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August 5 is the anniversary of Toni Morrison’s death.

The interstate from Columbus to Lorain, Ohio, carries the troubled weight of the United States’ history. The grey flatlands of America rolled past my bus window. My thoughts were constantly hovering about the state-sanctioned project of engineering “human forgetfulness.” A few months ago in India, I learned about the yearlong statewide commemoration of the late Nobel laureate Toni Morrison’s Beloved, titled Ohio Celebrates Toni Morrison. Touring the length and breadth of Ohio, I spoke with locals and listened to people discussing the importance of Morrison’s books as living history rather than mere literary works. With this, a paradoxical truth was unveiled: local institutions in the district were actively censoring and banning Beloved and The Bluest Eye from library shelves, treating their pages as contraband. 

This fracture in the US idea of democracy seems to be a desperate campaign to sanitise its long history of enforced slavery and racism. Grassroots movements like ‘Right to Read Ohio’ and ‘Authors Against Book Bans’ are actively challenging it. These are ordinary citizens who understand the power of literature to heal the collective trauma of racism. Witnessing this tug-of-war firsthand, I realised that the personal is never merely political; it goes beyond that. Geography, too, is a comfortable illusion; as an Indian, I witnessed these grassroots common people fighting their own battles to reclaim their past. I did not feel like a detached foreigner but felt a sharp resonance with what was happening in my home country. 

Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’.

To better understand the psychological truths in Morrison’s works, I needed to travel south to Cincinnati. On the banks of the Ohio River, one can see the grey, churning water separating Cincinnati from the hills of Kentucky. Going back to the nineteenth century, the Ohio River was a terrifying borderline. To cross it from the slave-owning South into the free North was to leap from death into the fragile promise of human existence. Precisely across this frozen expanse of water, Margaret Garner, the real-life enslaved woman who inspired Morrison’s novel, Beloved, fled in the brutal winter of 1856. To recall the incident from the book, the slave catchers surround Garner in a cabin in Cincinnati. She chose to kill her own two-year-old daughter. The........

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