Thoughts of Simon

At the end of  Beloved  we get this weird semi-poetic section that can be very difficult to comprehend and seems almost out of place. It seems to be from Beloved’s perspective and goes forward to many years after the story ended, talking about how everyone ended up forgetting her and the fact that she even existed. She then talks about walking through their houses when they’re asleep, brushing their foreheads with her fingers and hiding whenever people wake up. It’s an extremely creepy picture to imagine but does seem to have a deeper message. I took it as Beloved representing unwanted or unpleasant memories from long in the past, which have been completely forgotten by the people who experienced them. The first people to forget were the ones who only heard about it, then the ones who actually witnessed it, then those people who actually experienced it, and finally are the ones who had an emotional connection to the event. Nobody actually wants to remember the event that happ...

            One of the really interesting things about the last three books that we’ve read is how closely together chronologically they were written. All of the different authors knew each other at least by name, and even wrote commentary on each other’s work. We’ve seen this especially with Wright’s review of  Their Eyes Were Watching God . Looking at this, we can then start to see these books as reactions to each other, or even as the authors themselves having a conversation or argument through their literature. All of these books were written during the Harlem Renaissance, and were very different expressions of black culture at the time, expressing different opinions of what exactly it meant to be writing black literature. The first of these books to come out was Hurston’s  Their Eyes Were Watching God , which was published in 1937 and focused mainly on expressing a very specific form of black culture in the south, almost completely disr...