Saturday, April 6, 2013

Rememory


I don’t understand completely what Morrison means by rememory but I find the idea of it interesting. I understand rememory to be a memory that is so strong that it imprints into your head and in the place that it happened so you and others that didn’t experience it personally can experience the memory mentally, physically or emotionally. Examples in the book of rememory include: Beloved revives painful rememories for Sethe continually and the part when the 3 women go to the Clearing and Sethe falls into a reverie of Baby Suggs and the black community gathering.  The Clearing seems to generate the memories for her. I think rememory exists today, but I never thought of calling it “rememory.” When you go to a historical place like a civil war battle field, a famous person’s house like MLK or Falkner, a castle, or a concentration camp you can sometimes (vaguely) image yourself there at the moment the place was being used. Visiting those places makes the past come alive, which is important for learning about history, understanding how people lived and their rational for doing certain things and for sympathizing with past generations. If you can feel/image what people experienced in those historical places (maybe by having a kind of out-of-body experience) you might gain a better understanding of the human experience or be able to compare the past to the present better.

1 comment:

TSHAH said...

The concept of rememory is quite interesting to me because I think of it as almost a stream if consciousness concept. There are some thoughts your mind wishes to suppress due to the harsh nature of the experience, yet there is something or someone that will cause you to remember that past thought/event. In "Beloved" the ghost served to represent this inescapable thought that would remind Sethe of her past.