By Natalie Jarrett
My project is derived from Toni Morrison’s seminal classic, Beloved. Set in post-emancipation era America, the tragic novel tells the story of Sethe, a formerly enslaved African-American woman who is haunted (both literally and figuratively) by her past. The novel is an example of magical realism, a literary genre wherein a realistic setting or historical period is intermixed with elements of magic and fantasy. The majority of the novel jumps between the present narrative and the characters’ memories of the past told in a 3rd person perspective. However towards the middle, the three main characters, Sethe and her daughter’s Beloved and Denver, have a series of 1st person stream of conscious monologues that represent the characters’s complex relationship to one another. In my project I took fragments of those monologues, color-coded the fragments by the character who uttered them, and enabled the user to alter/change each text fragment via different interactions.
The original novel was based on the true story of Margaret Garner. Garner was an enslaved woman who escaped from slavery in 1856, but was caught and apprehended by US Marshals under the Fugitive Slave Act; upon being caught, she murdered her daughter, rather than see her return to slavery. In Beloved, Morrison seeks to unpack the struggle of enslaved black women to reclaim their humanity amidst impossible circumstances. Sethe is not only haunted by the ghost of Beloved, the daughter she killed, but also by the trauma of her past. I was inspired to use Beloved for this project after reading “Venus in Two Acts.” I found Hartman’s discussion of how to understand history despite a biased and incomplete historical record to be relevant to Morrison’s approach. In Beloved, both the magical elements and the writing style function to “embody life in words and at the same time respect what we cannot know” (Hartman, 3); we may never know how someone like Sethe might have grappled with the horrors of enslavement simply because there are limited records directly from the source, but Morrison’s fantastical fiction offers us a possible way in. The monologue section, in particular, is compelling because fills the “silence in the archive” (Hartman, 3) as an ecstatic and completely imaginary rendering of the characters’ emotional landscapes.
The original monologues are written with the repeated refrain “She is mine.” Given the historical context, the line can be interpreted as the women’s desire to claim ownership over their bodies and one another. The section consists of three monologues in each characters separate voice, before a fourth passage where all the voices become ‘one.’ However, even the separate monologues use repeated phrases and verbiage across the voices, including the main refrain “She is Mine.” I sought to visually convey how the characters are “melding” into one another by literally combining the different fragments. Within each text block, the user can interact with the text to combine or reveal different voices, thus visually rendering the voices as one. Each series of changes will result in a slightly different overall text, but will hopefully maintain the emotional core. By interacting with my project, I hope a user experiences the continuity and intimacy between these characters. Although my project does not use text that refers to very specific details about the novel nor about slavery more broadly, I hope that the universal and perennial truths it expresses still resonates with the user.
https://editor.p5js.org/carvedtree/full/mLfJ_VK0l
In terms of specific design choices, I opted for a long black canvas to give the project a solemn, memorial-like feel. Sethe’s voice is green to represent her proximity to greenery, nature, and trees; Denver’s voice is blue to represent the circumstances of her birth (at the confluence of two rivers); Beloved’s voice is white to represent her innocence and status as a ghost; the final text is teal to represent a combination of all the colors and thus a combination of all of their voices. I liked using the ‘hovering’ effect throughout the project to evoke the sense of searching for the ‘unsearchable,’ mirroring the mystical way in which the characters have searched/found one another.
For the first half, The text blocks appear in a rectangular spiral shape to represent the continuity across the different voices and generations. When the user hovers over the top text, they will see an acknowledgement for the original text. When the user hovers around each text block, instructions appear which share the keyboard action they should take to change the text. The right and left arrows move the top text block, the delete, return, and shift keys move the bottom sentence, the ‘s’, ‘b’, and ‘d’ keys (a reference to Sethe, Beloved, and Denver) move the right text block, and the ‘1’, ‘2’, and ‘4’ keys (a reference to the house address in the novel, 124 Bluestone Road) move the left text block.
Next, there is “scroll” text prompting the scroll down the page after which they are brought to a series of question and answers that were uttered amongst the characters. As they scroll down one of the most impactful questions/answers changes from the question “You rememory me?” to the answer “I rememory you.” They are able to see the other question and answers by hovering over the blocks of text. I hope that this section allows the user to experience the dialogue between the characters. Finally, there is a final pair of text “You are mine” and “I am yours” which the user can alternately highlight and deemphasize by clicking on each block of text.
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