Another reflection

Beloved embodies all the horrible experiences that slaves had to go through. Even though they don’t want to think or talk about their experiences from Sweet Home anymore, they find themselves constantly reminded of them through Beloved. As each as to forced to relive those experiences when Beloved comes back.

The biggest take away I’ve had from this book is the debilitating power of fear. If you constantly live in fear and you spend your life living in fear you’re never going to get through it. However, it’s easy for me to say that sitting on my bed, in a suburban town in 2015. I can not begin to imagine the pain and the guilt that Sethe harbored for so long. It’s reasonable to expect her to run away both literally and figuratively speaking because given historical context it wasn’t like slaves could simply go back and confront their perpetrators. Imagine if you someone had done something terrible to you, like murder or rape (which is something that unfortunately happened a lot to slaves) and they just got away with it. I don’t think that I could easily move on from that.  Slavery wasn’t the only thing that the Civil War was fought for and what happened after the Civil War is argued by many as having been worse to the African American community than slavery itself. Freed slaves had to live with the memories of being slaves but now on top of that they have to live with the fear of being haunted down. So you could say that the reality for many of the former slaves was that they didn’t have the title of a slave anymore but they were still bound to the racism that was a result of slavery.

Being in a Holocaust class I couldn’t help but compare the two situations. It’s interesting to see how for the most part America condoms what the Nazis and Germany did (as we should) but if anything Germany did a much better job of handling the aftermath. A lot of that has to do with the time period and the fact that the Holocaust was aimed towards annihilating a group of people as opposed to treating people like property and working them to death. Yes, the intentions of the situations were different and realistically you can’t expect every situation of injustice to end with someone in jail. Nonetheless, in America, you have people trying to avoid talking about slavery and teaching it in schools, which is quite frankly ridiculous.