Viewing of “Beloved”

 

After hearing Beloved mentioned in my African Diaspora and World lecture, I decided to watch it on my own as I like to contribute as much as possible to the class. I wasn’t quite prepared for how heavy the film would be. The film’s exploration of generational trauma and the haunting remnants of slavery left me uneasy especially with the horrifically graphic scenes of what happened to the characters when enslaved but was reflective for me. It captured how trauma doesn’t simply disappear; it’s carried, inherited, and transferred through generations.

The movie followed an ex slave mother who ran away and is now raising her teenage daughter in a haunted house. The sequence of scene bounce between past to present and the audience begins to learn about the mothers journey to freedom through hard to watch trauma scenes. Eventually an estranged young woman finds her way to the mother and daughter and is in a child like mental state. The mother and daughter take in the young woman and care for her but overtime the true nature of the relationship is revealed. (Spoiler) It comes out that the young woman is the reincarnation of the murdered baby the mother killed on her path to freedom and has been haunting the home and hunting the family the entire time. This does not discourage the mother but makes her happy to be reunited with her child that she sacrificed and continues to care for her. Eventually the young woman by the name of beloved is consumed by rage and continues to hurt the home when she cannot understand what would make her mother kill her. At the end of the movie Beloved is exercised and disappears and the mother falls into a deep illness while the teenage daughter takes steps to move on with her life. 

Through historical consciousness, I saw how the pain of the past still lingers and in some cases haunt people. It reminded me that the legacy of slavery isn’t just in the history books but still exists in the way we see ourselves and each other. Beloved taught me that acknowledging pain is not weakness it’s a necessary part of moving on. 

- Giavonni Whitener