قصة الكتاب :
Beloved is a novel by Toni Morrison that was published in 1987 and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in the subsequent year. It was also a finalist for The National Book Award in 1987. The book takes a blatantly honest and painful look at the destructive legacy of slavery. It was adapted into a movie in 1998 and was also ranked by several writers and literary critics in the New York Times as the best work of American fiction that was produced between the years 1981 and 2006.
\r\nIt chronicles the life of its key protagonist, Sethe, a black woman who lives in Cincinnati, Ohio but carries with her the lifelong scars incurred during the pre-Civil War days as a slave in Kentucky. The story takes place primarily in the years following the Civil War but constantly flashes back to the days when Sethe worked as a slave. The narrative spins back and forth across time as the author delicately approaches and reveals the real horrors that black slaves endured while working for their masters. The book is inspired by the true story of Margaret Garner, who in 1856 escaped from a Kentucky plantation with her family and found refuge in Ohio. Her owner managed to track her down and find her, but before she returned, she kills her youngest daughter to spare her from the horrendous life of slavery that would be imposed on her if she returned with her mother. In the book, Sethe too escapes from a plantation, goes through a traumatic set of events while trying to cross the Ohio river and lands at the home of her mother-in-law Baby Snuggs. Sethe’s owner comes back for her and this leads to a shocking event where Sethe attempts to murder all of her children. The boys and the newborn baby survive, but Sethe kills her two-year-old by slitting her throat. She later buries her baby and manages to get only the single word “Beloved” engraved on her tombstone, as she does not have “the energy to pay for two words” that she originally intended to engrave i.e. Dearly Beloved.
\r\nBeloved returns in Sethe’s life, first as a malevolent ghost that haunts the home they live in and later as a woman who calls herself by that name. The story throws light on how harrowing events of the past never really go away. The trauma lingers and forms a kind of invisible prison in which the survivors live even after their lives takes them forward. The dedication by Morrison for the novel reads “60 million and more” and makes its social relevance clear. The novel is all at once a captivating story, lyrical literature, a slice of history and a social document where the author expresses her views of how history shaped the conflicted and incompletely resolved issues that continue to play out in the present. Beloved is one of the few American novels that took every natural element of the novel and exploited it, in balance with the other elements. The impact of such a book is profound and is likely to transform a reader’s sense of the world.\r\n