Margaret Garner and the Second Tear (original) (raw)

Toni Morrison's novel Beloved depicts the problems of demoralization, dehumanization, marginalization and slavery of the Afro-American race. Besides this, she had explored racism, sexism, pathological mourning and ethnic cleansing of Afro-American race in her novel Beloved. The author spoke the unspoken and intolerable truths of Afro-Americans as they had been victimized and had been the worstsufferers in the history of humanity. Moreover, Afro-Americans had been demeaned, exploited, subjugated, and devastated on the grounds of race, colour, caste and sex. As, people of Afro-American race had been torn physically, emotionally and psychologically throughout the ages. The present paper is an attempt to explore dehumanizing conditions suffered by the Afro-Americans and how these people had been humiliated and forced to live cannibal lives. In thepresent globalized, liberalized, and privatized world concepts such as modernism, post-modernism, post-colonialism,subaltern, hegemony, and hybridity are the current issues of debates and discussions. These terms have a great impact on today " s literature. Moreover, the theories like deconstruction, feminism, Marxism have brought revolution in the field of literature especiallyin Afro-American literature and Dalit literature. These theories depict the pain of suppressed, marginalized, oppressed, neglected, and butchered people who were never a part of literature. The ideologies of Facult, Derrida, GayatriSpivak and Edward Said gave a life line to these unknown and downtrodden people. These people of Afro-Americans were colonized, oppressed, victimized, dominated and subjugated. Furthermore, the above theorists rebutted against the superior ideology and powerful culture. The twentieth century writers portrayed the issues of these distressed souls and explored the hidden scars of these people. Amongst them is the prominent Nobel Prize Laureate Toni Morrison who is considered the representative of the Afro-American race. In her writings, especially in her novel Beloved, she depicted the extreme agony suffered by the Afro-American race throughout their lives. Even today, the Afro-American people has not forgotten the torture done to them by white racist under slavery, colonialism and imperialism. So, Afro-American race is one of the worst sufferers in the history of humanity. These Afro-Americans were belittled, exploited, subjugated, dehumanized and ravaged on behalf of race, colour, class, language, and gender. Slavery haunted their lives so had left indelible scars on their consciousness. These were forced to held the worthless positions in white race, isolated from their existence, incarcerated, deprived from everything like education, jobs, etc. these collectively brought them towards psychic abnormality and disorders. Maxine Lavon Montgomeran expert in Afro-American studies and professor of English explained the Eurocentric experiences which entails, " a gradual decline in social, economic, and moral conditions, a major catastrophe, then a new beginning—an unreliable model when imposed upon the Black American experience " (Teresa Heffernan 3). The effects of lynching " s, holocaust could still be seen in their traumatic psyches. Slavery had great effect on their latter generations as it had severely damaged their lives. As Morrison states that " nobody knows their names, and nobody thinks about them. In addition to that they never survived in the lore; there are no songs or dances or tales of these people " (qtd. by Heffernan 2). It was in no way possible for these Afro-American people to have normal mourning due to psychological ghastliness of slavery. The Africans were deprived from their genealogy, culture and language by the white masters so that they could not forward their stories and claim for their identification. The agony of slavery portrayed in Beloved is meant to make readers see how the survivors of slavery live in day to day life. Morrison " s novel provides a message to black people.The message is that the black people have to deal with slavery as part of their past. The message is also given to white people that they have potential to take