Healing In Toni Morrison's Beloved

CHAPTER-V
THE HEALING POWER OF FOLK CULTURE

Images of women healing ill or injured women, or of women healing themselves, have become one of the central tropes in contemporary African American women’s novels. Authors such as Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, and Toni Morrison utilise the trope of healing to measure past and present oppressions of women of color and to discuss what can and what cannot be healed, forgotten and forgiven. Much focus is put on how healing could be accomplished. Some hurt, they say, is so distant that it cannot be reached; other hurt goes so deep that there may be no possibility of healing...some pain can only be healed through a reconnection to the African American community and culture (Gunilla T. Kester 114)
In Morrison’s reconceptualization of African American history, she attempts to visualise both the physical and psychological impact of the dehumanising process of slavery on the black Americans. According to Trudier Harris: “… ownership and possession are characteristics of slavery. They reflect the monetary exchange involved in that system of dehumanization as well as the psychological control usually attendant upon the physical imprisonment” (Harris, “Escaping Slavery” 330). Along with the right of

The psychological recovery of the protagonist Sethe happens due to the ritual of healing in the form of her “rememory” and confrontation with the repressed past. Morrison depicts in the novel both the psychological and physical pain of Sethe to overcome the unspeakable horrors of slavery conceptualised in the form of the ghost of her dead daughter Beloved. She fails to confront her past shredded with the crime of killing her own daughter to save her from slavery and the memory frequently haunts her in the form of a ghost since “anything dead coming back to life hurts” (Morrison, Beloved