On March 10, as part of a wave of similar moves by states across the country, the Florida legislature passed what supporters are calling the “Stop WOKE Act,” a bill limiting what workplaces and schools can teach about race and identity, with special emphasis on discussions that could cause others to feel shame over past actions of their race or sex.
But this widespread push to treat all truth-telling about America’s complicated racial history as “divisive” is in itself a cause of division. Such silencing impedes America’s recovery from that history; it denies the diverse communication that is needed to promote mental health around these issues. This was the perspective held by the late author Toni Morrison, whose baldly truthful work on race in America has been the target of bans in school districts nationwide. With this recent legislation, and considering March is also Women’s History Month, Morrison’s work becomes particularly relevant, especially since the theme this March is “Women Providing Healing, Promoting Hope.”
Focusing on America’s difficult racial past by centering the Black experience, Morrison sought to offer healing and hope not just to the Black community but to all Americans. But celebrating her shouldn’t be only about remembering, because this alone can’t provide a complete understanding of her contributions.
Instead, we must re-member — that is, realize the full import of the prefix “re-” in Morrison’s work by re-calling her idea of “rememory,” and through it, re-experience the story of race in America in ways that promote the kind of healing that also offers hope.
Morrison introduces the idea of “rememory” in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Beloved.” Her coining of this word was neither an ethnic departure from standard English, nor a quirk of the novel’s unearthly concerns. As one of the story’s primary characters, Sethe, explains to her daughter, Denver: “Some things go. … Some … stay. I used to think it was my rememory. ... If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place — the picture of it — stays, and not just in my rememory.” Through this moment, we see that “rememory” describes a simultaneous layering of past, present and future in a complicated sense of time. By using this relation to time to describe the horrific reality of slavery, “rememory” makes the otherwise bizarre ghostly title character fully comprehensible.
But this is not how I understood the novel when I encountered it in the late 1980s as an energetic graduate student teaching a class on women of color. “Beloved” was on my syllabus, and the students were struggling. Frankly, I was struggling too. Why couldn’t the novel just tell its story? Why did it keep jumping around from past to present and back again? What on earth was the point of including a ghost? And why had I ever chosen to put it on the syllabus?
But through teaching, understanding dawned. “Beloved” could exist only as a haunting, a symbol of how all Black people in America were plagued by the legacy of slavery, a problem that, for Morrison, also encompassed all Americans.
In a Guardian essay published just three days after her 2019 death, Morrison addresses what motivated her to write “Beloved:” “It was in ‘Beloved’ that all of these matters coalesced for me. … History versus memory, and memory versus memorylessness. Rememory as in recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body.” Through “rememory,” Morrison sought to encourage all Americans to re-examine the relation between ourselves and how we remember our individual and collective past, how that enters into our present, and how the past can serve either to repress or to re-invigorate our future.
In this, Morrison gestures toward the possibility of national healing over race, in creating a way to move beyond the American slave past into a re-forged future. In remembering, we re-visit; but in re-membering, we re-position ourselves to re-create. This is the unspoken imperative of Morrison’s work — “rememory” becomes a re-membering that also re-builds. As she said in a 1986 interview, Black women, herself included, write “to repossess, re-name, re-own.”
The present moment encompasses not only the multitude of racial struggles in America stretching back to 1619 — as we are reminded by Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the “1619 Project” — but those that have continued into the 21st century. In teaching us to re-member, Morrison’s work helps us re-find a world in which “rememory” builds a newly re-conceived reality that transforms America’s present by seeking to heal its past.
Such “rememory” conjures a picture of that past as it connects through my own to the present: a vision long gone of quiet, honest, family-oriented, hardworking, churchgoing, respectable, upstanding Black people, old enough to have suffered slavery’s aftermath, yet just able to glimpse the burgeoning future miracle of unprecedented promise for Black youth. Sharing long ago my own future with people like these — I saw through it the glimmer of a priceless education denied them — touched immeasurable beauty in the quivering depths of their intense pride in me, mixing with a joy so profound it could not be contained. Instead, it glowed through their eyes with a blindingly bright light that was their gaze meeting mine in “rememory,” full to overflowing with the healing power of hope in a future re-newed, brimming with possibility, and all contained in the prefix “re-.”
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Cyraina Johnson-Roullier is an associate professor of modern literature and literature of the Americas at the University of Notre Dame. She is working on a book exploring race through the lenses of law and utopia.
