Ghosts and Haunting in Beloved and the Korean Diaspora

Introduction: Haunting as a Literary Framework

In both Beloved by Toni Morrison and Grace Cho's Haunting the Korean Diaspora, the characters are haunted by past memories. Both authors invite readers into a twilight-zone landscape that is hidden but not completely gone — deliberately buried, yet not forgotten by the protagonists. In their lives, ghosts from a horrible past haunt the ethnic landscape of the present.

This essay compares and contrasts the ways in which questions of ghosting and haunting are central to both works. The central contention is that these hauntings allow the reader to personalize the characters and care for them, since readers can relate to suffering humanity in a horror landscape. This personalization of suffering allows the reader to enter into the mind of the oppressed and transcend the racialized, gendered, and sexualized forces of violence, loss, disappearance, memory, forgetfulness, and social death. Readers can thereby directly care for and connect with the protagonists on a personal level that would otherwise not be possible.

Repressed Memory and Fragmented Identity in Beloved

Because of the horrible and painful nature of the past experiences of slavery, almost all enslaved people possess deeply repressed memories. While forgetfulness can be a blessing, such repression and alienation from the past further causes a fragmentation of the self and a loss of true identity. In Beloved, Sethe, Paul D, and Denver all experience such alienation, and their losses of self can only be remedied by a psychological acceptance of the past and the memories of their original status. Morrison attempts to open her characters up to these repressed memories and ultimately brings about their cathartic reconstitution as they discover their new selves.

Slavery as an institution has a profound effect upon the individual. It splits a person into fragmented figures of sub-identity. These sub-identities consist of painful memories and unspeakable past atrocities that are collectively denied and kept at bay so that the person does not completely lose their sanity. To heal and humanize oneself, these memories must be reconstituted in recognizable language and images — first on an individual level, and then systematically.

Sethe, Paul D, and Baby Suggs all fall short of such a realization and are unable to fully remake themselves as free people. For them, the self is located in words as defined by others — in this case, by their former masters. The power to overcome this old dependence lies in language itself, or more precisely, in a change of terminology. The challenge for the former slaves is to take on a new language of freedom; once the terminology changes, so does the person's identity.

All of the characters in Beloved face the challenge of an unmade self composed of flashbacks and defined by language and perception. The obstacle that prevents their complete remaking is a desire for a past that is uncomplicated — they fear what the memories will do to them. This alienation is captured in the haunting passage: "Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name…remembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her…how can they call her if they don't know her name" (Morrison 274).

The Yanggongju and the Erasure of Korean Women's Identity

In Beloved, the protagonists experience emotions similar to those depicted in Cho's book. At the center of Cho's text is the ghostly and menacing figure of the yanggongju. She defines this term as "literally meaning 'Western princess,' broadly refers to a Korean woman who has sexual relations with Americans; is most often used pejoratively to refer to a woman who is a prostitute for the U.S. Military" (Cho 3). Cho sees this figure as part of what she calls the erasure of identity for women from Korean society.

For decades, Korea's population was alienated from both its indigenous language and culture under Japanese colonial rule. One must also factor in the loss of autonomy under U.S. military domination since 1945, the destruction of the peninsula and its people during the Korean War, and the absence of a decisive end to the conflict. Even after the war, American influence bore down heavily on Korea as a whole, and on Korean women in particular, who have carried its wounds and scars even more acutely than men.

Cho traces the experiences and troubles of the yanggongju across the history of Korea in order to document the stories of women who were forced into slavery as comfort women during the war and who, by economic necessity, ended up turning to the Americans. She calls this emotional destruction the "fabric of erasure" and undertakes this examination to exorcise the ghost from the Korean national consciousness and from the consciousness of women (Cho 1). The psychological trauma suffered by the comfort women is considerable, and Cho adapts the concept of the crypt — developed by Holocaust scholars Maria Torok and Nicholas Abraham — to explore these issues across generations of the Korean consciousness. Even "Korean wives who led lives of isolation and were the subject of neighborhood gossip" carry this burden (Cho 3). Like the children of Jewish Holocaust survivors, Koreans living in America who were not alive during the Korean War are still haunted by the secretive and furtive nature of that conflict — particularly through the Nosferatu-like quality of the yanggongju, feeding as it does on the living (Cho 30).

Conclusion: Healing Through Narrative and Exorcising the Past

Psychological therapists will confirm that creating a new identity requires confronting our buried pasts. In many forms of therapy, past horrors are examined in order to break the bonds with the past and to learn new, more positive behaviors. These buried and unresolved pasts must be addressed both on an individual and on a communal basis. In both books, the authors illustrate the pitfalls of failing to do this, as well as examples of individuals and communities that are better and happier for having done so.

These communities can heal and grow from the experience, remaking and empowering themselves as they reclaim ownership from their oppressors in a cathartic process that ends only when the bonds and chains are broken. Those chains took many years to establish and require many years — and many retellings — to fully exorcise the ghosts from the collective consciousness of the women who were their victims.

Works Cited

Cho, Grace M. Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Print.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York, NY: Plume, 1998. Print.