Beloved as one half of an orange

To call someone your “media naranja” — a term of endearment in Spanish — is to regard them as your “better half”. “Naranja” itself translates into “orange fruit” (citrus sinensis), lending the affectionate name its metaphorical dimension that is traced in Plato’s The Symposium: Aristophanes speaks about how man was once ‘perfectly’ spheric like an orange before Zeus released lighting bolts to split orange-humans into two. To call someone your “media naranja”, then, is to entail that you have found your other half in your orange-soulmate and to proclaim that no one else can fit as perfectly or closely with you.

Active users of social media may be familiar with this idea of “love [as] just a really big orange”,  a concept that draws parallels between various works — from paintings and poems to pop songs — that lay out the sweet symbolism of an orange fruit. Frank Ocean sings in End / Golden Girl that “She peels an orange for us in the morning / She woke up to give me half”, and it evokes more than the materialised agricultural product when put in conversation with its neighbouring images in an Instagram carousel.

The word beloved is derived from the root word love; to call someone your “beloved” is to appreciate them as someone dearly loved by you. When reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), then, I wondered about the capacity of and case for “orange-love”: In a novel about slaves, set in the period after the American Civil War, how, where, and why would more conventional or contemporary ideas of love leave its mark?

Inspired by the story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved African-American woman in pre-Civil War America, Beloved follows its main character Sethe, who slits the throat of her baby to relieve her from slavery. The title, while describing the Africans who died in the Atlantic slave trade (to whom the book is dedicated), also takes on its noun form to refer to a mysterious character named Beloved, who is interpreted to be the spirit of Sethe’s child.

In an intricate way, rather than presenting the roughness of the exploitative, dehumanising history, the story resists violence and broadly conflates its events with a tender element of love. For example, Sethe’s abused, painful back full of scars is described as a chokecherry tree, with a tree “trunk” and “cherry blossoms. . .in bloom”; the cruel marks of slavery, then, are lovingly and subversively rewritten as an artistic, beautiful, and lively tree.

In terms of the idea of orange-love (the love between two halves), the story foregrounds the emotive love between Sethe and Beloved, exemplified, for instance, by their song: Sethe makes up a song and sings it only to her children, creating art that “[n]obody knows. . .but [her and her] children”. Beyond the broadly loving light of the novel, then, it also focuses on maternal love — a love that forces a private bond and a shielded realm that oppressors simply cannot penetrate.

Orange-love is also necessarily glazed with the notion of provision and sustenance — to love someone is to hope that they eat well and live well. Echoing this is perhaps Christopher Citro’s “Our Beautiful Life When It’s Filled with Shrieks” which articulates beautifully: “I’m doing a balancing act with a stack of fresh fruit / in my basket. I love you. I want us both to eat well.” 

In Beloved, then, maybe the focus on love exceeds its mission to restore narratives; it also plainly presses home the characters’ powerful, hopeless, and unimaginable love. Thus, when the narrative follows how Sethe fixates on nurturing the baby and providing it sufficient milk, it presents this love of provision against an inhospitable backdrop. She loves Beloved, and she wants them both to eat well, but a simple, straightforward reading of love slips away from them, yielding a twisted version of the orange-love’s notions of intimacy, perfection, and provision.

On the whole, love is so vast and thick — in Sethe’s words, “Thin love ain’t love at all” — that we may never understand this extreme degree from our external points of view. But maybe that is just the natural by-product of its exclusivity and intimacy, rendering love always idiosyncratic and fitting only for first persons. Love exists in such measureless and limitless domains, that portentous proclamations of love may never reckon with intoxicated, love-filled hugs and kisses. But as long as the love is thick, then, to call someone your beloved is to proclaim them the perfect half of your orange and to produce this sacred space privy to only you.

By: Shannon Ling