Lecture Four
“Know it, and Go on out the Yard”:
Acts of Memory, Anti-Racism and
The Journey towards healing
Communal Response and Communal Healing
 Welding of form and content

Use of black art forms: call-and-response in blues, spirituals, gospel,
jazz
 Beloved and memory as a creative process: dismember,
re-member, “disremembered”, “rememory”
 The function of Beloved as character
 Collaborative Storytelling and the idea of “rememory”
―> Baby Suggs, Sethe, Paul D., Stamp Paid, Ella and Denver,
the women of the community, and us…


The participating reader
“You mean I never told you nothing about Carolina?
About your daddy? You don’t remember nothing
about how I come to walk the way I do and about
your mother’s feet, not to speak of her back? I never
told you all that? Is that why you can’t walk down the
steps. My Jesus my.”
But you said there was no defense.
“There ain’t.”
Then what do I do?
“Know it, and go on out the yard. Go on.”
p. 286-289 [243-44]
Freud “Remembering, Repeating, and
Working Through (SL)
Remembering is conscious
 Repression is the burial of traumatic and
painful memory in the unconscious
 Repeating is the unconscious acting out of
repressed memory
 Freud: whatever we do not consciously
remember we are doomed to repeat
- “acting out”

What is a ghost?



“Foreword”: “Life would be violently disrupted by the
chaos of the needy dead” (p. xiii)
“Memory Creation and Thought”
Deliberate use of “discredited information”
Susan Spear’s essay in Body Matters: Feminism, Textuality
and Corporeality (RU LIB Level 3: 305.42 BOD)
includes this quotation from Jacques Derrida:
Ghosts … casualties of history in danger of being
forgotten … our duty is to enjoin them, to speak to,
with and of them and to mourn them, so as to
eventually release ourselves from a history impelled
by a cycle of vengeance and retribution

Process of healing in 124: Spiteful  Loud  Quiet
Beloved’s function
“everybody’s ghost”
Repeating implies conjuring up a
piece of real life; and for that
-- Linden Peach
reason it cannot always be harmless
 A catalyst for memory
& unobjectionable. This consideration
opens up the whole problem of what
 real and unreal
is so often called deterioration during
 Return of the repressed
treatment – Sigmund Freud
 Sethe’s “crawling already?
baby”
 A sex slave who escaped
 An ancestor of the middle
passage
 African traditions &
psychoanalytic ideas
 “rag doll” – renders
Sethe and Paul D powerless

Re-membering = Collective Story-telling
Rememory : memory as a creative process
• “Tell me” said Beloved – catalyst for memory/narrative
• Sethe: Sethe’s telling and remembering: Nan’s story pp.72-5
28 days - claiming the self p. 111 [95]
• Stamp Paid & Paul D pp. 257-277 [218-235]
The escape (hush, hush), Joshua & Vashti, Sethe and Beloved
• Denver and the modern reader –
see Krumholz in Casebook (SL)
• Ella p. 301 [256] the cape of sound
• The participatory reader: Songs & language, tears & laughter
p. 313 [265] Sethe’s acting out
The African-American Quilt
Photo: Robert E. Williams (1888)
• Sethe’s wedding dress
• Baby Suggs’s quilt
• The crazy dresses and
ribbons
•The notion of colour
• The idea of
remembering
pieces of the story
http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/hargrett/williams/
Robert E. Williams (d. 1937), an African-American photographer, operated a
photography studio, R. Williams and Son, in Augusta, Georgia, from 1888 until around
1908.
The African-American Quilt
p. 321 [272]
Sethe and Paul D.
Sixo and the Thirty-mile woman
“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me,
man, the pieces I am, she gather them and
give them back to me in all the right order.
It’s good you know when you got a woman
who is a friend of your mind”
The image of the quilt – piecing together
the stories
Putting your story next to another’s
“me and you, we got more yesterday than
anybody, we need some kind of tomorrow”
Quilt from: Signs and
Symbols:
African Images in
African-American Quilts,
by
Maude Southwell
Wahlman.