In-Person: The Salon at Mama Koko's -Beloved

Beloved

In her novels, Morrison describes the contours of this hostile environments of America, the south where the venom of race is intensified and the north where a different type of mob robs the quality of life. Both locales have provided the fecund soil in which Black people were challenged to evolve.  Replete in her literary corpus are characters who must battle white supremacy and the inhospitable lands as marginalized, exiled people and at the same time, assist one another and the larger community in deflecting the harmful assaults directed towards them. Using African value systems, Morrison’s characters overcome the contours of unwelcoming and unwilling whiteness to withstand the trauma described in her 1993 Nobel Acceptance speech. In that address she notes the distress of Black folks not having had a home in this place, as well as the historical occurrence of being “set adrift from the one(s) you knew” and the social situation of being placed “at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.”

In this month of February, the so-called Black History month, we will explore Beloved, a novel that bears witness to the trauma African people suffered during and immediately after enslavement.  The current suppression of memory and the dearth of African American history in school by mandate because the brutalities recorded make white students uncomfortable, warrants our being acquainted with the endless string of signifiers, associations and iterations that honor our social, spiritual, political, historical experiences in this country recorded in this novel.  In Beloved, Morrison addresses the system of enslavement recording history and the manner in which Black people responded and endured in a place where boys hung “from the most beautiful sycamore trees” (Beloved 6) where a woman could have scars on her back that resembled a “chokecherry tree”—where men were chained together with “forty six loops of the best hand-forged iron in Georgia” (Beloved 109), and where a woman could lament: “Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed” leaving her with the conclusion that “There was no bad luck in the world but whitefolks” (Beloved 89).

 Morison has often said that novels are the history books.  In this two-week cycle we will examine what the record shows according to the text of the novel Beloved.

Please join us on February 13 and February 27 at Mama Koko’s in-person or virtually on Zoom.  The meetings begin promptly at 6:30p.m. Eastern Standard Time and end at 8:30 p.m. 

When you fill out the information on the Shopify link make sure you include your valid email address to receive the course document: PDFs, assignments, and other links to enhance our reading experience.  You must register by February 5^th  to ensure you receive the mailings of all course materials. You should have read the novel or listened to it on audible  by the first class meeting.