BELOVED—A DELEUZE-GUATTARIAN READING 39

Nomadic Subjectivity and Becoming-

Other in Toni Morrison s Beloved:
A Deleuze-Guattarian Reading

NAEEM N ED A EE

[I]t is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding

space, of maintaining the point of springing up at any point:
the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes
perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or
arrival. (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 353)

The general body of Toni Morrison’s fiction is

concerned with the African-American populations historical
experience of captivity, subjugation and victimization. In her
fifth and most widely acclaimed novel Beloved (1987), Morrison
addresses the repercussions of slavery—despite the abolition
thereof—in the life of formerly enslaved black individuals who
continue to struggle against traumatic memories from the past.
Beloved is—far from a passive reflection of misery—marked
throughout by the hopeful tenor that emancipation is possible
through de/reconstructing the notion of history/memory
and promoting the idea of nomadic/transversal subjectivity.
The main problem is a conflict/war between two contrasting
and apparently incompatible worldviews. Against the more
common tendency to approach texts such as Morrisons
Beloved from a postcolonialist viewpoint, I aim to explore—via
Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of nomadic subjectivity, war
machine, and becoming-other —how Morrisons novel opens
lines of flight/possibilities of emancipation and constitutes
a discourse of resistance and affirmation. Before doing
so, however, it is necessary to resolve the apparent critical
contradiction that seems to unsettle the relationship between
postcolonial criticism and the poststructuralist philosophical
40 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

practice pertaining to Deleuze and Guattari.

Since Gayatri Spivaks leading critique of Deleuze
and Foucault, subsequent analyses of the possible relation
between Deleuze—and Guattari— and postcolonial thinking
have been prone to the common misinterpretation that there
is a problematic lack of mutuality or dialogue between the
two streams of thought—or more precisely, that Deleuze s—
and Guattari’s—philosophy runs counter to postcolonial
emancipation. Spivaks Althussarian critique revolves around
her central claim that both theorists “systematically and
surprisingly ignore the question of ideology and their own
implication in intellectual and economic history” (249). In other
words, both Deleuzes and Foucaults theoretical attempts at
producing a counter-discourse for the subaltern to form and
articulate subjectivities outside the dominant discourse are
paradoxically rooted in the same privileged position that they
aim to deconstruct. In the same vein, Caren Kaplan argues
that nomadism sustains a Eurocentric fascination with—and
romanticization of—the Other:

This kind of “othering” in theory repeats the anthropological

gesture of erasing the subject position of the theorist and
perpetuates a kind of colonial discourse in the name of progressive
politics. (88)

As Simone Bignall and Paul Patton discuss in their

“Introduction” to Deleuze and the Postcolonial, whereas
postcolonial thinking is basically concerned with speaking
for/about the Other and providing the subaltern with tools
of resistance, Deleuze’s apparent refusal to do so may be
erroneously interpreted as a lack of concern for the devastating
impact of colonialism and the widespread suffering of formerly
colonized peoples— or, even worse, as “a cultivated or
‘interested’ disinterest” (1).
Nevertheless, more nuanced readings of the Deleuze-
Guattarian legacy reveal how Spivaks critique is skewed
and misdirected. In the opening essay of Deleuze and the
Postcolonial, Andrew Robinson and Simon Tormey head
 BELOVED—A DELEUZE-GUATTARIAN READING 41

for a ground-clearing exercise beyond Spivaks “cursory

examination of Deleuze’s oeuvre, especially the co-authored
work with Guattari, which is replete with analyses of non-
Westem, indigenous and subaltern practices and discourses”
(21). According to Robinson and Tormey, Spivaks critique
that Deleuze’s work is confined within “Western notions of
oppression or domination,” which are in principle essentialized
and universal, fails to note the fundamental distinction between
the Nietzschean thrust of Deleuzian philosophy as based on
“affirmative desire” and Spivaks own Freudian-Lacanian
origin of thought as rooted in “ontological lack” (ibid. 22, 36).
Even more ground-clearing is Bignall and Patton’s suggestion:

[T]he texts and interviews collected in Desert Islands (2004) and

Two Regimes o f Madness (2007) document Deleuze’s supportive
interest and active involvement in struggles for decolonization and
the return of appropriated territory in colonized regions including
Algeria and Palestine. (2)

It is not off the mark, then, to posit that Deleuze-

Guattarian notions can operate independently of a postcolonial
tradition of thought in various—political, philosophical
and literary—forms of critical experimentation with the
postcolonial quest for autonomy. Indeed, as Robert LaRue
argues in “Postcolonialism and Posthumanism,” the Western
tradition of postcolonial thinking is often caught up in the
Cartesian trap of searching for “ontological roots,” which
limits human existence to the confines of the mind and the
human ability—or lack thereof—to reason (21). Descartes’
cogito as the Enlightenment model of the human excludes
from— European—humanity all but those who rely on reason
as the foundation of their existence. In the face of foundational
humanism, which rationalizes existence, presupposes an
origin and operates by exclusion, the Deleuze-Guattarian
legacy promises a different understanding and appreciation
of subjectivity as predicated on fluidity, heterogeneity and
interconnectivity. After all, as Kaustuv Roy points out, what
Deleuze and Guattari conceive of as nomadic constitutes
spaces where “potentialities for resistance increase” (31).
42 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

Nomadism as Non-Philosophy

Deleuze uses the term nomad(ism) for the first time in

an early essay entitled “Nomad Thought” to refer to a modern
counterculture/anti-Enlightenment discourse epitomized
by the figure of Friedrich Nietzsche. Deleuze identifies in
his predecessor a tendency toward movement, speed and
mobility, which triggered the development of a nomadic and
uncodifiable system of (anti)thought against various forms
of societal recodification as reinforced by Freudianism and
Marxism (142). Unlike modem society with its tripartite
system of laws, institutions, and contracts, which constantly
codify and recodify social relations, Nietzsches nomadism is
entirely immune to (re)codification. Nietzsche’s philosophy,
according to Deleuze, is “above all nomadic; its statements can
be conceived as the products of a mobile war machine and not
the utterances of a rational, administrative machinery, whose
philosophers would be bureaucrats of pure reason” (ibid. 149).
The idea of Nietzsche as a nomad warrior/thinker
also finds resonance in Nietzsche ancl Philosophij, where
Deleuze denounces the problematic post-Kantian practice
of the dialectic—an umbrella term designating the synthetic
resolution of binary opposites (8-10). As Daniel W. Conway
explains, the error of post-Kantian philosophy is that it
perpetuates the pre-Kantian/metaphysical codification of
human experience into standard binary oppositions by which
“order is preferred to chaos, stability to change, unity to
multiplicity, mind to body, reason to passion and so on, [...]
irrespective of any productive syntheses that opposition might
magically yield” (74). It follows that dialecticians confuse the
causal direction only to conceive of affirmation in negative
terms—as the effect of the negation of negation rather than
as the cause or precondition. As Deleuze argues, “difference is
the object of a practical affirmation inseparable from essence
and constitutive of existence. Nietzsches ‘Yes’ is opposed to the
dialectical ‘no’; affirmation to dialectical negation; difference
to dialectical contradiction; joy, enjoyment, to dialectical labor;
 BELOVED—A DELEUZE-GUATTARIAN READING 43

lightness, dance to dialectical responsibilities” (Nietzsche and

Philosophy 9). In this light, the Nietzschean war machine
functions for Deleuze as a form of non-philosophy which runs
counter to the sedentary post-Kantian dialectic—a nomadic,
decentered and non-hierarchical (counter-)discourse with a
focus on movement, speed, and unexpected irruptions.
The nomadic and the sedentary pervade all dimensions
of contemporary life—whether in relation to social forms of
organization or individual forms of identification. It is for this
reason that Michel Foucault, in his preface to Anti-Oedipus,
the first volume of Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, warns of “the fascism in us all, in our heads
and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love
power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits
us” (xiii). In the same line, Deleuze and Guattari identify two
distinct modes of fascism: historical (molar) fascism, which
occurs as it did in such cases as H ider s National Socialist State
and Stalinist totalitarianism, and particular (molecular) fascism,
which can be found on a less general scale— “rural fascism and
city or neighborhood fascism, youth fascism and war veteran’s
fascism, fascism of the left and fascism of the right, fascism
of the couple, family school and office” (A Thousand Plateaus
214).
Deleuze’s—and Deleuze and Guattari’s—art is in
teaching us how to live counter to any form of fascism. As
Deleuze perceives in Nietzsche, living a nomads life does not
necessarily require movement in spatial/geographical terms;
rather, it is a refusal to be fixed or pinned down even as one
does not go anywhere (“Nomad Thought” 148). Furthermore,
the war waged by Deleuze s Nietzsche is “a war of becoming
over being, of the [nomadic] over the [sedentary]. Becoming
different, to think and act differently” (Deuchars 3). If nomad
thought/nomadism found an early paradigm in the figure
of Nietzsche the warrior, it reached its pitch in A Thousand
Plateaus, particularly with reference to Deleuze s exploration
of the dynamics of war machine assemblages.
44 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

The War Machine, Nomads and the State-Form

As already noted in the introductory section, the main

problem of Beloved is a conflict/war between two opposing
worldviews. We may find it especially productive to map this
onto one of the most intriguing yet widely misunderstood
concepts developed in the course of A Thousand Plateaus,
namely the war machine. In a broad sense, the war machine is
contrasted with the state-form and its apparatuses of capture.
For the sake of clarification, Deleuze and Guattari remain
quite explicit that the term is not synonymous with war as
such, that the war machine does not possess a primary or—in
the Kantian sense of the term— analytic relation to war but it
has armed conflict as its object only under certain conditions.
The immediate object of war machine assemblages is, instead,
constituted by creative transformation and transmutation.
It is in this sense that Deleuze and Guattari make a direct
link between lines of flight/deterritorialization and the war
machine: “The assemblage that draws lines of flight is of
the war-machine type. Mutations spring from this machine,
which in no way has war as its object, but rather the emission
of quanta of deterritorialization, the passage of mutant flows
(in this sense all creation is brought about by a war-machine)”
(A Thousand Plateaus 229-30). Considering that the primary
purpose of a war machine assemblage is creative change and
becoming, with only a secondary/synthetic relation to war as
reactive negation, Paul Patton suggests using a less ambiguous
term:

[I]t might be preferable to think of this type of assemblage

not as a war-machine but as a machine of metamorphosis. A
metamorphosis machine would then be one that does not simply
support the repetition of the same but rather engenders the
production of something altogether different. (110)

To complicate the matter even further, Deleuze and

Guattari state that the war machine, despite being originally a
nomad invention, is not specific to nomadic peoples:
 BELOVED—A DELEUZE-GUATTARIAN READING 45

[T]he nomads do not hold the secret: an “ideological,” “scientific,”

or artistic movement can be a potential war machine, to the
precise extent to which it draws, in relation to a phylum, a
plane of consistency, a creative line of flight, a smooth space of
displacement, (A Thousand Plateaus 422-23)

An infinite range of social formations possess the potential to

constitute war machine assemblages with objectives as diverse
as “building bridges or cathedrals or rendering judgments or
making music or instituting a science, a technology” (ibid.
366). What is the point, then, if the war machine does not
belong exclusively to nomadism? And, how can one justify the
logical possibility of a state war machine if the war machine
is contrasted with the state-form in the first place? It seems
more precise to say that the nomad war machine is primarily
a machine of metamorphosis whereas global capitalism, as
a state-form, has war machine assemblages of its own. By
Deleuze and Guattari s own indication at the end of the treatise
on nomadology, there are in effect “two kinds of war machine”
(ibid. 423).
Therefore, there is the task of differentiating between
sedentary and nomadic, reactive and affirmative, rigid and
insurgent forms of the war machine. In his “Affirmative
Nomadology and the War Machine,” Eugene W. Holland
suggests that state and nomadic war machines occupy a shared
space, a smooth one, obviously for quite different purposes—
the former operates as an apparatus of capture, the latter as
a revolutionary tool to “prevent the capture of the space by
a State, which is the essence of nomad-warrior operations
[... and] to protect [the] smooth space from State striation
to begin with” (219). In this respect, the state war machine
creates or occupies a field of interiority and incorporates
all possible elements—part-objects, whole-objects, even
other assemblages—that may add to its power via processes/
apparatuses of capture. Whereas the sedentary war machine
encompasses states and appropriates the state-form, the
essential precondition for the formation and perpetuation of
the nomadic war machine is opposition/exteriority to the state
46 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

apparatus. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari insist that the war

machine “comes from elsewhere” and that it is “irreducible to
the State apparatus, [...] outside its sovereignty and prior to its
law” (ibid. 352). Thus, the metamorphosis machine designates
social assemblages that remain outside and opposed to the
state and constitute the Other in relation to the state-form.
Once again, the criterion for distinguishing state and
nomadic war machines is two-fold. Firstly, the metamorphosis
machine has very little to do with war as such. In contrast
to the state apparatus of capture, which always attempts
to striate space and appropriate the entire world, the war
machine s single concern is to open lines of flight, to constantly
deterritorialize. The principal aim of the war machine, as
specified by Deleuze and Guattari, is constituted by its guerilla
logic to “create something else, if only new nonorganic social
relations” (A Thousand Plateaus 423, original italics). Secondly,
the capitalist war machine lacks the means or the potential to
recapture/reterritorialize the entire range of flows of desire that
it deterritorializes. And, it is precisely here that possibilities for
drawing lines of flight— for becoming-other—increase. In the
following sections, I will map out how Morrison s characters in
Beloved form nomadic subjectivities and activate processes of
resistance and affirmation through becoming-other.

Becoming-Monster, or Redefining Motherhood

Set in 1873, in the Reconstruction era, and with

retrospective references to the 1850s, Beloved portrays the
life of Sethe—as the central figure of the novel—with her
daughter Denver at 124 Bluestone Road, Cincinnati. Having
lost her mother at a very early age back in the early 1850s,
Sethe was brought to the Sweet Home Plantation in Kentucky
to serve a relatively benevolent and humane kind of slavery run
by Mr. Gam er and his wife. There, Sethe marries Halle Suggs,
one of the six male slaves on the plantation, and bears two sons
and two daughters from him. Following the eventual death
of the proprietor, Mr. Garners wife asks her brother-in-law,
 BELOVED—A DELEUZE-GUATTARIAN READING 47

who is called schoolteacher, to take charge of the plantation.

Schoolteachers extremely harsh and dehumanizing behavior
forces the slaves to attempt to escape, which marks a turning
point in the lives of Sethe and the other slaves on the plantation.
Although the other slaves fail at the cost of losing their lives or
being sold to the chain gang, Sethe—pregnant with her fourth
child—manages to escape to 124, her mother-in-law Baby
Suggs’s house. Finally after twenty-eight days of refuge at 124,
when schoolteacher and the sheriff come to take her and her
four children back to the Sweet Home Plantation, Sethe kills
her “crawling-already? [sic] girl” (152) with a handsaw before
she is stopped from killing herself and the other three children.
Charged with murder, Sethe is condemned to seven years of
imprisonment by the slaveholders and shunned by the black
community.
Before interpreting it as a pathological or criminal act,
it is necessary to set Sethe’s infanticide against the backdrop
of slavery. In her foreword to the Vintage edition of Beloved,
Morrison declares that the story of Sethe was inspired by the
true story of Margaret Garner:

A newspaper clipping in The Black Book summarized the story of

Margaret Gamer, a young mother who, having escaped slavery,
was arrested for killing one of her children (and trying to kill the
others) rather than let them be returned to the owner’s plantation.
(xvii)

The practice of slavery posed a great challenge to African-

Americans by depriving them of the most basic human rights.
Feeding off the supremacist view that slaves are inferior to
their masters, the South’s institution of slavery sustained
itself through trading slaves. As Betty Wood points out in The
Origins o f American Slavery, slaves were regarded as products
or properties with a price: “The word slave meant a piece of
conveyable property, a chattel, with no legal rights or social
status whatsoever” (9 original italics). Also, Peter Kolchin
describes a “civilization or way of life” in the South where
slaves were subjugated, objectified, and treated as tradable
48 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

objects or properties of white masters (111). Slavery posed

a great challenge especially to women, who faced double
discrimination for being both female and slave. As Harriet
Jacobs describes in her slave narrative, “slavery' is terrible for
men; but it is far more terrible for women” (86). Additionally,
Adrienne Rich describes how raping black women was
encouraged among plantation proprietors; “The motherhood
created by rape is not only degraded; the raped woman is
turned into the criminal, the attacker [...] whose [supposed]
absence of a sexual conscience produced the financially
profitable mulatto children (35 original italics).
In Beloved, Morrison seems to have captured the
ultimate problematization of motherhood/mothering for
African-American women under the gruesome experience of
slavery. The conditions under which Sethe commits infanticide
in Beloved are illustrative of how women were denied the
freedom/right to cherish and care for their children as biological
mothers. Enslaved women had no claims on their children and
were treated as breeding stock. Even young girls, as soon as
ready, were forced to give birth to as many children as possible
to provide their masters with slaves as field hands. Morrison
depicts the legacy of a troubled and deprived motherhood in
Beloved as Sethe remembers being separated from her mother
in early childhood (61). Worse yet was the hereditary nature of
slavery—that children would inherit their m others status and
confront the same fate.
For such typical slave mothers as Margaret Garner, and
her fictional reconstruction in the figure of Sethe, motherhood/
mothering turns to a literally impossible task. Given the narrow
space for exercising ones free will, infanticide can be conceived
as not an act of one’s own choice but only as an unfortunate
dead end solution. Sethe is told how her mother, although
motivated differently, committed infanticide by throwing all
the children she bore for the whites away “[w ithout names”
(62). We also learn that Ella, another slave woman, gives birth
to a child she allows to die after being locked up and abused
by her white master as a slave (258-59). Having undergone
 BELOVED—A DELEUZE-GUATTARIAN READING 49

the evils of slavery herself, Sethe admits that “[she] couldn’t let
all that go back to where it was, and couldn’t let her nor any of
em live under schoolteacher. That was out” (163). Sethe’s act is
perplexing and incomprehensible to the white master whether
it is interpreted as mercy-killing, since the slave mother has
no right to love her children whatsoever let alone to kill them,
or as an act of resistance, in the sense that she is inferior,
subservient, “animal.” One such case of literal animalization
occurs after schoolteacher and his nephews anticipate the
imminent escape of the slaves, hunt down Paul D and kill Sixo.
Sethe is still intent on her plan to flee having sent her children
ahead to Baby Suggs’s house in Cincinnati and pregnant with
Denver. Nevertheless, before she manages to fulfill her plan,
schoolteacher’s nephews seize her in the bam, hold her down
and milk her like a cow (16-17).
It would not be implausible to suggest that this practice
is rooted in the discourse of scientific supremacism/racism
as epitomized by the figure of schoolteacher. Schoolteacher
carries around a notebook in which he keeps a record of what
the slaves say in order to “[develop] a variety of corrections [... ]
to reeducate them ” (37, 220) and divides up Sethe’s “animal”
and “human characteristics” in two separate lists (193). Slaves
are even branded by slave masters to both mark their animal
status and claim ownership of them. Sethe’s mother, among
other slaves, is branded “on her rib [with] a circle and a cross
burnt right in the skin” (61). The cowhide the pupils take on
Sethe leaves the sign of a “chokecherry tree” on her back forever
(16). The discourse of racism in this sense goes even as far as
to write on black bodies in an attem pt to define their identity
and existence, to make it clear that “definitions [belong] to the
definers—not the defined” (190). As Deleuze and Guattari
suggest in the seventh plateau of A Thousand Plateaus, the
definition apparatus of the racist war machine operates by
determining degrees of deviation and choosing between the
two endpoints of integration and exclusion:

From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no

people on the outside. There are only people who should be like
50 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

us and whose crime it is not to be. [...] Racism never detects the
particles of the other; it propagates waves of sameness until those
who resist identification have been wiped out. (178)

It seems that the black community—at least initially—has fully

internalized and absorbed stereotypical definitions propagated
by the fascist-racist machine of the colonizer and has accepted
its own status as inferior to humanity. It is for this reason that
Sethe’s murderous/monstrous act cannot be understood even
by black community members—despite sharing a similar
plight—including Paul D, when he learns of the fact eighteen
years later:

“What you did was wrong, Sethe.”

“I should have gone on back there? Taken my babies back there?”
“There could have been a way. Some other way.”
“What way?”
“You got two feet, Sethe, not four.” (165)

Unlike that of Paul D, Sethe’s position is radical. H er decision is

revolutionary in that she refuses to conform to preset definitions
any longer. Sethe recognizes that it is time to redefine things
and turn racism against itself. She creates the possibility of a
free future by refusing schoolteachers dehumanizing project:
“No notebook for my babies and no measuring string neither”
(198). The narrator also reveals how Sethe, in an affirmative act
of self-determination, decides to exchange her body for having
the name “Beloved” engraved on her daughters tombstone. As
Barbara Hill Rigney observes:

Sethe in Beloved trades ten minutes of sex for a single inscription,

“the one word that mattered”, on her daughters tombstone, thus
almost literally translating her body into the written word. (26)

The narrative also portrays how operating within the

confines of motherhood as defined by the slave regime can be
debilitating and disempowering. The horrific circumstances
under which Sethe commits infanticide do not offer any viable
options. She can only think of death as a milder alternative
to a lifetime of slavery and mortification. Thus, it is not
 BELOVED—A DELEUZE-GUATTARIAN READING 51

difficult to realize how the kind of fascism that determines

Sethe’s infanticide is rooted—not in her psyche but—in
the suppressive discourse and practice of supremacism/
racism. Adrienne Rich describes it as misleading that “[i]
nstead of recognizing the institutional violence of patriarchal
motherhood, society labels those women who finally erupt in
violence as psychopathological” (263). The war machine that
Sethe develops is a medium of transformation and becoming.
H er war machine nullifies slavery’s apparatuses of capture by
forming a nomadic mother love, a defamiliarized motherhood
that does not fit into the sedentary and exclusionary framework
of the discourse of racism. Stephanie Demetrakopoulos
identifies Sethes murderous love as a preemptive/protective
gesture:

Sethe attempts to return the babies to perhaps a collective mother

body, to devour them back into the security of womb/tomb death
much as a mother cat will eat her babies as the ultimate act of
protection. [... ] For Sethe the children are better off dead, their
fantasy futures protected from the heinous reality of slavery. (53)

The other side of Sethe s transition from maternal loss

to maternal love can be studied in reference to her relationship
with Beloved and Denver. Following their refuge in 124, the
house is haunted and troubled by “the baby ghost” (12) which
causes Howard and Buglar to run away (19). Worse yet, Sethe s
relationship with her only remaining daughter is governed by
tension and pretension. Denver is intensely afraid that her
mother might do the same to her, confessing:

I love my mother but I know she killed one of her own daughters,
and tender as she is with me, I’m scared of her because of it. She
missed killing my brothers and they knew it. [...] I spent all of my
outside self loving Ma’am so she wouldn’t kill me, loving her even
when she braided my head at night. (205, 207)

When after long years of separation Paul D arrives at 124, the

tension heightens between mother and daughter, deepening
Denvers isolation and loneliness further. Beloveds return
from the dead makes things yet more complicated, stirring
52 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

simultaneous feelings of joy and guilt in Sethe. In an attempt to

compensate for lost time, Sethe begins to act overly obsessive
and fall behind on her daily activities. Her decline intensifies
on a downward spiraling trend until Denver intervenes by
resorting to another line of escape—a form of communal
subjectivity.

Becoming-Collective, or Redefining Selfhood

As already clarified, the colonialist apparatus of

capture operates by establishing binary relations based on
supremacist/racist premises of superiority and inferiority.
Through stereotyping the colonized into certain templates of
representation (e.g., black, animal, ignorant), the colonizer
maintains a dominant status and prevents the Other from
sustaining a sense of self altogether. The inferiorized subject,
according to Penelope Ingram, “is thrust [into a subordinate
positionl through a mechanics of discourse and representation”
(13)—hence, losing the capacity to signify independently. In
this regard, it seems vital for Sethe and the other characters
to begin journeys of self-discovery/self-affirmation on grounds
that diverge from the logic of the colonizer. The encounter
between the capitalist-racist system of American slavery, which
dismembers the body and spirit of slaves, and the subjugated
system of West African beliefs, in which death does not
preclude communication between the living and the dead,
serves as a line of flight for redefining selfhood. The main
challenge of such experimentation is to trace not merely the
change that results from the clash of two cultures but also how
and by what agency it is brought about. In the words of Robert
LaRue:

Once postcolonial individuals understand that what appears to be

a loss of agency is not so much a loss, but a misunderstanding
[...,] new understandings of postcolonial existence can be
uncovered. [...] [T]he existence of colonized individuals should
not be understood as fixed at the point of interaction. Instead,
[it] extends beyond—both before and after—this “moment” of
interaction. (27-28)
 BELOVED—A DELEUZE-GUATTARIAN READING 53

Following a collective loss of agency and negation of

selfhood under the slave regime, self-affirmation seems to
be an impossible ideal unless under the auspices of a loving
community. What is often neglected is the fact that the
Cincinnati community of former slaves is indirectly complicit
in Sethe’s infanticide. The black society deliberately chooses
to remain silent when schoolteachers posse comes for Sethe
and her children. Stamp Paid, one of the six black men on the
Sweet Home Plantation, identifies this as an act of “meanness”
(157). Worse yet is the community’s uncritical participation in
the hegemonic discourse of the colonizer by shunning Sethe.
It is so often the case that, as Kristina K. Groover points out,
“the community fails to perform its role” (72). As a result of
the community’s neglect and rejection, Sethe becomes more
deeply isolated and unable to participate in the outside world.
In the face of social exclusion, Sethe’s self-recognition becomes
conceivable only with the prospect of building and maintaining
uninhibited connections with the past and with the black
community.
Beloved’s reincarnation serves as a trigger for Sethe’s
reenactment of a long-lost maternal bond. As suggested by
Duran, the character of Beloved is “signaled in the text as the
personification of the past [or] as the resurrection of a baby
ghost who makes the characters finally face the rebuked past
and work it out” (13). H er physical return provides Sethe
with the opportunity to directly confront rather than “[beat]
back the past” (73). As the dead daughter that returns to the
world of the living, Beloved becomes the site where past and
present, history and memory, converge. In one sense, she even
embodies “the literal return of the event against the will of the
one it inhabits” (Grewal 98).
Insofar as intense historical events can instigate
collective trauma, forgetting them can be achieved only
through communal efforts. Thus, if Beloved functions as
the revival of the past, the resulting trauma can be undone
by recourse to the social space. Beloved performs the double
role of being pathological and therapeutic, deleterious and
54 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

restorative, in the same way that the past can enslave and free
Sethe at the same time. Although reopening the wounds of
slavery proves painful, it is of crucial import for fulfilling the
process of healing as echoed in Amy’s dialogue with Sethe:
“Good for you. More it hurt more better it is. Can’t nothing
heal without pain, you know” (78).
While Sethe and Denver seem to experience a mutual
incapacity for communication, Beloved’s reappearance
functions to bring them together and reconstruct the mother-
daughter bond. The moment of reunion between the mother
and the sisters is, in a sense, indebted to Beloved’s second
coming. Despite all the healing force that underlies this
reunion, Beloved’s demand for absolute devotion has a severely
ravaging impact on Sethe’s body and mind:

Then Sethe spit up something she had not eaten and it rocked
Denver like gunshot. The job she started out with, protecting
Beloved from Sethe, changed to protecting her mother from
Beloved. Now it was obvious that her mother could die and leave
them both and what would Beloved do then? (243)

Denver is the first one who recognizes the pernicious nature of

Beloved’s overdependence on Sethe:

Sethe was trying to make up for the handsaw; Beloved was making
her pay for it. But there would never be an end to that, and seeing
her mother diminished shamed and infuriated her. (251)

As a witness of her mother’s gradual decline, Denver decides to

prevent further damage to Sethe’s body and soul by resorting to
the community for help. Sethe’s moment of spiritual paralysis
coincides with Denver’s initiation into maturity and her quest
for communal self-discovery. According to Groover, Denver’s
act marks her “rite of passage into womanhood” (74). Inspired
by the spirit of her deceased grandmother Baby Suggs to “go
on out the yard” (244), Denver finally breaks her self-imposed
domestic confinement and initiates a journey into society'. The
first person Denver turns to for help is Ella who once turned
her back to Sethe for her retreat into 124. Once the women of
 BELOVED—A DELEUZE-GUATTARIAN READING 55

Cincinnati become aware of Beloved’s return and her malicious

abuse of Sethe, they decide to put an end to their long-lasting
grudge and rejection. As for Ella, “The past [was] something
to leave behind. And if it didn’t stay behind, well, you might
have to stomp it out” (256). As Doreatha D. Mbalia postulates:

Once the enemy is identified, once it is out in the open, the

community struggles collectively against that which divides them.
And it is only through the collective will and action of the people
that Beloved, the enemy, dies. (92)

The community’s collective effort in exorcising Beloved has

a double significance. On the one hand, the black society
identifies in the figure of Beloved the shared agony of life in
and after the slavery era. It is in this sense that fighting back
the trouble becomes a collective responsibility. On the other
hand, the black community finds the chance to recognize
and compensate for its deliberate negligence. In the words of
Bonnie C. Winsbro:

By perceiving Beloved as a demon whipping Sethe, the community

projects its guilt for having whipped her themselves for eighteen
years. [...] Beloved acts as a supernatural agent—experienced
as daughter, sister, witch, or demon-child—who engages others
in a seemingly external but actually internal struggle resulting in
rebirth, renewal, [and] resurrection. (152,153)

Denver’s quest for self-recognition outside the four walls of

124 culminates in a communal effort by the Cincinnati society
of former slave women to chase Beloved, along with the ghost
of slavery, away. Thirty women make up the company and
march to the house to perform a collective exorcism:

[T]he voices of women searched for the right combination, the

key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words. Building
voice upon voice until they found it, and when they did it was a
wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the
pods off chestnut trees. It broke over Sethe and she trembled like
the baptized in its wash. (261)

Finally, through a communal effort to chase off Beloved,

the society of ex-slaves confronts the past and eradicates the
56 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

trauma. Although Denver succeeds in reclaiming her agency,

in being admitted into the community, Sethe seems to be at a
loss as a result of Beloveds departure. Convinced that Beloved
was her “best thing” (272), Sethe loses all hope and resigns
to death. H er recovery, nevertheless, is facilitated by Paul D s
encouragement of Sethe to reassert her agency and affirm her
own self aloud: “You your best thing, Sethe. You are” (273). In
the same line, Winsbro insists that Sethe “regains a chance,
under Denver and Paul D s care, for a resurrected life of her
own” (140). Furthermore, Mbalia points out that Morrisons
novel highlights “the intrinsic value of collectivism” and the
“genocidal [risk of] most forms of isolation [... ] for the race”
(89, 91). It is only through communal participation, through
establishing a nomadic war machine that Sethe and the other
characters can form a non-identitarian subjectivity, reclaim
agency and sustain a sense of self in connection with one
another. The process of subjectivity formation for the characters
in Beloved, as summarized by Gay Wilentz, is marked by the
movement “from a life of fragmentation and isolation to a (re)
vision of wholeness and sense of community” (60).

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