The beautiful chokecherry tree - why the deepest pain is unspeakable?（by Qiubai Jiang）

The beautiful chokecherry tree - why the deepest pain is unspeakable?

（by Qiubai Jiang）

 "Chokecherry tree" is what Sethe heard from the white girl Amy who rescued her. As soon as Amy saw Sethe’s back, she cried out, then didn't make a sound for half a day, and said:

“It’s a tree, Lu. A Chokecherry tree. See, here’s the trunk—it’s red and split wide open, full of sap, and this here’s the parting for the branches. You got a mighty lot of branches. Leaves, too, look like, and dern if these ain’t blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms, just as white. Your back got a whole tree on it. In bloom.”

It seems to be a beautiful picture engraved on Sethe’sback, but from Amy, we know that the "white cherry blossom" refers to the septic wound. Perhaps Amy, in order to comfort the fleeing Sethe, intentionally embellished the wound to alleviate her physical pain. It is puzzling that Sethe accepts Amy's words and remembers the "tree" on her back forever, and the "chokecherry tree" becomes an important metaphor in the text with a specific symbolic meaning.

 

The "chokecherry tree" is a huge scar left on Sethe's back when she escaped. What is the function of this imagery in the novel?

 

For Sethe, the "chokecherry tree" represents her physical trauma and a reminder of that period of her life. But the physical wounds are visible and partially recoverable, and the pain that can be described is not the greatest pain - because the physical pain has disappeared in time - but the deeper pain seems to be unspeakable here. The novel's narrative technique here suggests this point in particular: the cruel scars cannot be directly spoken, but only described by means of something else. Language seems to play a very important and special role in memory. This is also shown in the name of "sweet home" from which Sethe escaped - a place full of pain for the slaves, but marked as "sweet". How does this narrative or memory come about? Why are certain memories, especially painful ones, presented in a particular way in language? Firstly, it is unable to be a direct, plain description, and secondly, it is instead referred to and recorded by something beautiful. This precisely does’tglorify or deny pains, but to remember them in a deeper way. When the pains have become part of your destiny and identity, you seem to have to face a cruel situation: on the one hand, you cannot forget them, because they have become part of your soul and forgetting them means denying your self-existence; on the other hand, such a memory is a pain that beyonds time and you do not want to repeat these feelings at any time and place. So in a crippled life, pain becomes a inescapable, and living is harder than dying. When pain appears as such beyond the bearing capacity of the human soul and is left in memory, the feeling and energy it carries might go beyond the boundary of what human reason can describe - in other words beyond language. It is necessarily indescribable, or rather, no description in words can reach its actual condition. So the deepest pain is inevitably unspeakable, but if it has to be said, we seem to be only on the other side of it and speak out in some indirect ways.

Comments

  1. Elena TalamanteMay 12, 2021 at 8:59 PM

    As an additional thought on the tree being on her back and the reminder it serves. It is something behind her, something she cannot see, but it is ever present in her memory. It has strong significance for Paul D when he sees it. Her pain is on display for him, he gets a kind of first hand experience of it, even as she thinks it has passed over and borne fruit. I agree with you that the pain is a part of her identity and destiny, and I wonder about the distance that the mind puts between what is in its direct line of vision and what is behind us but still a part of us.

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  2. Krishnan VenkateshMay 13, 2021 at 10:35 AM

    Great questions, Mr. Jiang, and eloquently expressed. What kinds of pain would be unspeakable, and why would they be unspeakable? I can imagine a level of constant terror that would result in shutting down and blanking out, also the blanking out of the "moral horror" of deeds committed by ourselves on other people, so that we wouldn't want to see let alone acknowledge our deeds. What would be the pain of the unspeakable in the case of slavery? -- and is it different for Paul D and Sethe? Ms. Talamante, I agree with you. If we "put it behind us" and can't see it, in what way does it become "part of our identity"? -- in contrast, say, to the kind of person who consciously feeds their grievances and clings to them.

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