The Quilt Woven with Repressed Memories: Toni Morrison's Beloved

The text Beloved which amalgamates its characters' memories intricately resembles a sort of huge quilt woven out of various pieces of painful experiences of slavery. Just as the quilt is woven through various colorful pieces of cloth, Morrison's text juxtaposes various characters' traumatic experiences of slavery. This quilt-text, woven from the perspective of black ex-slaves, claims for revising the official version of American history, written from the perspective of the white historian. Morrison's peculiar narrative style full of fragments represents the fragmented life of the blacks who had to be uprooted from Africa, transported to America, and positioned under the yoke of slavery. More importantly, this speakerly text invites readers to fill in gaps in the text, incorporate their own memories and interpretations into it, and reconfigure the official version of national memory or amnesia.