Some people can't remember anything for weeks, months, or even years. This condition is called amnesia, "the loss of memory as a result of brain injury or deterioration, shock, fatigue, senility, drug use, alcoholism, anesthesia, illness, or psychoneurotic reaction." psychoneurotic reaction, can even cover the patient's entire life. Toni Morrison, in an interview, stated that not only an individual but also an entire nation can be diagnosed with (psychoneurotic) amnesia. When discussing Beloved, she explained what she calls “national amnesia.” I thought this [Beloved] had to be the least read book of all the books I've written because it's about something that the characters don't want to remember, don't want to remember, black people don't want to remember, white people don't want to remember.2[2 ]The memory of slavery that no one wants to remember had to be written, and the untold stories had to be told and remembered. No matter how painful it is to "remember" the past, Toni Morrison had to write about it, and she did. He had to give voice to the “Sixty Millions and More” of slaves and give names to those who had been buried nameless.3[3] He said, “It was an era I did not want to enter: to go back and through the pain,” yet he had to do so, because America is still haunted by its past of slavery and burdened by the weight of memory. Through Beloved, Morrison resurfaced repressed memory and awakened America from a “national amnesia.” In this essay, I will discuss how Morrison evokes America's haunting past in Beloved so that no one escapes the past: first, by giving voice to slaves, particularly Margaret Garner; second, arousing a… middle of paper… itz, “Nameless Ghosts: Possession and Dispossession in Beloved,” Studies in American Fiction, 17 (1989), 157. Although, by a vampire, succubus, for a child pre-Oedipal various ways of seeing the Beloved are possible, Horvitz's definition is more complete. On the topic of vampires and succubus, see Trudier Harris, Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991). The definition of a pre-Oedipal child provides many insights into the relationship between the female characters. See Jennifer Fitzgerald, “Selfhood and Community: Psychoanalysis and Discourse in Beloved,” Modern Fiction Studies, 39 (1993), 669-87.9[9] The unconscious is a controversial concept. I used this term more figuratively. It's like a huge warehouse, in which we throw away everything we don't want to remember or accept.