaborative effort between the African American Community Fund, Community Foundation, Lorain Historical Society, Lorain Public Library System, Lorain County Alliance of Black School Educators, Lorain County Urban League, Lorain County Section of National Council of Negro Women.  

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VIRTUAL: Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory

The much-anticipated exhibition, “Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory,” is scheduled to open in Spring 2023, in Firestone Library’s Milberg Gallery. 

The Educator Online

Toni Morrison’s “The Site of Memory” Summary

Toni Morrison’s essay “The Site of Memory” is a thought-provoking exploration of the role of memory in shaping individual and collective identities, particularly within the context of African American history and culture. Morrison reflects on the significance of remembering and preserving the past as a way to confront the injustices and struggles faced by African Americans, and to forge a stronger sense of self and community.

In the essay, Morrison emphasizes the importance of storytelling as a means of passing down cultural heritage and experiences. She contends that memory is not just about preserving historical facts, but also about capturing the emotional and sensory aspects of events. She discusses how the act of remembering can be a form of resistance against erasure and oppression, allowing marginalized communities to assert their humanity and challenge dominant narratives.

Morrison delves into the complexities of memory, noting that it is not always a straightforward process. Memories can be painful, traumatic, or difficult to access, and she highlights the tension between remembering and forgetting. However, she argues that confronting these difficult memories is essential for healing and empowerment.

One of the central themes of the essay is the idea of “rememory,” a term coined by Morrison to describe the act of remembering in a way that goes beyond historical accuracy. Rememory involves tapping into the collective unconscious and experiencing the past on a visceral level. This concept allows individuals to connect with their ancestors and their struggles in a more profound way.

Morrison also discusses the role of language and narrative in shaping memory. She asserts that language has the power to both convey and distort memory, and she advocates for the use of language that is authentic and rooted in the experiences of the community.

Throughout the essay, Morrison draws on her own experiences as an African American woman and a writer. She reflects on the ways in which her own novels engage with memory, history, and the interplay between the personal and the political.

In “The Site of Memory,” Toni Morrison offers a poignant and thought-provoking meditation on the importance of memory in preserving identity, confronting historical injustices, and building a sense of belonging. Her insights invite readers to consider how memory shapes their understanding of the past and their place in the world, and to recognize the power of storytelling as a form of resistance and empowerment.

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“Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory”: The Making of an Exhibit

Autumn womack, english and african american studies; rené boatman, princeton university library; jennifer garcon, princeton university library; andrew schlager, english, april 24, 2023 · 6:00 pm — 7:00 pm · princeton public library, princeton university library; princeton public library; national endowment for the humanities.

In 2016, Princeton University announced the opening of the Toni Morrison Papers. Comprised of manuscript drafts, editorial notes, correspondence, speeches, photographs, and research material, the collection registers the importance of the archive within Morrison’s decades-long career. In her writing practice, she gathered archival objects like popular photographs, advertisements, newspaper clippings, and historical documents as source material for her novels, essays, and speeches. These were the sites from which she began to “reconstruct the worlds” that her characters dwelled in, worlds that the dominant historical record had neglected or obscured. In this archive we can glimpse her own writing practice, professional interests, and changing creative investments. In its breadth, the collection invites us to consider how history, memory, and the literary imagination relate to one another anew.

Taking inspiration from her 1986 essay “The Site of Memory,” this exhibition brings together select objects from the Toni Morrison Papers—materials that illuminate how her creative process was a deeply archival one, and that reveal aspects of her writing life and practice. Members of the curatorial team will give a behind the scenes look at the research and work that went into making this special exhibition.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Love — Emotional Symbolism in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”

Emotional Symbolism in Toni Morrison's "Beloved"

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Published: Jun 13, 2024

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Introduction, the character of beloved, 124 bluestone road, the motif of water.

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