Cain knows that the shoring up of recollected impressions – factual or fictional – on the page, gifts readers these self-same recollections – the camomile, the trees, the water – with which to understand and see, animate and enrich, our own inner lives. Writer Amina Cain knows this with Morrison, she shares this sense of knowing about the palimpsestic magic of words and the images they create and lodge in the minds and bodies of readers. Remembering someone else’s remembering reminds us of the power of writing – as well as the power of memory. With these fragments in mind, Morrison asks us to consider how the very fabric of this our beautifully violent world is made. This is a novel whose images live on, live through and ‘roll’ out in the reader’s imagination. Rather, this is a book whose images deliberately haunt our imaginations this is a novel that shows the underside of a quivering leaf (blood), the refracted reflection in the pail of water (a broken brutalised man), the potentiality of the scraps and orts of a household (a wedding dress).

I’m not saying ‘rememory’ – Morrison’s concept about the disjointed but no less true experience of remembering for African Americans like Sethe – is mine. Perhaps it’s because the whole novel is about acts of memory – is in itself a memorialisation, an eternal remembrance of those most ignored – that I carry these fragments, and continue to remember the beauty and horror Sethe sees, Toni writes and we imagine, in my own waking hours. Perhaps it’s because I have taught this text many times. The water, the trees, the stinging itch of the camomile, the ghosts of the past unsaid. But I, like so many readers, remember these images as if they were mine I remember the sublime ‘rolling, rolling, rolling, rolling out’ of the past in Sethe’s present, remember how memory unwinds to its own accord, its own unknown logic remember how history is held in one fist-like image only to unclench and reveal another. They are not my memories nor are they exactly Morrison’s, but those of her main character, the other beloved of the text, Sethe, whose mind revives and relives the trauma of her former life on the ironically named Sweet Home farm. These are some of the visual fragments from the opening pages of Beloved, Toni Morrison’s commemorative love song to the ‘sixty million and more’ Africans and African Americans who suffered, endured and fought the horrors of slavery. What I remember is the camomile, the ‘plash’ of the water, the ‘shameless beauty’ of the sycamore trees.

Amina cain