It was a portal into Sharpe’s methodology. What I was witnessing, I later realized, was more than a lecture. The first and final words of the book were not merely an epitaph on a grave: They were instructions for living. “Be loved.” The name of the book, Sharpe told the class, is “an injunction, a command, a wish, a plea, a lamentation.” To love the self, to believe the self worthy of love and to let that love radiate out and fill up others around you.Ī thick silence settled over the classroom as the students absorbed the force of the revelation. She held the book aloft and read the title aloud: “Beloved.” She paused and reframed the word for us.

One of those is infanticide another, Sharpe shared with the class, is love. For Sharpe, “Beloved” is rich in techniques for refusing the logic of slavery. “Freeing yourself was one thing,” Morrison writes, “but claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” The work of embodiment, belonging and rest become the central themes for the characters and, by extension, the readers. The book holds horrors, but it also raises questions about the beginning of freedom time. “Beloved,” at its core, is a story of multiple hauntings: The remnants of trauma left in those forced to be property, the fury of a petulant baby-spirit that seems to come back from the dead to find the mother who killed her rather than let her be taken into enslavement. It “completely rewired how one could write and think about slavery.” “I’ve been thinking about this book for a long time,” Sharpe told the class. Morrison’s fifth novel, in contrast, focuses on the interiority of the enslaved and formerly enslaved, placing the textures of their lives at the center of the story. Historically, narratives about slavery prioritized white readers, displaying atrocities to rouse support for abolition. The book was fat with stickie notes and tabs, its pages so marked up with highlights, exclamations, notes and annotations that it resembled a devotional. She smoothed a hand over the well-worn cover.

Sharpe, who is 57, sat poised in a black tunic over black pants and boots, her red lips immaculate. Sharpe pulled out her copy, which she has had for more than 30 years and keeps carefully sheathed in protective plastic.

No one in attendance had read the book before. That week they were discussing “Beloved,” by Toni Morrison. They trickled in, arranging themselves around the classroom. Campus felt sleepy, blanketed in snow from a recent storm. Christina Sharpe was waiting for her students to arrive. On a recent Monday afternoon at York University in Toronto, Dr.

Dressed for Death by Alexa Sharpe