Baby

               Beloved (the character, not the book) is almost a walking contradiction. She has the body of an 18-year-old woman, and with it the impulses and desires that come with the age, but mentally and behaviorally she often acts like an infant. She initiates sexual contact with Paul D, but she has no memories and does not speak much, almost never elucidating her thoughts clearly. This makes her relationship with Sethe quite complicated. She feels love and affection for her, and desires to have her all to herself, but she also might have used some supernatural powers to choke Sethe when they go outside. She despises Paul D as someone who pulls Sethe's attention away from herself, but she tempts him into having sex with her. With the revelation partway through the book that Beloved is Sethe's child that she murdered in an attempt to keep her away from slavery, the relationship takes on a whole new dimension. It becomes increasingly clear that Beloved is functionally incapable of explaining her feelings, but is terrified of the "dark place" she existed in during the interim between her murder and eventual reincarnation. She feels a bond towards her mother, but is emotionally stunted and sometimes lashes out in an attempt to stay close to Sethe.

                From her first appearance, it is clear that Beloved and Sethe share a special bond. Her emergence from the water coincides with Sethe out of the blue having an experience similar to her water breaking. Her behavior for the next few days mirrors that of a newborn almost exactly, and the few things we get from her perspective are a strong connection to Sethe, a sentiment that is captured with words even in thought by Beloved. Despite this connection, however, when Sethe takes Beloved and Denver to the clearing where Baby Suggs used to preach, she feels hands around her throat choking her. Beloved then comes to her rescue, kissing Sethe's neck and rubbing the bruises. Although Sethe is relieved to not be choked, she is also confused by Beloved's actions. Denver then in private accuses Beloved of doing the choking, although Beloved denies it. The whole situation is quite strange: why would Beloved choke her own mother and then come to kiss the bruises? Furthermore, why is Beloved's reaction to the choking so intimate? Even if she cannot explain herself, it is clear that Beloved does not express emotion and connection like anyone else in the novel, as her relationship with each of the other characters is quite strange. Part of it is her implied infancy, and that she has only been alive for roughly two years, but part of it is also what she represents that causes her to act the way she does. Her fate and current state of existence is due to the horror of slavery that Paul D and Sethe had to live through, and despite the love that Sethe and Beloved have for each other, everyone still feels discomfort and confusion dealing with their past demons in such a literal way. I have not read the book up to the end, but I would make a guess that this problem is not simply going to resolve itself, and that most likely more tragedy will occur before Beloved has anything close to a healthy relationship or existence.

Escape

                Beloved is a book about a time period so earth-shattering that its effects resonate through history, up to the time of the events in the novel and further up to the present day. Events like these, because of how utterly they dehumanized and terrorized the people involved, often create some sort of distance between those who suffered them and the rest of the world, as a method of coping with the situation that is presented to them. In order to talk about slavery, Toni Morrison presented a chronology that takes place mostly removed from slavery, occurring after its end, but showing that the event has irreparably damaged the fabric of its main characters' lives by using Sethe's murder of her own child as a symbol for the horror of slavery.

                The novel opens with an idiosyncratic line: "124 was haunted." The reader has no idea what this means at the beginning of the book, but what slowly begins to emerge as the first chapter is read is that 124 is the house that all of the characters live in, and that it is haunted by the ghost of a dead child. This concept of haunting is important - this ghost ranges from benign acts such as handprints in cakes they make to quite malicious acts such as hitting a dog against a wall so hard that its leg breaks. Sethe's sons leave because of this ghost, and her family is ostracized from the community for reasons unknown at the time, so for the most part she lives in complete isolation with her daughter - she can avoid speaking of or dealing with her memories in slavery.

                However, things become more complicated with the arrival of Paul D, one of the men who lived on the plantation with her. Interestingly enough, the dead infant Beloved manifests herself physically as a young woman almost as soon as Paul D shows up, as if they are both reminders of the past that she has tried to avoid. As the novel progresses, it also becomes increasingly clear that Sethe is the one who killed her own daughter, and that this is the reason for the community's ostracization and the haunting of her house. It is not until Paul D confronts her that the reader learns the reason why: the slave-catcher had come from the plantation to return them, and she was so horrified of returning to slavery that she attempted to kill her children and then herself in order to avoid that fate. Disgusted, the slave-catcher left and her family sans one member stayed relatively uninterrupted in their house until the present.

                With this information, the family's situation becomes much more clear. The community stays clear of her both because they are horrified of the murder and because the murder represents everything horrible about their lives in slavery that they tried to escape. By rejecting her, they are attempting to distance themselves from the lives in slavery that they escaped. However, Sethe does not have this option. After the murder of her child, Sethe is perpetually haunted by the event, and by extension her awful history. Then, she is forced to relive and evaluate these moments with the arrival of Paul D. While he represents moving forward with a new husband, he is also inextricably tied to the past with the events that they both witnessed. Beloved, too, carries both of these sentiments. As a young woman, she carries on a new future as a family-like unit for Sethe, but she is also literally the physical manifestation of the most horrible thing that has ever happened to Sethe. She is caught between her desire to distance herself from slavery and the unignorable facts that she must deal with: she killed her own baby. This is the horror that she must deal with, and this is the horror of slavery that Morrison presents in Beloved.

Killer

Hip-hop, since its inception, has constantly been a topic of fierce debate, within and outside the hip-hop community. Inside, graffiti artists, break-dancers, and especially rappers have been internally fighting over the legitimacy of various styles, rappers, and rhymes since the activities themselves began. Outside, uninitiated and often outraged members of society at large criticize and condemn hip-hop culture with concerns ranging from its legitimacy as a cultural movement and art form to the effect it has on children. Music in particular is a sore point between the two groups, as many adults were and are concerned with the influence hip-hop music has on youth culture. Such debates first began to heat up when NWA's Straight Outta Compton came out, and continued through gangsta rap to the perceived excesses and hedonism of modern rap. The chief concern seems to be "how can a bunch of thugs yelling about killing each other and owning money be art?" Indeed, while those inside the community would bristle at their entire community being cast in this light, few would deny that there is in fact rap music being produced and consumed that espouses these beliefs. When the issue is viewed in a racial light (as it often must be, given its origin and primary creators), opponents of hip-hop and rap generally come from two different camps: white Americans who believe such music is barbaric and harmful, and black Americans who view such music as harmful to the perception of black culture.

                The first group, the so-called moral guardians of society, tends to see rap as a whole as indicative of some sort of social malaise, where corrupt youth make this harmful music and their corruption spreads to other children who listen to it. This viewpoint is very clearly seen (in context of graffiti) by Koch, the mayor of New York, interviewed in Style Wars. He states that he believes that the vandalism in his city (and presumably analogs in music, though gangsta rap had not emerged yet) was not the result of youth with too much time on their hands, but instead youth with no moral compass. He viewed this culture as a scourge, something to be kept out of sight. However, some of the concerns of this group, while often voiced too contemptuously,  are valid concerns that many parents had to face. No one, black or white, rich or poor, wants their children listening to music which advocates violence and misogyny, and indeed many hip-hop songs released have been on this topic. However, the question that everyone has a much harder time answering is, "is it art?"

                The second group, while condemning much of popular hip-hop, often still embraces the notion of hip-hop as art. It is truly a black movement, almost entirely unaffected by white influence in terms of the actual music being produced (aside from a desire to consume, and therefore produce, "real" depictions of hood life). Many classic hip-hop artists, such as Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, or A Tribe Called Quest, released music talking about issues of the day, and seeking to depict a message instead of glorifying violence. While popular music has drifted in and out of such topics, hip-hop discussing difficult topics has persisted near the spotlight to this day. However, the issue that many black community members have with popular hip-hop is that some see it as a sort of minstrelsy. Artists like Gucci Mane slather themselves in gold jewelry and outlandish clothing and women and in some ways seem like caricatures of themselves, and some people believe that this presents the black community in an unflattering light.

                Nobody anywhere has a clear answer on exactly how much of hip-hop is art, and on what makes some rap art and other rap not art. From the outside, listeners endlessly debate on its impact, and inside, figures prominent in hip-hop endlessly debate on whose style is legitimate and whether materialistic rap is in fact art or not. No matter how much they argue about it, hip-hop is here, and it is constantly being served to the ears and eyes of the populace at large. The movement as a whole considers itself art, and whether other people agree or not it will proliferate as long as the people within it continue to view it as the artistic release of choice. 

Dad

                Throughout most of the novel White Boy Shuffle, the Gunnar Kaufman describes the various events in his life with humor and sarcasm, making a joke out of anything and everything. He describes his extended family history as a tradition of cronyism to the white man, giving their saga almost as a comedy or farce with all of the humor he puts into it. However, the jokes stop completely one generation before his own, and for some reason Gunnar refuses to tell jokes about his father, another crony in the form of a criminal profiler for the LAPD, stating that it hits too close to home. This relationship with his father is quite enigmatic, and is expanded upon very rarely, but by closely examining it we can see many of Gunnar's fears and struggles in a more illuminating context.

                Aside from the introduction, the next mention of Gunnar's father occurs in his color vignettes about his early childhood. Most of the pieces are short and somewhat humorous poems about his life and the daily minutiae he experiences, but when he reaches "black," the tone immediately darkens. He heavily implies that he views himself as unwanted and useless, and then segues into a segment implying that his father molested him at some point in his childhood. This segment in between several humorous ones is so somber and intense that it is quite jarring and uncomfortable to read, and yet, as soon as it is over, it is never mentioned again. Gunnar moves on to his next topic with "after my father molested me" and that is the end of his discussion about the topic. This intensity and then return to the norm is  quite important for the development of Gunnar's character and psyche, however.

                Gunnar rarely mentions his father after this incident, but whenever he is mentioned he pointedly calls him phrases like "piece of shit" and tries to avoid him at all costs. In addition, the context of the rest of the vignette about "black" frames much of the internal conflict Gunnar feels. Many of the issues he faces, such as sexual identity and self-worth, take on a very different color when viewed in light of Gunnar's previous molestation. Indeed, his sense of blackness itself seems influenced by this, as his father was the model Kaufman in terms of living on the white man's terms. Gunnar's molestation by a man who had previously forced him to go along with white culture and racism could be part of the cause for the strong distaste in Gunnar's mouth for going along with the institution. The molestation, by being included in the "black" vignette, is implied to be a facet of his own blackness that he is ashamed of, and yet embraces in opposition to the oppressive culture that his father comes from.

                The second significant incident occurring with Gunnar's father occurs during the LA riots. After a humorous if not surreal foray into the streets and stores turns up little to nothing, Gunnar and his gang friends attempt to secure a safe from a building that is left in the nearby parking lot. The crew barely manages to load it into the truck before Gunnar's father, the cop, shows up and beats Gunnar severely. This event too is presented rather starkly, in contrast to the humor of the rest of the scene. A similar dynamic to the molestation can be seen here as well. Gunnar, wanting to belong to the black community of his friends, is beaten by his father, a black man who has completely embraced the white institution. In a way, Gunnar's father is beating him for being everything that he sees as wrong with "blackness." Of course, the reader has grown up with Gunnar, and recognizes this robbery not as a "black" action but as part of Gunnar's frustration and resentment at the white world, which has boiled over by letting Rodney King's killers free.  This contrast between Gunnar's emerging identity and the hate his father feels for Gunnar's rejection of the institution only cements Gunnar's anti-establishment views further, and pushes him further and further away from activities which he sees as affirming his place in white society, such as basketball player and later poet.

                Gunnar's father, interestingly enough, is mentioned at the very end of the novel. Gunnar wrote a poem about his father's suicide, presented strangely comically as literally swallowing the gun and choking on the trigger. The poem states that his father dreamed of equality and civil liberty but then "woke up and had to go to work," implying that his day to day concerns overrode his ideals. This captures Gunnar's father's attitude quite well, and frames him as someone who goes along with the institution because it's convenient and the path of least resistance. Gunnar has in contrast followed a path more resistant than perhaps anyone else, becoming a black messiah while completely rejecting any authority or identity such a title would give him. This desire to escape Kaufmanism, personified in Gunnar's father, presents a strong and compelling case for Gunnar's development as a man.

Reality

When reading most classical, or at least pre-World War II novels, the issue of "what reality is this" is barely worth considering. Most of the previous novels we have read in this class, with the partial exception of Invisible Man, have concretely taken place in the real world. For example, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, we never need to ask ourselves whether what is happening to Janie is realistic, or if Tea Cake could actually acquire a guitar. However, White Boy Shuffle, a much more contemporary novel, regularly raises questions such as these. Right from the beginning, Beatty plays with our suspension of disbelief, stating to the reader that he is a messiah to black people, their unwilling savior. Initially this can be laughed off, but by the end of the book it is quite clear that he is literally their messiah, and they await his every word to make their next move. For this reason, this novel falls squarely into the territory "postmodern novel."

                It is not useful to bandy about such terms without a clear understanding of what exactly they mean first. A postmodern novel, in contrast to a Modernist novel, is usually written after World War II, and is more concerned with the nature of the narrative's reality and its interaction with other realities (such as our own) as opposed to a Modernist novel's concern with the subjectivity of the narrator. In a postmodern novel, events that are wildly implausible are often woven into historical scenes or backgrounds to give a different perspective on the chosen subject. White Boy Shuffle regularly employs all of these techniques.

                One of the most notable scenes in the novel, where the strange world that Gunnar lives in intersects our world, is when the LA riots begin and Gunnar feels a rage awaken inside himself. Driven to action, he flocks to the street to begin looting and causing general mayhem. The chapter is patently ridiculous - at one point he and his friend Nicholas Scoby stop a truck driver and beat him senseless with loaves of bread. However, the real events that occurred, such as store looting, are placed in this distorted lens to glean new observations. For example, Gunnar goes to an electronics store to rob it, but finds inside an orderly line where looters wait one by one to receive their plunder before casually strolling out. At another point, the Korean woman in Gunnar's neighborhood burns her own store down after the neighbors refuse to burn it down because "she's too black."  This scene, while on the surface quite funny, recontextualizes the riots as a reasonable if not somewhat violent frustration within the black community about their continued oppression.

                Many scenes which are on the surface hilarious are re-interpretations of accepted tropes and social stereotypes. Possibly the most memorable is Gunnar Kaufman's resident gang, the Gun Totin' Hooligans. Aside from the strangely self-referential name, the gang refuses to fight with guns, resorting instead to medieval and unorthodox weapons. At one point, in some twisted, Wagner-be-damned interpretation of the Ride of the Valkyries and gang shoot-outs, the group dresses in drag, drives up to a rival gang, flirts with them and then proceeds to fight them with such instruments as a bleach-filled balloon attached to a crossbow bolt. This scene is worth reading multiple times, because it not only is the depth Gunnar's gang throws themselves into this con hilarious ("I bet your panties are wet, bro"), it also gives a completely different take on gang violence than is normally given. In this bizarre alternate world, gang conflict is not just senseless shootings, it is a sense of honor, a brigade like any army would lead. It is quite important to them. The scene's take on masculinity is also worth noting. The gang is willing to dress fully in drag and commit to femininity for some time, flirting with the members of the rival gang before fighting them, and finishing by singing opera with the radio. Gang culture is traditionally seen as hyper-masculine, almost to the point where it's the primary message presented, but this scene instead casts gangsters as a group of friends who like to goof around and have fun, even if it means quite serious violence.

                There are many, many more examples of the strange reality that Gunnar Kaufman inhabits, but the message to take from the overall theme of differing reality is that Beatty is attempting to re-interpet reality by presenting a reality that is stranger than our own. By regularly making us ask, "is this really happening? Could this really happen?" he is forcing us to examine the event in our own lives as well. Basketball culture, gang life, and what it means to be black are all warped so deeply in this book that we have to ask at some point, "well, what does it mean that Gunnar is preternaturally gifted at basketball and that even though he is literally the black messiah all he wants to do is die?" Only in the answer to these questions can we begin to understand the reality in White Boy Shuffle, and by extension our own reality.

Romance

Zora Neale Hurston is almost certainly a very well-read author. Her seminal work, Their Eyes Were Watching God breaks new ground in its subject matter and location, but it uses themes and modes common to many previous canon works. One prime example of this is the somewhat Romantic theme of true love in a marriage as opposed to marriage by necessity. Janie Starks marries a man at the very young age of 16, and due to the awakening of the desire for true passion within her, is unhappy in her marriage. She feels that romance and a man she loves is vital for a marriage, while her grandmother believes that stability and safety is the most important part of a marriage. Based on this ideological difference, Janie runs away from her husband and goes through the events depicted in the novel. Yet for some reason, even though such themes are commonly accepted as standard fare for a Romantic novel, I have never liked Romantic novels like this, and for the same reason I so far dislike Their Eyes Were Watching God.

My distaste for novels like this began in Sophomore English. The broad subject was British literature, and of course the Romantic era covered a large part of British literature, so we read several books from this time. Some of them, such as Frankenstein, were alright, and I read these with some difficulty but got through them. However, others, such as Wuthering Heights, were just not to my liking at all. I am pretty good at struggling through books that I don’t like when I need to, but this book just stood like a brick wall before me. Heathcliff and Catherine’s eternal love was supposed to be the driving force of the whole book, but it never seemed important to me, and the novel just seemed so small. There was so little happening, so little in the characters that I could identify with, that I just couldn’t finish the book. Maybe I am not particularly romantic, but the theme of lost love was not enough for me to work with.

                Their Eyes Were Watching God of course takes a different perspective on this theme. Janie does not simply want to be with a man and exist as his wife; she wants to be in true love, but she realizes that this requires personal freedom on her part and she doesn’t want to be subservient to a man. However, the novel is still in many ways about love, in a somewhat Romantic light, and I have a lot of trouble identifying with this. Maybe my scope of reading is a little limited, but something about this theme seems so limited itself, compared to the grandeur of a book like Invisible Man. A novel about how each person fits into society (or doesn’t) that takes its protagonist through a variety of ridiculous situations and that is wry in the levels of metaphor that implies just seems more interesting to me. I just don’t connect with the quest for love as a theme in a novel

Freedom

Many people see Their Eyes Were Watching God as one of the seminal works in African-American literature. Given Hurston's relentless dedication to depicting Southern black life in rural communities, this is a reasonable light to view the book in. However, others make the case that this novel is primarily a racial novel, and this a point that I would have to dispute. While there are certainly racial elements of Their Eyes Were Watching God, the main character is not constantly seeking to understand her life in the context of race. Indeed, the topic of race and racism is not brought up often at all, and only in passing. One modern reading of the novel that does align with Janie's struggles, though, is a feminist context. Janie is perpetually in a struggle between her desire to find "true love" and her desire to remain independent and not be subjugated by any man she is with. Every large event that Janie experiences ties into this quest to be a free woman, and for this reason, I believe that Their Eyes Were Watching God is one of the first feminist novels.

                The first indication that this novel gives us about its gender themes is in the opening passage. The narrator of the novel begins with a broad statement about men and women. Men are constantly looking for boats on the horizon, seeking their destiny afar and by travel and experience. Women, meanwhile, stay at home and watch men leave. With this statement, the narrator is affirming rather poetically traditional gender roles. Men are adventurers, explorers, and they are the ones doing all the action. Women simply wait. However, this idea is almost instantly subverted by the introduction of the protagonist, Janie Starks. She is introduced as attractive, yet scorned by many in the community for having a relationship with a younger man. She has mud-caked overalls, and she has returned from hard work in the Everglades. This is clearly not a woman anything like the gender divide specified in the opening paragraph.

                However, when the narrator shows us the chronological beginning of the story, with Janie as a young girl, she is much different than the character shown in the first chapter. She simply is a young teenager, just hit puberty, who instantly becomes enamored with the idea of true love, and wants to have a relationship with a man that will be idealized, romantic, and will knock her off of her feet. Her grandmother, her guardian, instantly bucks at this when she sees Janie kissing a boy over the fence. In her mind, Janie should not be concerned with true love, because she grew up in slavery, and her idea of the perfect life for her granddaughter was a stable husband, who could provide for her. Janie (and many readers) disagree strongly with her idea of freedom as a providing husband, but in some ways this lays the background for Janie's development into a woman. Janie's grandmother is clearly an independent woman, having escaped slavery and raised Janie's mother on the run. Their disagreement on true love is indicative of the further freedom Hurston believes a woman needs, i.e. the ability to love who she wants to love and not just the man who can give her a house, but Janie arguably would not have been able to run away and seek her fate at all had she not had a grandmother as a role model who did a somewhat similar thing: escaping a situation that she believed prevented her freedom.

                When Janie left her first husband, a humble, homely farmer with a respectable sixty-acre plot, she left him for a smooth-talking man passing through town, and she ended up still not being free. However, time passed, and she began to understand more exactly what it was that she wanted. As a sixteen-year-old, she frankly had almost no idea of what love was, other than that her marriage had none. It took years of marriage to a man almost the polar opposite of her first husband for her to realize what was missing from both marriages: her agency to do things. In the first marriage, she was required to work the land with her husband to survive. This was not out of the ordinary for a farmer's wife, and the requests he was making were not unreasonable, but his sweet-talking ended quickly and she was left with a man who she didn't love that made her work hard. She felt like she had no freedom. In contrast, her second husband pampered and wooed her, but it soon became apparent that she was supposed to exist as his wife, not as a human being. She wasn't allowed to talk to the people or even let her hair down, and she had no agency in this relationship either. When her husband eventually died (after twenty years) she knew that all she wanted was agency. She was going to be beholden to no man.

                This idea, while easy to grasp now, was somewhat radical in Hurston's time. Feminism was not a household word, and a woman free to enter relationships with multiple men and seek her own destiny was not a woman that society would readily accept. However, strangely enough, much of the concern about the novel's feminism was almost totally overshadowed by the novel's purported racial content. Richard Wright was so furious about the novel's "shameful" depiction of the modern black person that the novel failed in all aspects in his eyes. Because the novel was written by a black woman, about black people, critics analyzed the novel almost entirely in a racial context and missed the budding sense of female identity and self-determination. These themes, not the racial themes so commonly touted in Their Eyes Were Watching God, are the themes that stick.