Essay on "Race Gender and Sexuality"

Essay 5 pages (1403 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Ghosts

In both Beloved by Toni Morrison and in Grace Cho's Haunting the Korean Diaspora, the characters are both haunted by past memories. Both authors invite the readers into a twilight zone landscape that is hidden, but not really completely gone. It is deliberately buried, but not forgotten by the protagonists. In their lives, ghosts from the horrible past haunt the ethnic landscape of the present. In this essay, the author will compare and contrast the ways in which questions of ghosting and haunting are central to our literary works this semester. It is the author's contention that the hauntings allow the reader to personalize the characters and then care for them since they can the relate with the suffering humanity in a horror landscape. This personalization of suffering then allows the reader to enter into the mind of the oppressed and transcend the racialized/gendered/sexualized forces of violence, evidence, loss, disappearance, memory, forgetfulness and/or social death. They can now directly care for and connect with the protagonists on a personal level that otherwise would not be possible.

Because of the horrible and painful nature of the past experiences of slavery, almost all slaves possess such repressed memories. While forgetfulness can be a blessing, such repression and alienation from the past further causes a fragmentation of one's self and a loss of our true identities. In Beloved, Sethe, Paul D. And Denver all experience such an alienation and their losses of self can only be remedied by a psychological acceptance of the past and the memories of their original status. Morrison attempts to open her characters up to these repressed memories and finally causes the their cathartic reconstitution as they discover their new selves.

Slavery as an institution has a profound effect upon an individual. It splits a given person into fragmented figures of sub-identity. These sub-identities in turn consist of painful memories and unspeakable past atrocities. They are collectively denied and kept at bay so that the person does not completely lose their sanity. To heal and humanize oneself, these memories must be reconstituted in recognizable language and images to deal with them first individually and then systematically.

Sethe, Paul D, and Baby Suggs all fall short of a such realization and are unable to fully remake themselves as free people. For them, the he self is located in words as defined by others, in this case, by their old masters. The power to overcome this old dependence lies in the audience, or more precisely, in the change of terminology. In the case of the former slaves, their challenge is to take on a new language of freedom. In this case, once the terminology changes, so does the person's identity. All of the characters in Beloved face the challenge of an unmade self composed of their flashbacks and defined by language and perceptions. The obstacle that keeps them from the complete remaking of themselves is their desire for a past that is uncomplicated past. They fear what the memories will do to them. This alienation can be summed up in the realization that "Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name...remembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her...how can they call her if they don't know her name " (Morrison 274).

In Beloved, the protagonists experience emotions that are similar the experiences laid in the Cho book. In the center of Cho's text is the ghostly and menacing figure of the yanggongju. She defines this as "literally meaning 'Western princess,' broadly refers to a Korean woman who has sexual relations with Americans; is most often used pejoratively to refer to a woman who is a prostitute for the U.S. Military" (Cho 3). Cho sees this as part of what she calls the erasure of identity for the women from Koren society. For decades, the country's population was alienated from its both its indigenous language and culture under the Japanese boot heal. Also, one must factor in the loss of autonomy under U.S. military domination since 1945, the destruction of the peninsula and its people during the Korean War and the lack of a decisive termination to the war. Even after… READ MORE

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