Toni Morrison's novels are involved in a work of mourning Death or loss
is prevalent in the world of Morrison's characters, and mourning becomes
a driving force or a thematic point of the narratives. The works which try
to remember the victims of injustice in slavery, war, or genocide and tell
the story of the oppressed past are caught between two commitments:
summoning the dead for justice and coming to terms with the loss. As we
see in Beloved, mourning is an act of bringing the past into life and
Morrison's mourning refuses to attain a sense of closure, which, for Freud,
is a sign of healthy mourning. In this sense, Morrison's work of mourning
does not follow Freud's distinction between mourning and melancholia.
Derrida's concept of specter, which is a threat of the oppressed past and,
at the same time, the promise for a just future, is relevant to Morrison's work
of mourning. In Playing in the Dark Morrison examines the African
American presence as surrogates or shadows for the white characters' search
for self and freedom and their drama of repression in the works of white
American writers. From this understanding of the critical examination,
Morrison sees her job as a black writer as turing the racial other into the
racial subject. Resurrecting the dead in Beloved can be part of the project,
and it is an investigation for a different future. In this effort to bring the
past back into life as a promise for a different future, Morrison also opens
room for her readers to participate in her mourning and working for the
future. Different from Derrida, who sees the impossible as the only possible chance of something new, Morrison focuses on doable activities in the
present to work for a different future. For Morrison, her literary imagination
and writing is what makes a change, and she sees that her job as a black
writer is also to develop language which helps her to be both free and
situated in this racialized world and to refigure the raced community.
Removing all the racial codes in her short story, "Recitatif," she shows the
possibility of a world not without racial differences but without racial
hierarchy. She thinks that for her text and language to live and flourish it
must enter into human relationships. With her readers who share her
mourning in her work, Morrison works for a different future and a different
community.