So.....What was Beloved?

First things first, Rest in Power Toni Morrison.

Second things second, I really don't like most slave movies. I already told y'all in my MA review that I generally don't like movies that don't have a balanced view of Black women. I do like Beloved, but I like it in the way I like Requiem for a Dream. I've seen it, and I think it is good, and I recommend it to people. But, it's not really something I feel like I can watch over and over again.

Non-Consequentially, I started re-reading Beloved because I had a vague idea for a short story.  An older woman meets an younger woman soon after the death of her baby girl. The older woman is convinced that it is her daughter who died from like, "SIDS". The older woman stalks and eventually kills the younger woman, "out of grief". She digs up her daughter's grave, and her little baby bones are still there. The younger woman was not her daughter,  just a woman she thought her daughter would look like if she was alive. The cops come, and she assumes it's for the murder of the woman. It's actually for the murder of her daughter.

But then I was like, isn't that like....A modern day Beloved? I couldn't remember if Beloved (the character) actually ever said she was any kind of a revenant. When I first read Beloved, I had not seen the movie yet. So I always kind of thought in the back of my head that Beloved could have just been some chick. I personally feel that ghosts cannot get pregnant, but that is up to interpretation, I guess.  She could have been a ghost, an alien, an emotional succubus, a soucriant, or even a zombie....The novel never said. She could have been the African American version of The Babadook.
 Maybe she was some chick, that ended up getting possessed by Beloved when the girl just happened to be in the area. There is like a ~subplot~ that includes a missing woman.
 Some people might find that the fact that we as reader don't know exhausting. The book is very, very long. American Literature happens to be my favorite genre and even I struggled with finishing this book.  I am still working on falling back in love with reading after the internet destroyed it. I need dopamine a little bit more quickly these days lol.
I do like that Morrison never tells us what Beloved was. I think that anyone's guess is the correct guess. I want to say it's like whatever was in the box at the end of Seven. It doesn't really matter, but it's important enough to have an impact.

I personally feel that "Beloved" was a demonic entity that fed off of negative emotions.  It was always in 124. I'm not going to argue about Sethe's choice to kill Beloved to save her from slavery. Mostly because I have never seen or read anyone drag Sophie from Sophie's Choice. I'll leave it at that. But, I want to reference another movie, because I think that the two have the same type of thing going on.  In the Ju-on/The Grudge, an violent entity is created when someone is killed in a rage or a sorrow.

Once, I tried to put a basketball in the hoop and I totally missed and the ball knocked Archer over. That was three years ago and I still feel really, really bad. And it wasn't something that happened on purpose. I can imagine that Sethe, felt GREAT sorrow when she deliberate killed her baby.
I don't think the Beloved was necessarily the ghost of the baby, but the spirit of that event manifesting physically. I could not imagine a greater torture than seeing the child I killed all grown up. I would spend the rest of my existence thinking about what could have been if the child did not die. That is much worse than a zombie or a poltergeist. I know that Onryo is a concept that is strictly Japanese. But y'all won't shut the f*ck up about vibes or whatever, and I know that after a murder that the vibes are permanently off in a place. That's why houses where homicides have occurred are often cheaper.
For all we know, there could have been a West African version of an Onryo that has been lost to history. For ADOS (plz tell me there is a better way to word that), a lot of our "culture" is dependent on oral tradition. I doubt people wanted to talk about vengeful ghosts and stuff like that. Especially when they have to deal with the IRL horror of the chattel slave system. 

I am kind of over all of these remakes, but I think Beloved would benefit from a remake. The movie is not a bad movie. I actually think that Thandie Newton should have been nominated for a Golden Globe for her acting as Beloved. I finally got around to watching Euphoria, and I think that maybe, just maybe, Zendaya Coleman would play a good Beloved. I think Rue is a ghost btw.

Anyway, I actually don't like thinking about Beloved too much. It's based on a true story and it makes me sad. It actually makes me think about what may happen to pregnant women or very young babies that get detained and sent to those detainment centers. I am under the impression a lot of children have gone missing.
Also, it really bothers me that experts are saying that children being separated from their mothers will give them trauma that may be impossible to recover from. Like, I don't know. I just don't know some people sleep at night.   Women are still being mistreated to this day and I'm just so tired.  I'll stick to my daydreams, thank you very much.