Absurdly Beloved

Reading Beloved makes me further consider seeing the black woman's plight in ways that I maybe had not previously because their stories are either not readily told or not told in their entirety. Sometimes, this can lead to distorted images of what "black people" or "black women" do. I think what often gets left out of the equation is the idea of absurdity and how there's no such thing as normalcy in the lives of black people which makes it difficult to make sense out of black life because a lot of it doesn't make sense. You can't make certain things add up because the math doesn't add up quite simply when it comes to black folks. I think Sethe embodies that notion more completely and perfectly than any other character in Beloved most of the time at her own expense, which makes it ridiculously difficult to ever trust or truly love anyone or anything else without some underlying selfish ulterior motive or some paranoia that someone else will hurt her again like they always had in her past, which drives every action she takes in the novel. It's easy to judge Sethe as immoral or unjust but hard to uncover how and why she got that way, which again shines the light on the absurdity in black life because she's seeking her justification for her actions in a certain series of unfortunate events that were caused by other outside sources that were in themselves unjustified to begin with. Infanticide of course is not the ideal way to resolve the problems in Sethe's life, but it's not like we're talking about Casey Anthony drowning her daughter in a swimming pool and tossing her body in the woods somewhere simply because she didn't want the responsibility of motherhood. Of course, that's about as absurd as it gets but the difference is Sethe felt rather than not fulfilling her duties as a mother in protecting her children from abuse, rape, hunger and thirst, homelessness, poverty, and many of the other atrocities directly and indirectly associated with the institution of slavery, she would rather kill them herself than allow them to suffer the same way as she had. Sethe is definitely the epitome of absurdity and while her morality is up for debate, what isn't debatable is the fact that she should never have felt that option-less or choice-less as a human being, a woman, a black woman, and a black mother. Therein lies the problem...