Living After, and Before, the End of the World: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth

Abstract

To live and write after Toni Morrison is to by necessity live and write in deep contemplation about endings and aftermaths and – if we are to learn from the ways that Morrison’s novels play seriously with time such that singular endings often refuse closure and instead fracture into myriad timelines moving in multiple directions and interrupting the reader’s expectations of a conclusive ending to a logical progression – beginnings. It is in this spirit that I first began the thinking that takes shape in this essay. In fall 2019 (the first semester after Morrison’s passing), I taught Beloved in “Intro to Literary Analysis,” and in spring 2020 I taught N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season in “Afrofuturism.” As a literary scholar and a prison abolitionist, I am obsessed with endings – of narratives, of the carceral state. But the experience of teaching these two novels that I love during an academic year which presented a guaranteed ending to my own nonrenewable contingent faculty contract, which then proceeded to become a year of multiple endings as in-person classes were nixed before the end of the spring semester by the COVID-19 pandemic, primed me to recognize echoes of Morrison’s invocation of the “four horsemen” in Jemisin’s elaboration of apocalypse as “a relative thing.” I want to ask, what does it mean that for some of the characters in Beloved, the world ended that day that the four horsemen came into Baby Suggs’s yard, even as for Schoolteacher and the world that sustains his dominance life moves on? And not only does the