Toni Morrison's dedication to the "Sixty million or more" in Beloved -- intentionally insensitive to the Holocaust?
Last week Tumblr blogger stillawannablessedbe linked to this blog post by Dr. D.G. Myers, a critic and literary historian at Texas A&M. Myers suggests that Toni Morrison’s opening dedication of her acclaimed novel Beloved to the “sixty million or more” who died as a result of slavery practices is a pointed exaggeration — one that “appears to suggest that the toll of the slave trade was ten times greater than the Nazi Holocaust.”
There is something that strikes me as profoundly disingenuous about this sentence, and it is this: “appears to suggest.” Myers, in both this and in an an earlier post about how Beloved is the most overrated novel ever (ever!), indicates that Toni Morrison, celebrated author, purposely, intentionally distorted figures of slavery casualties in order to minimize the significance of the Holocaust.
But Myers never owns this statement. He raises and then dodges the question of how Morrison happened upon the “sixty million” figure, citing a study published in 1996, almost ten years after Beloved was released. He then, in a kind of rhetorical feint to direct attention away from the serious accusation he doesn’t want to make openly, reiterates, again with citations, the well-known casualty figure of the Nazi Holocaust: six million Jews were murdered. But, curiously, after this, he does not explore how or why Morrison arrived at what he believes is an exorbitant and inaccurate figure.
But perhaps the strangest aspect of his post is that he, a white male academic critiquing the masterwork of an African-American woman — one that is not only about our nation’s legacy of slavery, but about the collective silence and silencing involved in what Morrison calls our “national amnesia” — never appeals to Morrison’s actual words. Because, yes, Toni Morrison has actually gone on the record about this…about twenty years ago.
TIME magazine directly asked Morrison about the “sixty million” figure in 1989:
Q. Beloved is dedicated to the 60 million who died as a result of slavery. A staggering number — is this proved historically?
A. Some historians told me 200 million died. The smallest number I got from anybody was 60 million. There were travel accounts of people who were in the Congo — that’s a wide river — saying, ”We could not get the boat through the river, it was choked with bodies.” That’s like a logjam. A lot of people died. Half of them died in those ships.
So we are faced with a few possibilities: 1) Toni Morrison was deceived or received inaccurate facts; 2) Newer, more conservative estimates have emerged in the nine or ten years between Beloved’s publication and the study Myers cites; or 3) Toni Morrison is a liar. It is this last that Myers means to say but can’t quite seem to squeak out. He instead says:
But in dedicating her novel to “Sixty Million or more,” Toni Morrison was demonstrably not interested in being “accurate and probably sparing.”
…
Instead, she appropriated the Jewish commonplace of six million and trumped it by a factor of ten.
He makes no reference to Morrison’s statement in TIME. He says, rather weakly in my opinion, that Morrison was “demonstrably not interested” in accuracy. “Demonstrably not interested” is not quite the same as calling someone a liar, is it? It’s hedging. You mean to say, Dr. Myers, that you do not admit the possibility that Morrison could’ve been deceived, or that historians gave her inaccurate figures, or that perhaps the study from 1996 contained data that weren’t available to Morrison in 1987. Or even perhaps, that your figures might be inexact. “Demonstrably not interested” gives Myers an intellectual, jargon-y way of avoiding the messy need to call Morrison what he believes she is: a nasty little deceiver.
But again — and I do believe it is out of a certain cravenness than out of desire to be “measured” in his criticism — he will not and does not simply say “Toni Morrison is a liar, who, in spite of the things she has said, in a well-documented interview available on this here intertube, trumped up this ‘sixty million’ figure to minimize the Nazi slaughter of six million Jews.”
Now, I’m familiar with Toni Morrison’s entire oeuvre. I’ve read every single one of her books. But I do not know Toni Morrison. We are not pals. I cannot speak to her intentions and to do so would be an act of hubristic fuckery that even my considerable ego couldn’t tolerate. So, judging by Toni Morrison’s own words, quoted in the TIME interview above, and by her body of work — which expresses the tension and complexity and ambiguity of black-white interaction but never betrayed any demonstrable (!) desire to minimize the Holocaust — I can’t reasonably conclude that “six times ten equals sixty” = “Toni Morrison doesn’t give a shit about the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis.”
And I would also like here to point out that, in his post lamenting the academic tongue-bathing Beloved regularly receives, Myers uses this charming analogy to characterize Morrison’s popularity in spite of her “mediocrity”:
To adapt something that Thoreau once said: the head monkey in Cambridge puts on his hat, and all the little monkeys follow suit.
Just as the six million number is widely-known, well-known enough that Myers believes (but doesn’t sack up enough to say) that Morrison is intentionally gaming the Olympics of Suffering, “monkey” is a well-known racial slur for an African-American. ” Now, when a white male academic is strenuously criticizing an African-American author, you would think he would take care to avoid using the word “monkey.” Someone might perhaps, based on nothing but context and the racial implications of that word, decide that Myers is racist. But: I do not know D.G. Myers. We are not pals. I cannot speak to his intentions and to do so…well, you see where this is going. Far more likely is that Myers, in adapting Thoreau, is merely being a bit insensitive, wearing his Oblivious White Dude Bifocals without actually fully considering what he is writing. I am willing to grant him the benefit of the doubt, a bit of generosity he does not, for reasons that baffle me, extend to Toni Morrison.
