Imani Perry has been hanging out with the most wonderful writer and most thoroughly decent of human beings, Jesmyn Ward, and not surprisingly on Jesmyn’s home turf of DeLisle, Mississippi, and Gulf environs, so familiar to her fans. This will be part of my weekend reading but I just had to scribble a quick post with the link (NYT sub. probably required).
Tag: Jesmyn Ward
What to read this autumn: 2023’s biggest new books | Books | The Guardian
Sara Pascoe’s new novel, rare Terry Pratchett, memoirs from Barbra Streisand and Britney Spears, plus the essential reading on today’s hot button topics – all the releases to look out for
— Read on www.theguardian.com/books/2023/aug/26/what-to-read-this-autumn-2023s-biggest-new-books
Autumn is it absolutely not in the south of Germany! The warmest of sunshine, leaves barely tinged and little change in sight. But nevertheless it is a good time to start planning for days indoor. For this “The Guardian” has some good suggestions. Not necessarily those mentioned above in their pulled quote, though by Streisand I could be tempted. Of the others, some expected and therefore of no surprise: Zadie Smith, Mary Beard, Emily Wilson. And one who I will be particularly thrilled to read again after all her travails in the last few years: Jesmyn Ward – for this I have been waiting.
When the next time is now
“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.
Continue Reading…Making connections
Connections these days seem to bombard one! Or maybe it is that they only ‘seem’ to do so, given time enough to contemplate, reflect and make connections that may otherwise pass unnoticed. This then in The New York Times today, criticising and giving an ultimatum of sorts to the renowned Poetry Foundation relate in some ways to my two previous posts; firstly, that in respect to my revisit in the last days to The 1619 Project, and secondly, one about a call from black and minority writers for equal consideration in publishing.
In a literary section of the Project, mentioned mostly for the point of mentioning Jesmyn Ward!, I did also enjoy very much a poem by Eve Ewing, probably because her subject, Phillis Wheatley, a most extraordinary woman, born in West Africa, sold into slavery as a child and transported as a young girl to Boston, was known to me (from a poetry course I did a few years ago), and Wheatley’s story is such that one tends not to forget, and Ewing’s verse honours her short, tragic life. Following is a poem by Phillis Wheatley; from the Poetry Foundation [sic].
On Being Brought from Africa to America 'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, Taught my benighted soul to understand That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too: Once I redemption neither sought nor knew. Some view our sable race with scornful eye, "Their colour is a diabolic die." Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain, May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train. - BY PHILLIS WHEATLEY
Ms. Ewing is amongst the very many initiators of a letter to the Poetry Foundation criticising not only the Foundation’s tepid response to the current antiracism efforts, but more generally the lack of structural and financial support of marginalised groups. And they don’t pussy foot around with their demands!
Eve Ewing and Jesmyn Ward, poetry and prose; black and gifted and successful, but ready to fight this fight for writers of color, or those otherwise marginalised, who may not have a voice.
From the NYT article, one also learns of similar initiatives in the theatre. Could it be that there really is change afoot? Could this be the moment, the generation, to continue fulfilling dreams not dreamed out?
There are authors and there are authors
Coincidental to the racism discussion whirling about us in recent weeks; one thing leading to another, to another and so forth … then to Jesmyn Ward (see my last post), her picture in The New York Times today almost jumped out upon me.
In short, a #PublishingPaidMe has been making an impact (hesitate to say “gone viral” [sic]) highlighting as it does the disparity in advances given to white and black (and minority) writers in the United States (only the US?). Many writers are risking the ire of their publishers (and maybe even agents) and shining a not terribly flattering light on apparently inequitable structures in an industry that generally speaking tends to the liberal side of things. In respect to Jesmyn Ward the NYT reports:
Jesmyn Ward, a critically acclaimed novelist, said on Twitter that she “fought and fought” for her first $100,000 advance, even after her book “Salvage the Bones,” for which she said she received around $20,000, won a National Book Award in 2011. After switching publishers, she was able to negotiate a higher advance for “Sing, Unburied, Sing” — for which she won a second National Book Award, in 2017 — but, she said, “it was still barely equal to some of my writer friends’ debut novel advances.”
A spokeswoman for Bloomsbury Publishing, which published “Salvage the Bones” and Ms. Ward’s memoir “Men We Reaped,” said that the company does not comment on advances paid to authors, but that it was honored to have published her books.
The New York Times, June 8, 2020.
Love that:“…honored to have published her books”! So they god damn should be!
Return to Bois Sauvage
Perhaps I have just read over it, but I don’t recall an explicit mention of (calendar) time in Sing, Unburied, Sing. The best I could come up with is about 2014, and that being based on Michael having been present at the Deepwater Horizon explosion which occurred in April, 2010, and it seems to have been not so long after, traumatised and unable to find work in the region, that he falls into drug addiction and related criminal activities presumably leading to a conviction and interment in Parchman. Kayla doesn’t seem to have been born when he leaves, so given that she is now three, this seems a reasonable enough guess.
Which of course got me thinking about Jesmyn Ward’s Bois Sauvage and how it may have changed between Salvage the Bones, defined by Katrina in 2005, and the time in which Sing, Unburied, Sing is set. It seems to me, a lot can happen in what must be almost a decade, both to people and to place, and especially in a a very special fictional world that has evolved out of a very real one. Now of course even if I wasn’t wondering madly over this, Ward sort of invites one to do so with a neatly placed reference as they drive back into Bois at journey’s end, the road journey anyway. Leonie narrates:
Two people walk in the distance …a man, short and muscled…[leading] a black dog… next to him, a skinny little woman with …cloud of hair that moves like a kaleidoscope of butterflies…Skeetah and Eschelle…The siblings walk in sync…Esch says something and Skeetah laughs…
“Sing, Unburied, Sing” Bloomsbury paperback ed. p.197
To be deduced: Esch and Skeetah are in their mid-twenties now, and they are in Bois where we left them immediately after Katrina; with Esch awaiting a child, and Skeet still unreconciled to the loss of China. One wonders about the extended Batiste family, Daddy and the kids and their friends: who has gone and who has stayed? are they well enough? I hope so, for how I loved this chaotic troupe, and Leonie’s envious reaction “…jealousy twins with anger…”(ending with Kayla being severely slapped and a vague imagining of how different it may have been for her had Given lived) seems to suggest at least these two are doing okay. For Skeet, what times – good and bad – lay between that radiant white China and this black beast now on parade? Does the colour tell a story? Esch’s baby would now be almost ten (a Jason or a Rose?), and I dare to imagine, armed with Medea and the love of family, that she salvaged some good out of the devastation Katrina left in her wake, and that her fine, kind mind has been given the chance it deserved to bloom, that she is a good mother, and all the fathers Big Henry promised were there for her. Wearing still, and proudly, her wild crown atop her head makes me happy and gives me hope. (While Leonie’s maternal failures may more than irritate, that she sees a “kaleidoscope of butterflies” where others would see a “dishevelled mop” says much.)
Somethings we do know. The prevalence of cannabis and cocaine has been superseded by the scourge of crystal meth, oxycontin and god alone knows what else. White privilege spares not – just ask Michael or Misty. Prosperity is there alongside the desperate, and race defines as ever; in ways subtle and not so, and boundaries drawn accordingly – you can be up the Kill (where white folk live) or in the Pit (where the Batistes lived); transgress at your own peril.
Bois Sauvage has survived; not capitulating to the most powerful forces that Nature could muster, nor to the deprivations formented through mortal weakness and depravity. Against all laws of Nature, the Delta draws sustenance from the vast river of human waste salvaged as it flows from its history into each moment.
Sing, sing of …
In Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing we are returned to the fictional Bois (Sauvage) of Salvage the Bones then north on an odyssey to (a very real) Parchman and back again. And what an odyssey it is in every meaning of that word, for I am struck by the language of Homer in the very title – “Sing, O goddess, the anger …”( The Iliad, Samuel Butler, Ed.) and suggesting the ancient’s interest in ritual and the afterlife. This is an even more powerful work; uncompromising, brutal even. To be wondered at again is Ward’s gift of crafting such a narrative with the tools of lyric and filtered through the veil of myth.
For the most part, the narrative voice alternates between JoJo and his troubled, addicted mother Leonie, and it is through their eyes, eyes that see other, that father and grandfather, Pop, and the dying Mam are described, that their world is described. When we meet them it is JoJo’s thirteenth birthday, and the eve of their trip together with Leonie’s friend Misty, white, just as troubled, and the three year old baby of the family, called Michaela by Leonie and Kayla by JoJo (which says something about the order of affections and disaffections of mother and son) to bring home Michael, the lover of one and the absent father the other. Along the way we will be confronted with the irreconcilable truths that haunt them both.
And indeed they are haunted – Leonie by the silent ghost of the elder brother, Given, beloved by all, taken in youth, beautiful, not yet tainted by the harsh reality defined by race and place that killed him, and JoJo by the boy Richie, a tortured spirit, bound to him through his grandfather and the history shared at Parchman, long ago when neither was much more than a child and one survived and the other not. Richie does have a voice and a lot to say, and joins the narrating chorus for the journey home.
The relationships here are so intense, the interplay of race and familial dynamics all pervading and the situations described with a realism such that one’s senses are in a permanent state of alert – the stench conjured each time the little Kayla vomits is as visceral as the softness of her cheeks seeking human touch. And when these realistic elements are intertwined with the mythical of afterlife and voodoo ritual, a potent literary tableau is created.
A wanting, needing, to get home permeates the whole novel, and home comes in a guise other than situational – rather as an overriding desire to find a place of rest, either in this world or the next. Some are to find it, some not, and for some we just don’t know. And after all, isn’t that how it is?
Just like in the ancient Greek song culture, the song never really ends, for memory never ends, but is passed on through the generations. And so it is fitting that this wonderful novel should close with Kayla singing joyfully forth in unison with all the ghosts of the past, and with the promise of an enduring love that fate denied her mother, that her mother denied herself.
On Toni Morrison
A few days later and the tributes, and love, for Toni Morrison have no end! Amongst the many, Jesmyn Ward has contributed a longer piece at The New York Times. I have read in the last days so much in this vein from younger, a lot younger, writers – black, women but not only – who Ms. Morrison has touched and inspired, who have learnt her lessons on the power of language to pass on to new generations – beyond her literary greatness this too will surely be an enduring legacy.
And here is her 1993 Nobel Lecture – whereby that latter word can not adequately describe the beauty of her words and the narrative voice she chooses, and in audio to be heard as she delivered it twenty-six years ago.
That this should have been said a quarter of a century before an Internet gone haywire and a President equally so:
…The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek – it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language – all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas…
Toni Morrison – Nobel Lecture. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Media AB 2019. Tue. 13 Aug 2019.
In life Toni Morrison pleaded with words – the words of her novels, stories and essays – for a greater human language that is universal in its embrace of the individual, the “other” – not in its “sameness”. It was not the cacophony of unintelligible sound that doomed The Tower of Babel, rather an unwillingness to share in the myriad of other languages – cultures, points of view. She says: “…unmolested language surges toward knowledge not its destruction …We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
It was certainly the measure of this most remarkable life.