BELOVED BY TONI MORRISON:

A POSTCOLONIAL LENS THROUGH THE WORLD ENGLISHES

WORLD ENGLISHES AND CULTURE

LE4601107

PROF. DR. GÜVEN MENGÜ

DİLEK ÖZDEMİR

2364601008

ANKARA, 2024
BELOVED BY TONI MORRISON:
A POSTCOLONIAL LENS THROUGH THE WORLD ENGLISHES

The term "postcolonial study" has a more colorful past than most people realize, even though
it is now customary to credit the term's inception to the 1978 release of Edward Said's
groundbreaking work Orientalism, with additional insights derived from Ashcroft et al.'s
previously discussed and now classic The Empire Writes Back. The oldest known usage of
the concept in scholarly discourse is found in T. W. Allen's 1910 essay in the Journal of
Hellenic Studies, which makes extensive use of an underscore and mostly mentions a few
minor pre-Homeric authors. The term was rarely used in historical writings until 1950,
primarily in reference to early American and Latin American republics. The term first
surfaced unhyphenated in linguistic studies, maybe in an American Speech magazine article
from 1952. An essay on living close to the Delaware River, where there were traces of the
Finnish language, was written by A. Dunlap, R., and E. J. Moyne. Justus M. Van der Kroef
translated the colonial novel in Indonesia from Dutch and published an analysis on it in the
journal Comparative Literature in 1958. This was the first instance of the idea, unhyphenated,
in literary studies. The field of African and Pacific area studies had adopted the expression by
the 1960s and 1970s, when both hyphenated and unhyphenated variants were equally
accepted. The phrase first arose in the comprehensive MLA Bibliography in 1967. It then
reappeared in the 1981 list of forthcoming conferences and meetings of the PMLA, which
announced the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language
Studies, with a topical conference on "Nationalism, Regionalism, and Internationalism in
Postcolonial Literature" to be held at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand." It did
not surface in PMLA literature until 1990. With the exception of the 1990 PMLA pieces by
Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s introduction to the special issue on African and African American
Literature and Debra A. Castillo's essay on Coetzee's Dusklands, all previously published
practices of the expression used it as an immediate marker to denote the period of time that
followed colonial rule, whether that was in colonial earlier times in relation to the pre-
Homeric period, or in relation to the social and cultural condition. “Williams and Chrisman's
Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader” was the first to synthesize a
collection of papers that together provided a genealogy of field orientations.
On the other hand, when it comes to World Englishes, there is clearly a decrease in violence
in World Englishes using various ways. Given that the phenomenon under consideration
constitutes a danger to the concept of directedness, strategy, or management, which is making
a resurgence in the linguistic imperialism paradigm, it looks inescapable. However, what
exactly are World Englishes, and why does the paradigm of linguistic imperialism need to be
revised in light of them? On the surface, the term "World Englishes" appears unusual or
complicated. The phrase may become even more problematic if we broaden it to include
terms such as "World Englishes literatures" or "World Englishes studies." Nevertheless, there
are good reasons for using this phrase. If "New Englishes" served as a euphemism for what
had previously been dismissed as "colonial Englishes" or "non-native Englishes," as Roy
Harris (1989, pp. 39) contends, then "World Englishes" appears to be a far less apologetic or
euphemistic term, in part because it should, in theory, also refer to so-called native speaker
Englishes. Also, postcolonial studies and World Englishes studies appear to be natural
partners in the sense that postcolonial studies conceive travel theory, stress cultural
translation, and tend to prefer Anglophone writers in literary approaches. Postcolonial
perspectives may properly distinguish themselves from World Englishes in a variety of ways.
For example, it is all too tempting to conclude that studies of World Englishes are a
celebration of the spread—or rather, diversification—of English, and this celebration will
undoubtedly face criticism. In theory, postcolonialism should be multilingual and free of any
Anglophone bias that exists in both past language hierarchy and contemporary research
agendas. The institutional Anglophone focus in postcolonialism should also be avoided, as it
is rooted in a global bias against Anglo-American colleges and English language studies. In
that respect, it appears to differ significantly from studies of international Englishes, which
are inherently linked to the Anglophone world. World Englishes studies, on the other hand,
has profited from a range of discursive traditions, but one key driving reason behind the
discipline's expansion has been a shift in the ecology of world languages—that is, the nature
of the phenomena under study—as previously observed (Huddart, pp. 22, 23).

More and more, in the case of World English studies, the critique leveled at postcolonial
studies has been largely overlooked. This is remarkable, but it might originate from the
latter's lengthy history of making too ambitious political claims. Having said that, at least
some components of World Englishes studies, such as Critical Linguistics, seek to make
similar assertions and commonly employ the same sources; in fact, they have lately come
under fire, often from different areas within World Englishes studies. Interdisciplinarity
sometimes appears to be a hazardous game in which academics depart from their area of
competence, display disciplinary ineptitude, or emerge as masters of none at all. It is
necessary to first identify anything like a reality under study from a range of approaches to
the subject in both "postcolonialism" and "World Englishes." Naturally, the mix of
approaches utilized in each case adds to the phenomenon's formation, thus the tools you use
will always have an influence on the object of your observation. However, it is also true that
both disciplines have an underlying force that causes them to exist in the first place. As a
result, just as there was no single colonial framework, there is no single postcolonial theory
or approach in postcolonial studies, leaving only the phenomenon of World Englishes. This
demonstrates that there is no distinct phenomena, but rather those of World Englishes.
Because of the foregoing, combining postcolonialism with World Englishes, or even
postcolonial studies with World Englishes studies, is difficult (Huddart, pp. 26).

With this basic knowledge of postcolonialism and World Englishes, we can begin to unravel
how these ideas explain the various layers of Toni Morrison's novel "Beloved". By exploring
the novel through these two frameworks, I hope to reveal new dimensions of identity, power,
and linguistic expression, with a focus on African American Vernacular English.

In beloved, fearful of a malevolent spirit that inhabits the house from Bluestone Road, the
children of Sethe, Haward, and Buglar escape their home at the beginning of the novel.
Denver is in love with the ghost that comes to live with them one day. Sethe, her husband
Halle, and Paul D. had been employed as slaves on Mr. Garner's Sweet Home plantation. The
text is divided into chapters that are presented in reverse order. The story is set in Ohio in the
present day, but there are also flashbacks and soliloquies about events that happened on this
farm in Kentucky twenty years ago. It is necessary to read the book several times in the style
of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The scenes that jump back and forth between the present
and the past create a diasporic Iliad of Africanity, complete with descriptions and pictures of
the atrocities committed against runaway slaves, like rapes and murders for resistance.
Compared to other slave owners, the Garners have a more relaxed relationship with their
slaves. When Sethe was thirteen years old, six men (Paul A, Paul D, Paul F, and Sixo)
courted her after she had come to live on their farm as a small child. She marries Halle, a
kind person who spent her weekends working to get her mother, Baby Suggs, released. After
Mr. Garner passes away, his nephew becomes controller of the farm; nevertheless, because of
his strict nature, the slaves refer to him as a "school teacher." Because of the teacher's
attitudes, slavery becomes intolerable to the slaves, and they run away. Paul D. and Sixo, two
slaves, escape, but are soon found and cruelly treated. The nephews of Sethe's "school
teacher" mistreat her by forcibly expressing her infant's breast milk. Halle, Sethe's husband,
sees the scene and goes crazy. Sixo is killed, and Paul D is made to keep the curb in his
mouth—a common method of torture used by slave owners. Sethe gets whipped and her back
is severely scarred in the shape of a tree after it is revealed that she told Mrs. Garner about the
abuse committed by the professor's nephews. Still, with the help of Amy Denver, a white girl
who finds out about her escape, she runs away and gives birth to a girl on the way. Sethe
makes her way to Cincinnati to see her mother-in-law, an evangelical minister who hosts get-
togethers for the black community in the woods. The "school teacher" catches Sethe a month
later she gets to Baby Suggs' household and makes her return to the farm. In a desperate
attempt to spare the two-year-old from the horrors of slavery when he grew up, Sethe saw his
daughter's neck. She was stopped from killing the other kids by those who were in the house
with her. The monument during her daughter's funeral has the inscription "Beloved," which
translates to "beloved." After being apprehended and found guilty, Sethe is freed by
abolitionists, and the family is left alone. Paul D moves in with an old friend after seven years
of walking to Sethe's house. A weird girl shows up at Sethe's house shortly after he arrives
and remains. This figure seems to be Beloved over time. She befriends Paul D., becomes
pregnant, and leaves. Sethe loses her job and gets sick because she is only interested in
Beloved. Denver, her daughter, is looking for job, gets together with a boy, and starts over.
Morrison uses magical realism to depict the young Beloved in the novel. The use of the
African American English or Ebonics dialect, a subversion of the
regular norm that mixes the standard norm with the dialect, sets the work apart artistically.
The experiences of his characters are so vile and exposed that it is perilous and embarrassing
to even think about them, but nothing comes close to the terrifying memory of Sethe killing
her child. A people that had been oppressed by history found their dignity restored because to
Beloved (Sumulatha, 2020).

As I noted before, most importantly, Toni Morrison's novel Beloved has components that
reflect African American vernacular English, which is ungrammatical and non-standard in
comparison to formal and standard English. There are examples, such as the omission of
major auxiliary verbs in a phrase expressed in a character's conversation, which is
inappropriate in standard English. To illustrate, here are some quotes from the novel:

 Why they hang your ma’am?” (omission of the auxiliary verb, "did") Denver
asked. This was the first time she had heard anything about her mother’s mother.
Baby Suggs was the only grandmother she knew.” (Morrison, pp. 33)

 "What'd be the point?" asked Baby Suggs. "Not a house in the country ain't packed to
its rafters with some dead Negro's grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby. My husband's
spirit was to come back in here? or yours? Don't talk to me. You lucky. You got three
left.” (Morrison, pp. 2)

Here, "not...ain't" creates a double negative, which in AAVE serves to emphasize the
statement. In Standard English, it would be phrased as "There isn’t a house in the country that
isn’t packed". Also, the omission of the verb "are" (which would make it "We are lucky") is
the common feature of AAVE. This is known as copula deletion, where the form of "to be" is
often omitted. When we look at the following phrase, "was to come back in here? or yours,"
we can argue that his phrase is less standard and could be seen as a non-standard way of
expressing the future conditional. A more standard form might be "If my husband’s spirit
were to come back here, or yours?"

 “Where you been keeping yourself? (omission of the auxiliary verb, "have") I told
John must be cold if Stamp stay inside.” (Morrison, pp.38)

Here, as a common feature AAVE, the present tense verb does not always take the -s ending
in the third person singular ("stay" instead of "stays"). Also, the subject ("It") is omitted but
understood in the context as follows: "It must be cold". Lastly, in formal English, we are not
supposed to use the preposition “in” before the verb “here.”

 “How old are you, Lu? I been bleeding for four years but I ain’t having nobody’s
baby. Won’t catch me sweating milk cause..” (Morrison, pp. 45)
This quotation is an example of using the present perfect without the auxiliary verb 'have'. In
AAVE, the verb "been" can be used without "have" to signify an action that occurred in the
past but is still relevant. It would be "I have been bleeding" in Standard English. Also, the
word "ain't" is frequently used in AAVE and other non-standard English dialects to negate
verbs. In Standard English, this would be expressed as "am not having" or "will not have".
Additionally, "ain't having nobody's" is a double negative. In AAVE, double negatives are
utilized to accentuate the negation, but in Standard English, a double negative cancels out to a
positive. The word "Nobody's" should be replaced with "anybody's" in standard English.

As a conclusion, Morrison explores the depths of African identity, culture, and tradition via
her characters. She boldly portrays a matriarchal figure in Sethe who valiantly fights for her
children's freedom, and in Beloved, she shows the significance of history and how it should
be overcome and healed by fostering a space where the black community can come together
and heal. It is impossible to read Morrison's book as being in any way lynched or beheaded.
She clearly identifies as writing from an African American perspective, speaks to the
common people's everyday struggles, and paints a picture of a strong black community that
has just recently emerged from the horrors of slavery. Toni Morrison emphasizes the use of
interethnic communication, such as African American Vernacular English, Ebonics, Black
English, or Spoken Soul, as a way to enrich culture. As a result, several variations of the
English language are ungrammatical or incorrect in standard English, such as the removal of
basic auxiliary verbs in sentences of character dialogue in the novel. In other words, non-
standard English appears in the text. Also, with the presence of Beloved, the history of
slavery and the anguish African-Americans have undergone highlights forth the significance
of re-living the past "in order to move forward"
REFERENCES

Huddart, D. (2014). Involuntary Associations: ‘Postcolonial Studies’ and ‘World Englishes.’

Sumalatha, D. (2020). The literature engaged in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”. International

Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. Retrieved from http://ieas-szeged.hu/downtherabbithole/wp-

Quayson, A. (2012). Introduction: Postcolonial literature in a changing historical frame. In