Beloved: A Literary Analysis

This class had many moments where we were made to think differently about things we thought we already understood, there were several times where we would be reading, discussing, or otherwise, thinking to ourselves. It was in these moments where we would begin to develop a different perspective on how we saw history, well to be more specific the forgotten parts of history. The parts where people and events were just completely left out. Most if not all people in the class had never even given thought to these moments, mainly because the people in our lives hadn’t either. We knew of the major events that happened in those time periods, but e lacked a lot of knowledge that had almost been lost to time. I have to say almost here because there

In Beloved (Toni Morrison) we see a woman Sethe, and her daughter Denver, living a live of complete and utter hell because of the event that they tried to put behind them, which didn’t work as the dead cried out to be heard rather than stay silent. In Gem of the Ocean (August Wilson), we see that as Citizen travel to the city of bones he hears people saying remember me. In both stories the dead are longing to be remembered by the living. It seems to me that both stories paint picture of the way the world is today, we have so many parts of history that have been chopped out. When I think back to every history class I have ever taken, I see that I know of maybe one or two important people from that event, but I have no knowledge of every person or the parts that they played in making that particular moment of time so important that we remember it so

Well, to start we have to understand two important parts of the situation, those who are forgotten, and how to remember them. To start who are these people we forget about? People who fall into this category are people like African Americans, Native Americans, etc., who have been forgotten because of the pain we inflicted upon them. We forced them from their homes, separated their families and killed a large number of them both directly, and indirectly. It was The U.S. who caused this problem, yet most of us have chosen to forget about them. The second part of this is how we remember them, to do this we first have to understand a critical term, Civic memory. Civic memory is when we take collective parts of history both good and bad and present it the way it happened, we have chosen to believe what history tells us happened to be fact. This is in some cases largely untrue, an example would be how we were taught that we had slaves in the country, but the books left out the parts where we tortured and beat them. Another one is how we know segregation was a problem in the U.S. for many years, yet we were given no knowledge of what happened to the people affected by segregation. If we're to bring back into civic memory all of these people we hurt, we would then truly have a sense of what it would take for this country to become whole, and heal its deep