Ward’s prose haunted by family ghosts

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This article was published 14/10/2017 (3241 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

African-American author Jesmyn Ward’s latest work of fiction, Sing, Unburied, Sing, is being touted as one of the not-to-be-missed fiction releases of this fall. It was recently announced as a fiction finalist for the 2017 U.S. National Book Award; last week, Ward was named a recipient of a US$625,000 “genius grant” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Like her earlier novels, Where the Line Bleeds and the 2011 National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, the Mississippi-born author’s latest explores the lives of a poor black family living in the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Like those other works of fiction, it is also a story about siblings and the dynamics and dysfunction, grief and gratitude that tie them together and break them apart.

The siblings at the heart of this family chronicle are 13-year-old Jojo, the primary narrator, and his toddler sister Kayla. The two live on a farm with their drug-addicted mother Leonie, their dying grandmother Mam and their beloved grandfather Pop.

Pop is strong and stoic, and determined to pass on his knowledge, skills and sense of duty to Jojo, who is receptive to all Pop has to teach. But Jojo’s life is turned upside down the day Leonie impulsively packs him and Kayla into the car to pick up their father Michael — a white man and a virtual stranger to his children being released from the state penitentiary.

As anticipated by everyone but Leonie, this ill-advised road trip is tainted by misadventure: Leonie gets high, Kayla gets sick and a state trooper shackles Jojo in handcuffs for the crime of being young and black.

Along the way, the family is also joined by the ghost of Leonie’s murdered brother Given, whom only she can see, and the ghost of a young man once tended to by Pop, whom Jojo realizes only he can see.

These ghosts, like Ward’s prose, are haunting, poetic and purifying, simultaneously evoking a surreal sense of dread and of comfort. Ward’s way with words is honest and astonishing, divulging her tremendous talent for observing and expressing the mundane and extraordinary, and the way in which the smallest gestures have the power to speak volumes.

Death is described as “a great mouth set to swallow.” Pop hugs his grandchildren “even when he is not touching them.” And when Michael embraces Leonie, “his arms wrapped around her like a tangled sheet.”

Jojo and Kayla, when they wake each morning, “turn to each other like plants following the sun across the sky. They are each other’s light.”

Themes of light, loyalty and love, hope, sorrow and visions all vie for position in the pages of this stirring novel. In the end, they seamlessly merge into a sad, soulful, tender and timely story — a story that more than proves the worthiness of all its praise.

Sharon Chisvin is a Winnipeg writer.