“The Fire This Time” ed. by Jesmyn Ward (2016)
Recently, I enjoyed very much picking my way through this 2016 selection edited by Jesmyn Ward; someone I have been truly thrilled to discover in recent years. Presumptuous of me perhaps, but I think I have read enough of Ward’s work and garnered enough information about some of the known aspects of her life, to understand her concerns as a writer and how her identity as a Black Southern woman is the beating heart of her creative output.
A project that came out of Jesmyn Ward’s anger and frustration, not just at the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin (to whom amongst many she dedicates the book) but long simmering within from the violent deaths of young black men close, very close, to her. Collected are some of the voices of a generation of Black writers, in the middle of life like herself, who articulate in their own personal and creative way their anger, their fear, their grief, but never without hope. Her introduction expands upon her motivation and intentions, and is a valuable piece in and of itself.
Ward makes a further contribution of her own in an essay called “Cracking the Code”, which is a very interesting appraisal of her personal genealogy and is, in itself, exemplary of the intricacies of race and how it manifests over generations; not just biologically but in the stories told and assumptions made. Now, given her roots in the Mississippi delta, Ward knew enough from family lore to surmise a broad mix – African, Native American, Creole, European – but the results of a 23andMe test gave her pause for thought. Strongly identifying as Black all her life, and that it surely followed that her ancestry must lay predominately on the African continent, Ward was momentarily taken aback when the analysis in fact concluded her to be of thirty odd percent sub-Saharan African ancestry and in fact forty odd percent European. The discrepancy is relatively small, but it bothered her. Who am I?
But it was only a momentary distraction, for Ward then rationalises genetic information to be that which it is, one piece only of the puzzle – just as relevant, or more so, is the familial, societal, cultural history that formed her and which she embraces (and which embraces her back). Nor does she throw the baby out with the bath water, so to speak – Heaney, Larkin, Harry Potter amongst others are more than welcome still in Jesmyn’s world. (And, Doctor Who! The Doctor? I ain’t ever met a Doctor fan that I didn’t like – even if my original Doctor is of an earlier regeneration.)
Also, and she doesn’t mention this, but any DNA databank is dependent on input, and is always expanding, and as time goes on that affects the analysis parameters. Should Jesmyn have another test now, some years on, she would almost certainly find that again she is not exactly that whom she thought she was. In some ways, the reading of the code, if not the code itself, is as fluid as the greater identity of any person through a lifetime.
Following are just a few brief words on some selected pieces of work that I particularly liked, and for different reasons.
I enjoyed immensely a searching piece by the poet, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (whose name alone is a show stopper!), about Phillis Wheatley, someone who has interested me since first encountering her poetry a few years ago. Probably like the most, I have digested the scant biographical information on this remarkable woman without much question. After reading Jeffers’ essay I question everything. And beyond the particular subject, there is a broader lesson here of how to approach historical and testimonial evidence; to be stringently asked: in the interest of whom or what is a particular version of history being told and retold.
Another poet (and poetry editor at The New Yorker), Kevin Young, draws upon the incredibly bizarre case of Rachel Dolezal that garnered so much attention in 2015, to anchor his piece, at the heart of which resides the sentiment that Black, being Black, is much more than skin deep. Loved this essay; short, staccato-like passages – snazzy. (Minor digression: I hope an outstanding career move doesn’t inhibit his writing.)
Fittingly I conclude, as the volume concluded, with Edwidge Danticat’s “Message to My Daughters”. In recent times, a lot has been said and written about the dangers inherent in just being a Black man in the United States, and a growing urgency to address these matters in families (the “Talk”) and communities. But in not so recent times, in 1963, James Baldwin wrote a letter to his nephew with sentiments that are as applicable today.
Danticat’s piece is not her letter to her daughters, though at the end she mulls over a formulation, and with reference to Baldwin, but rather how and why she as a Black woman and mother in America has concluded that she must write such a letter, or talk the “Talk”. That is not what she wanted; she didn’t want her daughters to grow up in fear of the place they call home. As Danticat rides a roller-coaster of extremes, from optimism (at the election of Obama) to despair (at the pervading racism and brutality), she ponders how it can be that African Americans can be treated (and badly so) as refugees within their own country – she cites the displacement rhetoric of the Great Migration but also in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. As a Haitian immigrant she knows about this, as a Black immigrant more so. She ends powerfully with a description of her visit with her daughters to the Haiti and Dominican Republic border, and the hundreds of impoverished refugees, and she returns to Baldwin: “You think your pain…heartbreak are unprecedented…” – then look around you. Baldwin’s message is not one of optimism, but nor is it one of defeat.
James Baldwin’s famous letter, also published as “My Dungeon Shook”, forms the first part of the book The Fire Next Time (1963). Many Black Americans may well appraise the society in which they live today, and justifiably deduce that the fires of discontent are already raging – next time is this time is now. That they may be extinguished before it is too late, is hopefully more than a dream, and a gifted generation (or two) will continue to play their role in fulfilling that dream.
The following, a post-script that I write with sadness:
As I was contemplating Jesmyn Ward’s collection and writing the first paragraph, I became curious as to how far away her new novel may be, and so did as one does these days and Googled, and there she was as a contributor to a special Vanity Fair September issue edited by Ta-Nehisi Coates; something that should not at all surprise. (By the way, I hope this VF issue remains available online for a while at least.) But then … Jesmyn Ward’s essay … and it was one of a woman in grief; the death of a beloved husband. It was her own grief about which she wrote; her own husband who died at the beginning of this wretched year, and presumably from this equally wretched COVID.
Obviously, I didn’t know as much about Jesmyn Ward as I intimated above – which is quite as it should be. But, at the same time, I do know that, as bright as the literary star shines, so has the darker side of Fate not always been on her side. Fate: Jesmyn loves mythology, so she will forgive me I think for resorting here to those eternally industrious mythical goddesses, when the truth is, of course, that the Fates would have had little to do with it; rather the humanly conceived inequalities and injustices that a Black girl of the Delta must take with her every day of her life – wherever it may lead.
Irrespective of the fact that the relationship between writer and reader is almost always distant, it may also sometimes be very special. For better or worse, I have a tendency towards those sorts of relationships with my favourite writers. Mostly they go back a fairly long way, but every now and then a new voice especially touches me and joins the fray – and so it was with Jesmyn Ward not so very long ago. We are neither of the same generation, nor nationality, nor race, if you will (though we are closer than at least she thought – see her 23andMe adventure above!), but I was immediately drawn to her mythically tinged but starkly realistic narratives telling of the place and community that she knows so well, and of which she is unafraid to call her own and to share with others. Hence my sadness – for Jesmyn and her children. And my optimism for their future.