The Roots of her Tongue"(1)

The Loss of a Language in "Beloved".

"Beloved" is written in memory of the "sixty million and more" Africans and African-Americans who died
unrecorded and unable to articulate their position in the years of slavery and post-abolition in the United States. Her
project is to allow these repressed histories to become spoken, recorded and therefore not forgotten. The only
surviving histories of these people is written, not in their own language but in the language of the slaveowners, that
is, English. Morrison's novel explores the way in which these forgotten stories can become articulated and the tension
between the use of another's language to write a story that by rights does not belong to it. However, the situation in
America is that the original language which could be used to write these stories has been lost; English is the only
language that the majority of African-Americans writers can use to express their history, to remember the past and
record it so that it is not repressed and re-enacted, however painful this re-memory might be.

One way to benefit from the lessons of earlier mistakes and past misfortunes is to record them so as to prevent their
repetition through exposure and inoculation(a)

In "Playing in the Dark", Morrison, exploring the way that the English language has been used by white writers to
speak of blackness. She identifies this "Africanism" as a construction by the white writers with reference more to
their fears and fantasies, than real black experience, and as an attempt to construct an opposition upon which to base
a concept of whiteness. Parallel to feminist critics, such as Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous who argue that language
is always gendered and dependant upon hierarchised oppositions such as male-female, culture-nature and public-
private, Toni Morrison argues that an unraced language is just as much of a myth as an ungendered language. She is
aware of the problems inherent in the use of writing to communicate anything to anybody:

Readers and writers both struggle to interpret and perform within a common language shareable imaginative
worlds(2)

However, she believes that through the work of a skilful and self-conscious writer, literature can go some way
towards finding a common form of communication:

How compelling is the study of those writers who take responsibility for ALL of the values they bring to their art.
How stunning is the achievement of those who have searched for and mined a shareable language for the words to
say it.(3)

This is not to say, however, that Morrison believes that a shareable language can transcend considerations of race. A
deliberately raceless language is perhaps even more racialised than one which takes responsibility for the subject-
position from which it is written:

The act of enforcing racelessness in literary discourse is itself a racial act. pouring rhetorical acid on the fingers of a
black hand may indeed destroy the prints, but not the hand. Besides, what happens in that violent, self-serving act of
erasure to the hands, the fingers, the fingerprints of the one who does the pouring? Do they remain acid-free? The
literature itself suggests otherwise.(4)

She argues that English has already been used to break with its original traditions, by the European colonisers of the
Americas, who used old words to address new and radical topics in their literature, to render previously unspeakable
things spoken:

Emerson's plea for intellectual independence was like the offer of an empty plate that writers could fill with
nourishment from an indigenous menu. The language no doubt had to be English, but the content of that language, its
subject, was to be deliberately, insistently, un-English and Anti-European, insofar as it rhetorically repudiated an
adoration of the Old World and defined the past as corrupt and indefensible.(5)

She sees her mission as similar, to use the English language with an awareness of, and a desire to subvert the
traditional racist values inherent in it:

I cannot rely on these metaphorical shortcuts because I am a black writer struggling with and through a language that
can powerfully evoke and enforce hidden signs of racial superiority, cultural hegemony and dismissive "othering" of
people and language which are by no means marginal or already and completely known and knowable in my work.
My vulnerability would lie in romanticising blackness rather than demonising it; villifying whiteness rather than
reifying it. The kind of work I have always wanted to do requires me to learn how to manoeuvre ways to free up the
language from its sometimes sinister, frequently lazy, almost always predictable employment of racially informed
and determined chains.(b)

So, in "Beloved", Toni Morrison is deliberately using English in a different way to which had been used by the
dominant culture of white, male, Americans. She is always aware of the ways in which this language has been used
before to write about black people, rather than for or by them:

What did happen frequently was an effort to talk about these matters with a vocabulary designed to disguise the
subject. It did not always succeed, and in the work of many writers disguise was never intended. But the consequence
was a master narrative that spoke FOR Africans and their descendants, or OF them(6)

The consequence of this was that those of whom the language was speaking were in fact left unarticulated and
speechless:

Silence from and about the subject was the order of the day. Some of the silences were broken, and some were
maintained by authors who lived with and within the policing narrative(7)

This idea of white Americans writing on and about black bodies is a prevalent theme in "Beloved", and becomes a
recurring image in the description of the tyranny of the slave owners. They are the owners of the language and can
use it to define what truth is, with or without the consent of the slaves about whom they are speaking. Garner, one of
the most lenient of the slaveowners, allows his slaves some measure of freedom, which at the time seems as if he is
doing them a good deed. However, it is only freedom dependant upon and within the bounds of slavery; their identity
and manhood (in the case of Paul D) depends solely upon Garner's position and definition of them:

Was that it? Is that where the manhood lay? In the naming done by a whiteman who was supposed to know?(c)

Later, it becomes clear that however liberally the definitions are imposed, they are still imposed:

Schoolteacher beat him anyway to show that definitions belonged to the definers(d)

Garner called and announced them men - but only on Sweet Home, and by his leave. Was he naming what he saw or
creating what he did not?...Suppose Garner woke up one morning and changed his mind? Took the word away.(e)

Sethe's mother, a speaker of a pre-American language, is only identifiable in her new context as slave by the mark
branded upon her by the slaveowners:

Back there she opened up her dress front and lifted her breast and pointed under it. Right on her rib was a circle and a
cross burnt right in the skin. She said "This is your ma'am. This,"(8)

Sethe does not understand the importance of this type of violence until she has a mark of her own; her scars from
when she suffers the ultimate degradation and violence at the hands of the two nephews of her owner. They write
upon her body that they own her and her motherhood, by incribing their mark in blood on her back. It is interesting
that the scars is shaped like a chokecherry tree, perhaps signifying the choking of Sethe's voice as she has these
marks written upon her; linking perhaps with her severing of her own tongue:

Bit a piece of my tongue off when they opened my back. It was hanging by a shred. I didn't mean to. Clamped down
on it, it come right off. I though, Good God, I'm going to eat myself right up.(9)

The redness of the blood and the pinkness of the tongue seems to be crucial colours describing in pre-verbal terms
(that is, in the language of colour) the desires, or the body of the repressed people. Bearing this in mind, it is
interesting that Baby Suggs retires to her bed to think about colour, and Amy, one of the most sympathetic white
characters in the book, who has also escaped from a regime where she is beaten and starved, is looking for carmine
velvet. However, she, although recognising the brutality of Sethe's mark, attempts to turn it into a mark of
identification, or beauty, a picture of nature, when in fact it is a mark of inexcusable violence:
Leaves, too, look like, and dern if these ain't blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms, just as white. Your back got a
whole tree on it. In bloom.(10)

She is in fact speaking her own language of the marks rather than the silenced language of the oppressed. This
language, which could possibly have more chance of encapsulating the experience of the Africans brought by force
to America and enslaved, has been repressed and forgotten; Sethe remembers that her nurse, again with an
identifying mutilation, and her mother had spoken a pre-American language which she once understood but was now
lost, remaining only in her memory of the message it had worded:

Nan was the one she knew best, who was around all day, who nursed babies, cooked, had one good arm and half of
another. And who used different words. Words Sethe understood then but could neither recall nor repeat now. She
believed that must be why she remembered so little before Sweet Home except singing and dancing and how
crowded it was. 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.(11)

So, Morrison seems to be identifying this lost language with the maternal line, her descendance and her heritage
which she has lost, and which has been replaced by the names of her master. Although she is writing in this language,
she is aware that this language, which is not strictly Sethe's language, is somewhat inadequte to her needs and the
needs of the other characters in the book. In the language of the law, the dominant ideology, the blacks are silenced
and excluded; the rights in the constitution, and the language in which they are inscribed do not apply to them:

To buy a mother, choose a horse or wife(g), handle guns, even learn reading if they wanted to - but they didn't want
to since nothing important to them could be put down on paper.(f)

We are reminded of this in the novel by the characters who are aware of this incompatibility. Baby Suggs is silenced
by the new language:

Baby Suggs talked as little as she could get away with because what was there to say that the roots of her tongue
could manage?(12)

We notice that even as a freedwoman, her white employers try to impose a name upon her which is not hers:

"Mr Garner," she said, "why you all call me Jenny?"

"Cause that's what's on your sales ticket, gal."(h)

Also, Sixo, the most rebellious of the slaves at Sweet Home, who dares to run thirty miles to meet his woman, gives
up on verbal language as a medium for translating his experience.

But that was before stopped speaking English because there was no future in it.(13)

So English is seen here as one of the tools of oppression, creating definitions and excluding the black speaker.
Instead, the only solace and expression to be had is in pre-verbal articulation, a language which can express
unconscious desires without leaving them open to the interpretation of the predatory white language. Julia Kristeva,
in the context of feminist linguistic philosophy, has emphasised the closeness of song to the imaginary. It would
seem that this point is being raised in "Beloved" also. Sixo gives up speaking coherent English in order to express
himself through song, defying the white rules in doing so; even when he is being burnt to death he is still deliberately
confusing and alienating the white slaveowners who seek to reduce him to their animal:

He laughs. Something is funny. Paul D guesses what it is when Sixo interrupts his laughter to call out,"Seven-O!
Seven-O!". Smoky, stubborn fire. They shoot him to shut him up. Have to.(14)

Although finally the firepower of the whites silences him, it is not before he has highlighted the fact that there are
things which they will never be able to understand. It seems that, in the character of Sixo, Morrison is exploring the
potential in pre-verbal media such as song and dance for communicating that which cannot be put into English
words. Dancing seems to be a way of asserting an identity that comes before the propreity of the Sweet Home
owners; we remember that the place Sethe was before was crowded and full of singing and dancing, despite being
another slave-home, and Sixo dances in order to keep his body his:
Sixo went among trees at night. For dancing, he said, to keep his bloodlines open, he said. Privately, alone, he did it.
(15)

Morrison emphasises the colour of Sixo; in the half-light he is indigo, with a red tongue; perhaps shown as more red
than any other tongue in order to emphasise his defiance and his determination to regain control over his own body,
in the face of its appropriation through the language of white men and property. He re-approprates language by
turning it into something which the whites cannot understand; just as the prisoners, although chained together and
forced to suffer degradation at the hands of the whitemen, again with guns, mix up the words of the songs they are
singing in order to keep them for themselves:

They sang it out and beat it up, garbling the words so they could not be understood; tricking the words so their
syllables yielded up other meanings. They sang the women they knew; the children they had been; the animals they
had tamed themselves or seen others tame. They sang of bosses and masters and misses; of mules and dogs and the
shamelessness of life. They sang lovingly of graveyards and of sisters long gone.(16)

Amy sings to soothe Sethe's pain when Denver is born, and finally, it is through the singing of the black female
community which results in Beloved's exorcism from 124; and the recuperation of Denver and Sethe into a society
based upon the same experiences as their own, having finally articulated what Sethe thought to be unspeakable:

For Sethe it was as though the Clearing had come to her with all its heat and simmering leaves, where the voices of
women searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words. Building voice
upon voice until they found it, and when they did it was a wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and
knock the pods off chestnut trees.(17)

However, Morrison seems to want to make it clear that this pre-verbal language is not the answer to the situation. In
order to exorcise the ghosts of the past they must be put into words, recorded and therefore defeated. It would seem
that the character of Beloved works on several levels; as the ghost-daughter of Sethe, as an unrecorded slave drowned
on the way from Africa to America, one of the "sixty million and more", but, most importantly from the point of
view of this essay, as a signifier for that which has not been spoken, whether as the bearer of a repressed history or as
one who has not been allowed the entry into language which constitutes subjectivity. We never actually know her
name; she is known as Beloved from the letter engraved, at great cost to Sethe on her (pink) gravestone. The word
"beloved" is a passive adjective; it denotes definition from outside rather than any definition from the speaking
subject bearing the name; it seems clear that for Beloved to enter into the world as more than a forgotten phantom
she must have a name which has reference to something inside her rather than something outside:

"You have to touch me. On the inside part. And you have to call me my name."...
"Call me my name."
"No."
"Please call it. I'll go if you call it."
"Beloved." He said it, but she did not go.(18)

She does not go because Beloved is not her name. Her name has been lost, and Sethe, the only one who could now
re-inscribe it, has repressed the memory; this much is indicated in the frontispiece to the novel, taken from a New
Testament re-inscription and re-memory of an Old testament verse:

I will call them my people,

which were not my people;
and her beloved,
which was not beloved.

So Beloved comes to represent those desires which, in fully integrated users of language, are translated into symbolic
images, that is, words. She however, as a two-year-old spirit stuck within the body of an adult, plays the role of an
infant Id, pure selfish desire without the mediation provided by language. There is a Lacanian undercurrent which
runs through her character; her speech is frangmented and broken, indicating that she remains in the imaginary
before the acquisition of language. She is found by the water and says that she came from there, a motif which is
remeniscent of feminist theorists claiming a place for female subjectivity in the more fluid imaginary rather than the
monolithic, logocentric symbolic. In her narrative in which she describes the time between Sethe's mercy-killing of
her daughter and the re-appearance of her ghost, she seems incapable of distinguishing between herself and her
mother and sister:

Beloved
You are my sister
You are my daughter
You are my face; you are me(19)

She does not seem to have gone through what Lacan calls the mirror-stage, in whcih an infant sees its reflection in
the mirror, recognises it as him or herself and therefore recognised both that he or she is distinct from the rest of the
world around him or her, and inherent in this recognition by the sight of an image, mis-recognises him or her self,
this being the first entry into language where signs stand for things. Beloved seems not to have fully made this
entrance, being only two years old when she dies, and so becomes a signifier for what is unspoken. She has an
insatiable desire, and an anti-social nature, because "Beloved has not yet learned the codes that give shape to and
control desire"; before she manifests herself physically she can be heard in the haunted house as speaking an almost
incomprehensible but insistent language:

Out on Bluestone Road he thought he heard a conflagration of hasty voices - loud, urgent, all speaking at once so he
could not make out what they were talking about or to whom. The speech wasn't nonsensical, exactly, nor was it
tongues. But something was wrong with the order of the words and he couldn't describe or cipher it to save his life.
All he could make out was the word MINE. The rest of it stayed outside his mind's reach.(21)

Beloved has not reached subjectivity, she is not the mistress of language, therefore she, like the Africans and their
descendants to whom this novel is dedicated, remains outside comprehension, outside language and outside speech. It
is through the re-memory and translation into speech of her history and the history of her mother that the ghost is
finally quieted; although something still remains unspeakable. This is clear at the end of the novel, when, although
the singing women have banished the physical manifestation of the ghost, her footprints remain. It seems that this
excess which cannot be put into words, although deliberately forgotten, remains in the very fact of its forgotten-ness.
If the whole of Beloved could be remembered and recorded, then her ghost would not be condemned to eternal
repetition of the repressed injury. However, the language with which to do so has been lost forever, or buried because
"remembering seemed unwise" due to the pain it involves. Beloved, as the ghost of stories which will and can never
be put into words, remains nameless and buried in the unconscious, destined never to come fully to light:

Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for,
she cannot be lost because no-one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don't know
her name? Although she has claim, she is not claimed.(22)