The ball of black words: dance as ritual performance in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Abstract

Beloved, the most well-known novel by African-American writer Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize of Literature in 1993, fictionally (re)creates a black ritual dance, supervised by Baby Suggs, a shaman and ex-slave. In this brief essay, I intend to: a) emphasize the performative nature of that ceremony and its general objectives; b) describe and analyze how Morrison, by using several narrative and stylistic strategies, transcribes that performance, comparing the steps of the dance to the steps of the text; c) show that this literary text is, afterwards, a mimesis of another mimesis — the dance itself — which imitates a spiritual reality. In order to do so, I resort to the novel Beloved; to essays by specialists in the Morrisonian literary production; to studies in ceremonial dances, by reputed anthropologists and, naturally, to my personal opinion. Hopefully, from this study will result a better understanding of the mechanisms of creation; of the exercise of two different languages, and of the performative nature of both arts.