As I was looking for an image to depict my passage from Beloved, I was listening to one of my favorite artists, Fiona Apple. Her song “Sullen Girl” came on. The song depicts when the artist was raped and in an interview in Rolling Stone she talks about how it affected her, and how she wrote the song expressing how she felt during that time. I thought that this song in particular would be a good piece to use to convey how Sethe must have felt when those boys stole her milk and how she carried that pain with her. ”
But he washed me shore
And he took my pearl
And left an empty
Shell of me
And there’s too
Much going on
But it’s calm under the waves
In the blue of my oblivion
Under the waves
In the blue of my oblivion
Under the waves
In the blue of my oblivion
It’s calm under the waves
In the blue of my oblivion
Fiona lyrics go on to talk about this man that stole her pearl, just as those men stole Sethe’s milk. When she talks about being calm under the waves in the blue of my oblivion. I though how the lyrics may have depicted how Sethe felt when she discovered that Halle had seen what had happened to her in the barn.
“After I left you, those boys came in there and took my milk. That’s what they came in there for. She had that lump and couldn’t speak but her eyes rolled out tears. But whatever he saw go on in that barn that day broke him like a twig. I don’t want to know or have to remember that. I have other things to do: worry , for example, about tomorrow , about Denver, about Beloved , about age and sickness not to speak of love.”
It almost seems that she can’t let that information change what she has to do, or has been doing. That she is lost in the oblivion of her pain ,and that anymore information were deter her from moving forward.
I think that the song really expressed pain of a traumatic experience, and how both the women seemed to cope in a similar ways.
