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“What You Call Yourself?”: Nothingness, Naming, 
Abjection, and Queer Failure in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

by Amelia Speight

 As her former master drives her to a purchased 
freedom in the North, “Jenny,” the matriarch of a 
family fractured by slavery, pauses to ask him, “‘Mr. 
Garner,’ she said, ‘why you all call me Jenny?’ ‘’Cause 
that what’s on your sales ticket, gal. Ain’t that your 
name? What you call yourself?’ ‘Nothing,’ she said, 
‘I don’t call myself nothing’” (Morrison 167-68). 
Until this moment “Jenny” has had no cause to 
name herself, even to herself. The dehumanization 
of slavery erased her individual existence, which is 
just one of the acts of violence that Toni Morrison 
forces her audience to face in her novel Beloved. In 
this paper, I use the work of Kimberly Benston and 
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to contextualize black and 
queer conceptions of naming (and the unnamed). I 
then employ queer of color scholar Darieck Scott’s 
work in Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, 
and Sexuality in the African American Literary 
Imagination to examine specifically how two self-
named characters, “Jenny” (who names herself Baby 
Suggs) and Stamp Paid, embrace nothingness and 
abjection and how that operates in Beloved. Finally, 
I perform a close reading of these characters’ names 
and lives, using Jack Halberstam’s “The Queer Art 
of Failure” to draw out the queerness, failure, and 
abjection circling in their stories. Their chosen 
names “fail” in many ways, leading me to questions 
about how Baby Suggs and Stamp Paid resist a 
dominant narrative and instead find power in, as 
Jack Halberstam would say, “the refusal of legibility, 
and an art of unbecoming” (Halberstam 88). 
 There is an obvious historical importance to 
African-American self-naming, as many slaves were 
given their slave-owner’s surname and arbitrarily 
assigned first names by those slave-owners. In “‘I 
Yam What I Am’: Naming and Unnaming in Afro-
American Literature,” Kimberly Benston writes about 
the violence of naming the Other. “Language,” he 
writes, “that fundamental act of organizing the mind’s 
encounter with an experienced world—is propelled 
by a rhythm of naming: It is the means by which the 

mind takes possession of the named, at once fixing 
the named as irreversibly Other and representing 
it in crystalized isolation from all conditions of 
externality” (Benston 3). Even in Beloved, there is a 
moment where the master beats the slave to remind 
him “that definitions belonged to the definers—not 
the defined” (Morrison 225). Benston argues that 
naming others, as the master enforces here, is a form 
of possession and colonization, but what happens 
when one names one’s self? The rest of Benston’s piece 
grapples with the ontological experience of being 
named, being nameless, searching for a name, and 
naming’s one’s self as represented in black American 
literature. He writes about how naming one’s self 
becomes symbolic of finding a free identity or a 
way to point towards that free identity; how kinship 
and temporality explicitly influence the post-slavery 
African-American experience of naming; and how a 
minority subject has the potential of being nameless 
for a time. All of these spaces exist in Beloved and 
resonate heartily with queer and queer-of-color 
theory about naming, identity, and the power of 
being abject.
 I set Benston’s ideas about “being named” 
next to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s argument about 
naming one’s self as “queer.” She writes, “there are 
important senses in which ‘queer’ can signify only 
when attached to the first person. One possible 
corollary: that what it takes—all it takes—to make 
the description ‘queer’ a true one is the impulsion 
to use it in the first person” (Sedgwick 9). Although 
Sedgwick’s instance of naming is about claiming an 
identity category, her statement offers an opportunity 
to engage with a queer experience of self-naming. 
She also famously defines queer as a very flexible 
term when she says, “‘Queer’ can refer to: the open 
mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and 
resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the 
constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s 
sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify 
monolithically” (8). The lack of definition in this 



“What You Call Yourself?”: Nothingness, Naming, Abjection, and Queer Failure

Aisthesis      Volume 8,  20178

definition gives “queer” an inherent and unsteadying 
power since anyone can use it to “name” themselves 
but are forced to engage with (and engage others 
in) what the term means for them. In other words, 
how can claiming yourself as “queer” both signify 
something to the world by supplying the world 
with a definition and refuse to be definable? What 
Sedgwick circles around with “queer” in “Queer and 
Now” parallels a felt experience in Beloved about 
both the power and the limitation of names.
 There is a power in refusing to signify or “be 
named,” a power that connects well to Darieck 
Scott’s work in Extravagant Abjection. He establishes 
a framework for considering the abject black subject 
that he largely uses to examine sexuality in various 
texts, which I will use to perform a close reading of 
namelessness and naming in Beloved. He argues: 

Is that within the black abject—within human 
abjection as represented and lived in the 
experience of being-black, of blackness—we may 
find that the zone of self or personhood extends 
into realms where we would not ordinarily 
perceive its presence; and that suffering seems, 
at some level or at some farflung contact point, 
to merge into something like ability, like power 
(and certainly, like pleasure) without denying 
what it is to suffer. (Scott 15)

Scott asks us to consider the state of abjection as not 
something to merely move on from, but rather a space 
of power and potential for the abject subject who 
has experienced defeat. He writes that “black people 
have had to be inside, as it were, abjection, have had 
to embody it and be it in the lack of command of 
their embodiment that becoming black decrees” 
(17). A novel like Beloved is entirely relevant to his 
claims (in fact he calls it “a novel which is in many 
ways the urtext and bible of my project,” although he 
works with different characters and issues than I do), 
as it acknowledges the psychological impact of the 
past alongside the day-to-day experiences of racism 
that black people face (1). Although the community 
in Beloved is predominantly African American, 
white people and their racism linger constantly on 
the margins of the story and remind the characters, 
especially Baby Suggs, of their abjection. She, in the 
middle of her life, is a survivor of degradation and 
defeat, but her method of survival is not necessarily 
“to overcome.” Within a lifetime marked by abjection, 

Scott asks, “What then is that fashion of survival? 
What are the elements of that survival in abjection, 
or as abjection?” (17). He offers a useful structure 
to work through an abject life, a life Toni Morrison 
represents in her matriarch, Baby Suggs. 
 Baby Suggs is not Baby Suggs’ name from birth. 
When she is arriving into freedom for the first time, 
she finally has the courage to ask her former master 
Mr. Garner “something she had long wanted to know,” 
which is why everyone on his farm, Sweet Home, 
calls her Jenny (Morrison 167). As aforementioned, 
he explains that this is her “bill-of-sale name,” but 
for her it has no personal meaning (168). When 
asked what she calls herself, she says “Nothing… I 
don’t call myself nothing” (167). Baby Suggs gives us 
even more perspective on her nameless, identityless 
existence just before this section, when she compares 
how her son Halle sees her to how she sees herself. 
She says: 

And no matter, for the sadness was at her center, 
the desolated center where the self that was no 
self made its home. Sad as it was that she did not 
know where her children were buried or what 
they looked like if alive, fact was she knew more 
about them than she knew about herself, having 
never had the map to discover what she was like. 
Could she sing? (Was it nice to hear when she 
did?) Was she pretty? Was she a good friend? 
Could she have been a loving mother? A faithful 
wife? Have I got a sister and does she favor me? 
If my mother knew me would she like me? (165, 
emphasis added) 

This is not an expression of losing one’s identity 
momentarily or struggling to figure out who one 
really is. This is an expression of never having had an 
identity because one has been dehumanized to the 
point of total abjection. Abjection here is a term I 
am using by Scott’s definition as “a way of describing 
an experience, an inherited… historical legacy, and a 
social condition defined and underlined by a defeat” 
(Scott 17). Baby Suggs has certainly experienced 
many defeats at this point in her story: the hard, 
endless work of slavery, the loss of her children in 
body and in memory, the unresolved question of her 
husband’s attempted escape from slavery. Describing 
herself as “nothing” indicates how deeply abject 
defeat defines her existence. 



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Aisthesis      Volume 8,  20179

 At the end of his most substantial chapter, Scott 
makes the argument that to understand “one… of 
the powers of blackness, the powers of lingering in 
the gap of being… we will need sweeter or perhaps 
more fabulous fables of lived experience… we shall 
need a literary imagination” (93-94). I argue that 
Morrison’s Beloved, specifically the character of Baby 
Suggs, provides an imaginative characterization of 
an experience of abjection that has these subversive 
powers. By lingering for a moment in her namelessness 
and identitylessness, one can critically examine 
what Scott defines as a uniquely black experience of 
embodiment. In his chapter titled “Fanon’s Muscles: 
(Black) Power Revisited,” Scott examines the work of 
writer and cultural theorist Franz Fanon, especially 
Fanon’s claim that oppressed black people must 
immediately and assertively move on from their 
oppression and “overcome” it. Scott writes, “It is 
reasonable to say Fanon is about nothing so much 
as resistance to defeat, and about a refusal to give 
defeat any final acceptance, a refusal to acquiesce to 
it… Fanon will not allow defeat; he must be actively 
defeated, he will not collude in the process” (39). 
This moment of disavowal is what Scott takes up and 
challenges in his work, especially examining Fanon’s 
writing through the lens of existentialist philosophy. 
He argues that while Fanon is concerned with “the 
freedom towards which human beings can aspire” 
by overcoming their anguish, the work of Jean-Paul 
Sartre focuses on “the anguished state [which] is the 
freedom that human beings possess” (79, emphasis 
added). The Sartrean principle of freedom is based 
on the idea that “consciousness is the nihilation, the 
withdrawal, of itself from the world around it…and 
from itself; consciousness surges up to become for-
itself, distinguished from the in-itself of unconscious 
or nonconscious being. Thus consciousness depends 
on ‘nothingness’; that is, it nihilates what it is in order 
to be—it transcends the world and itself in order to 
know them” (79). In that transcendence, one finds 
Sartre’s freedom. Scott invests in that nothingness 
(or abjection) and critiques Fanon’s work for moving 
quickly beyond nothingness because Fanon does 
not see total anguish as powerful. Scott makes an 
argument that a black abject experience can be a 
location for freedom and power, as it offers a distinct 
perspective on which to grapple with questions of 
nothingness, anguish, abjection, and transcendence. 

 Scott defines power loosely, saying he seeks “to 
trouble the notion of power… to theorize that which 
is not-power according to the ego-dependent, ego-
centric (and masculine and white) ‘I’ definitions 
we have of power, but which is some kind of power 
if by power we mean only ability, the capacity for 
action and creation in one or several spheres, be 
they internal or external to the empowered” (23). 
This definition links power with abjection through a 
discourse of nothingness; in other words, the subject 
who defines herself as “nothing” is part of the not-
power which is power, especially depending on how 
and why she defines herself as “nothing.” Consider 
how Baby Suggs’ open acknowledgment of her own 
“nothingness” is an act of resistance. When her 
master insists that she must call herself something 
or answer to something, she instead refuses to be 
legible in her master’s conception of the world and 
challenges her master’s idea (which he specifically 
prides himself on) that he treated his slaves well, 
that there was some sort of happy and acceptable 
identity for a slave in slavery that she would desire 
to affirm. Baby Suggs, or in this moment “nothing,” 
creates a moment of discomfort that makes her 
former master go “red with laughter” and later 
“pink again,” as she considers renaming herself Baby 
(Morrison 167). Her master attempts to shame her 
for this choice, saying that “Mrs. Baby Suggs ain’t 
no name for a freed negro,” but how can he when 
she is the one acknowledging and existing in her 
own dehumanization and presenting to him her 
nameless nothingness as one of the consequences 
of slavery and his specific slave-owing? (167). By 
lingering in this moment of abjection, Baby Suggs 
is claiming what Scott would call “a kind of black 
power, that power is the ability or opportunity 
to access this condition, state, or facticity that is 
anonymous existence” (Scott 90). She is, in this scene 
of unnaming that turns shortly to self-naming and 
self-invention, experiencing a process of coming to 
consciousness that Sartre would say annihilates her 
world and herself in order to make sense of both 
(79). 
 Morrison certainly seems to be playing with 
these ideas in her characterization of Baby Suggs. 
Baby Suggs challenges her own nothingness and 
identitylessness in the context of coming into a 
literal freedom: freedom from slavery. She, just 



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Aisthesis      Volume 8,  201710

before challenging Mr. Garner about her name, 
first becomes physically conscious of herself. She 
says, “Suddenly she saw her hands and thought 
with a clarity as simple as it was dazzling, ‘These 
hands belong to me. These my hands.’ Next she felt 
a knocking in her chest and discovered something 
else new: her own heartbeat. Had it been there all 
along? This pounding thing? She felt like a fool and 
began to laugh out loud” (Morrison 166). Morrison 
narrates the coming into consciousness and freedom 
from slavery at the same time and, in the same scene, 
sets up Baby Suggs’ interrogation of her slave name. 
Baby Suggs clearly gets pleasure from experiencing 
herself as a conscious, free person, and this moment 
of coming into consciousness also literally empowers 
her to ask Mr. Garner about her name. These 
impactful and moving moments about pleasure and 
power that she receives directly because of her abject 
experience are what Scott identifies in his work. 
 Part of Scott’s definition of power is in its creative 
energy, which is part of Baby Suggs’ freedom-and-
consciousness experience. She decides to create 
a name for herself, a name which is interesting 
because of its interplay with distorted temporality 
and its eventual relationship to abjection and failure. 
Jack Halberstam’s “The Queer Art of Failure” argues 
that part of the “anticapitalist, queer struggle” is also 
“about anticolonial struggle, the refusal of legibility, 
and an art of unbecoming” (Halberstam 88). In 
many ways, Baby Suggs practices all three at once in 
the aforementioned scene: her struggle against the 
colonizing effects of slavery in her mind, the refusal 
to be named legibly to her former master, and the 
claiming of an anti-identity that is her process of 
“unbecoming.” Moving on from that moment of 
lingering in abject namelessness, Baby Suggs does 
choose a name, and a close reading of that name 
and how her name circulates alongside her freed 
identity is fascinating because her narrative arc 
bends towards a kind of failure. She ends her life in 
bed, in her home called “124,” with her daughter-in-
law Sethe and her grand-daughter Denver but none 
of her other family. She focuses on nothing but pure 
colors in her final years, unable to engage with her 
community, her faith, or her family. She is failing the 
normative expectation, she is lingering in the abject, 
but what power is she finding in this end to her life? 
Why does she go to this place and stay there? 

      Beloved has another self-named character, a man 
named Stamp Paid. His and Baby Suggs’ chosen 
names are inspired by their pasts, reminders for their 
presents, and offer hope for their futures. Stamp 
first appears in the novel during a flashback, when 
Denver is retelling her mother’s story of journeying 
out of slavery and into the North. Stamp helps Sethe 
cross the Ohio river, which is emblematic of his role 
throughout the novel. Stamp comes from slavery and 
names himself in reaction to one specific element of 
his enslavement. He explains: 

Born Joshua, he renamed himself when he 
handed over his wife to his master’s son. Handed 
her over in the sense that he did not kill anybody, 
thereby himself, because his wife demanded he 
stay alive. Otherwise, she reasoned, where and 
to whom could she return when the boy was 
through? With that gift, he decided that he didn’t 
owe anybody anything. Whatever his obligations 
were, that act paid them off. He thought it would 
make him rambunctious, renegade—a drunkard 
even, the debtlessness, and in a way it did. 
(Morrison 218)  

By this Stamp Paid means that he becomes reckless 
in his charity; he fully employs himself in assisting 
runaway slaves and people in the community who 
need it. He gives and gives and gives, relentlessly. In 
many ways Stamp is invoking abjection, the power 
of taking “a social condition defined and underlined 
by a defeat,” and using the total and abject failure of 
masculinity, marital happiness, and independence 
that he was forced to sacrifice in slavery to create 
both his name and his lived identity; his stamp is 
paid by that moment (Scott 17). 
 However, Stamp’s name is also a constant 
reminder to himself about that humiliating moment 
and about his relationship to degradation and 
debt. He is tireless in his work of continuing “this 
debtlessness to other people by helping them pay 
out and off whatever they owed in misery,” but 
that too is a weight (Morrison 218). He is a fixture 
in a community; he is very clearly tying many 
people together with love and generosity. But all 
this bigheartedness comes from the worst moment 
of his life. He sees himself as not owing anyone 
anything, but once he realizes how bad things have 
gotten with Baby Suggs and her family at 124, he 
wonders, “if, after all these years of clarity, he had 



“What You Call Yourself?”: Nothingness, Naming, Abjection, and Queer Failure

Aisthesis      Volume 8,  201711

misnamed himself and there was yet another debt he 
owed” (218). He questions his own name, which in 
itself is a question about the slave’s life after slavery. 
Does he owe anyone anything? Is his stamp paid 
by the dehumanization, degradation, and defeat he 
experienced under slavery? What does he “owe” to 
himself or to his community? I think Stamp chooses 
his name to propel himself towards more giving, 
adding an element of futurity to his choice. Naming 
is something that happens to us at the insistence of 
the dominant world, so to choose one’s own name is 
abnormal and defies the system. Beyond that, Stamp’s 
choice of a name enters what Halberstam describes as 
a queer space where “self-shattering, loss of mastery 
and meaning, unregulated speech and desire are 
unloosened… to embrace a truly political negativity, 
one that promises, this time, to fail… to speak up 
and out, to disrupt” (Halberstam 110). Giving his 
wife over to his master’s son shattered something 
inside Stamp’s self, as he lost mastery of his identity 
and his family. He promises to speak up and out. 
Post-slavery he disrupts capitalism by circulating 
items, connections, housing, and messages without 
expectation of payment. While he may not wholly 
embrace negativity like Baby Suggs eventually does, 
he still experiences a self-shattering in his abject 
experience as a slave that points him towards his 
eventual name. 
 Contrasting Baby Suggs’ name with her narrative 
arc is even more fascinating and challenging to 
grapple with. Baby Suggs clearly articulates why she 
has chosen her name, saying, “Baby Suggs was all she 
had left of the ‘husband’ she claimed… The two of 
them made a pact: whichever one got a chance to run 
would take it; together if possible, alone if not, and 
no looking back. He got his chance, and since she 
never heard otherwise she believed he made it. Now 
how could he find or hear tell of her if she was calling 
herself some bill-of-sale name?” (Morrison 169). 
Baby Suggs chooses her name because it is a cobbled 
together version of his last name and the name he 
always called her, “Baby.” The name connects her to 
her family, allowing her to imagine the possibility 
of reuniting with her husband. She starts her life in 
124 under this name and this hope, and in her first 
conversations as a free woman, the reader can hear 
her dreams articulated (“We scattered… but maybe 
not for long”), and she starts to plan how she may use 

her new connections to find her children (169). She 
gets a house and a job, but what she really seeks, and 
what her name points to, is reconnection with her 
husband and children. A few pages before, enslaved, 
she has no concept of knowing her children; slavery 
has made that knowledge meaningless. She says, 
“All seven were gone or dead. What would be the 
point of looking too hard at the youngest one?” 
(164). Slavery violently oppresses Baby Suggs into 
this subject position of anti-motherhood because 
it has no interest in her being “successful” as a 
mother, only as a slave. But freedom gives her an 
opportunity to be someone tender and loving, a 
mother and grandmother and wife, and she claims 
that tenderness in her name, Baby Suggs, and with 
her actions. 
 Beyond the desire to connect with a husband 
and children in the free world, the name Baby Suggs 
also expresses who she is. She plays a crucial role in 
the black community as “an unchurched preacher” 
who gathers audiences in the woods and talks to 
them about loving and living. She is “Baby Suggs, 
holy” to everyone because “when warm weather 
came, Baby Suggs, holy, followed by every black 
man, woman and child who could make it through, 
took her great heart to the Clearing—a wide-open 
place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what” 
(102). In this space, she preaches to her community, 
helping them live through the emotions of becoming 
free, independent, self-owned people. Her preaching 
is about self-love and resists a supremacist narrative 
of religion or of white respectability politics. “She did 
not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin 
no more,” writes Morrison, “She did not tell them 
they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting 
meek or its glorybound pure. She told them that the 
only grace they could have was the grace they could 
imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not 
have it” (103). What Baby Suggs does in the Clearing 
is a kind of queer failure already. She resists dominant 
expectations and embraces what Halberstam says 
queerness offers in a “method for imagining, not 
some fantasy of an elsewhere, but existing alternatives 
to hegemonic systems” (Halberstam 89). What Baby 
Suggs offers in the Clearing is not the hard rule of a 
patriarchal and hierarchal church, but a literal open 
space where the black community, free people and 
ex-slaves, can learn to love themselves in a world that 



“What You Call Yourself?”: Nothingness, Naming, Abjection, and Queer Failure

Aisthesis      Volume 8,  201712

actively does not want them to. She preaches, sings, 
and dances in the Clearing, letting go of hatred and 
grief, encouraging all to “Lay em down… Sword and 
shield. Don’t study war no more” (Morrison 101). If 
Stamp Paid is working to connect people with literal 
resources, Baby Suggs is connecting them with 
spiritual ones. She is loved for it; “Baby,” after all, is a 
term of endearment. 
 “Baby” also invokes Baby Suggs’ gentleness, 
which she employs constantly to serve others. Sethe 
fondly remembers Baby Suggs massaging her neck 
and longs for her mother-in-law’s gentleness: “Just 
let me feel your fingers again on the back of my neck 
and I will lay it all down, make a way out of this no 
way. Sethe bowed her head and sure enough—they 
were there. Lighter now, no more than the strokes 
of bird feather, but unmistakably caressing fingers” 
(112). Baby Suggs’ gentleness helped black characters 
like Sethe give up some of their anger and emptiness 
in the face of so much pain, and turn that energy to 
making “a way out of this no way” (112). She makes 
space for people to feel comfortable; she is both gentle 
like a baby and also babies others. Sethe remembers 
Baby Suggs swaddling her stripped and beaten back 
after she arrives at 124: “[Baby Suggs] bathed her in 
sections, starting with her face… After each bathing, 
Baby Suggs covered her with a quilt and put another 
pan on in the kitchen” (109). She helps Sethe heal, 
gently, slowly, from physical wounds and mental 
ones, encouraging her to be strong as she faces her 
own free identity and the future life she will have to 
make for herself. 
 All of these links between Baby Suggs’ name 
and her character come undone after Sethe kills 
her daughter Beloved and attempts to kill her other 
children, hoping to spare them from the slave master 
who comes to reclaim his “property” after the passage 
of the Fugitive Slave Act. If Baby Suggs was gesturing 
towards some queer art of failure in the Clearing, she 
certainly calls upon it after this tragic event and as her 
life approaches its end. In “The Queer Art of Failure,” 
Halberstam talks about the film Trainspotting and 
one character’s “choice ‘not to choose life,’ where 
‘life’ signifies” the mundane, “a numbing domestic 
passivity” (Halberstam 90-91). Although he calls 
this film out for its depiction of white, male, unqueer 
failure, this description suits Baby Suggs’ final days. 
She seems to stop choosing life because of what 

life has come to signify for her. Nowhere is this 
more obvious than when she meets Stamp Paid on 
the street sometime after Sethe’s terrible deed. He 
says, “He had not seen her in weeks… When he 
stopped her with a greeting, she returned it with a 
face knocked clean of interest. She could have been 
a plate… If there had been sadness in her eyes he 
would have understood it; but indifference lodged 
where sadness should have been” (Morrison 210). 
Stamp Paid in this moment cannot fathom that this 
matriarch of a family and a community, a powerful 
woman who brings people together and makes them 
love themselves, has given up on life. She is not down 
and out for a spell, she is totally withdrawing from 
existence. She stops going to the Clearing, she stops 
preaching, and she disappoints her community. But, 
in the same way that there is power in imagining 
abjection productively, Halberstam asks, “What 
happens when failure is productively linked to racial 
awareness, anticolonial struggle… and different 
formulations of the temporality of success?” 
(Halberstam 92). 
 Eventually Stamp Paid and I come to the same 
conclusion. There is something powerful in Baby 
Suggs’ giving up. She may be embracing the queer 
art of failure, but also the world has deeply failed her. 
The name she gave herself, which held such hope 
for reunification with her family and possibilities 
of love, failed to deliver on what she hoped. Slavery 
and white dominance took her husband, her son, her 
grandchild, and her faith. Stamp realizes after Baby 
Suggs’ death that, “The heart that pumped out love, 
the mouth that spoke the Word, didn’t count. They 
came in her yard anyway, and she could not approve 
or condemn Sethe’s rough choice. One or the other 
might have saved her, but beaten up by the claims of 
both, she went to bed. The whitefolks had tired her 
out at last” (Morrison 212). Morrison centers this 
novel on Sethe’s murder of Beloved, but constantly 
and almost casually many characters remind us 
that this egregious act is just one of thousands 
and hundreds of thousands of egregious crimes 
committed in the name of slavery. It just happens 
to be a crime committed by a mother and a black 
woman, not a white slaveowner. So what do we make 
of a grandmother who attempts to counteract some 
of that pain with self-love but eventually has to give 
it up to think about colors, to just “fix on something 



“What You Call Yourself?”: Nothingness, Naming, Abjection, and Queer Failure

Aisthesis      Volume 8,  2017

harmless in this world” (211)? I argue that Baby 
Suggs comes to “feel backward… to recognize 
something in these darker depictions of queer life 
without needing to redeem them” (Halberstam 99). 
She is again resisting the dominant expectation (as 
she did by calling herself “nothing”) for a productive 
or normative body, this time by caring for nothing 
but herself and her desires. To take up the famous 
words attributed to black feminist lesbian mother 
poet Audre Lorde, “Caring for myself is not self-
indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an 
act of political warfare.” Caring for herself, inching 
her way through colors, and lingering in the total 
abjection and loss she faces is in many ways a deeply 
queer, deeply powerful capstone on a complicated 
life. 

Works Cited
Benston, Kimberly W. “‘I Yam What I Am’: Naming 

and Unnaming in Afro-American Literature.” 
Black American Literature Forum, vol. 16, no. 
1, 1982, pp. 3-11. JSTOR, doi: 10.2307/2904266. 
Accessed 10 October 2016.

Halberstam, Jack. “The Queer Art of Failure.” The 
Queer Art of Failure, Duke University Press, 
2011, pp. 87-121.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Vintage International, 2004. 

Scott, Darieck. Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, 
Power, and Sexuality in the African American 
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