“Siblings, Kinship and Allegory in Jesmyn Ward’s Fiction and Nonfiction”

ABSTRACT

This article examines the centrality of sibling relationships in Jesmyn Ward’s fiction and nonfiction, focusing specifically on her second novel Salvage the Bones (2011) and memoir Men We Reaped (2013) but referencing all of her long-form works. It analyzes Ward’s repeated depictions of siblings supporting each other in the absence of protective or nurturing parents, and argues that this can be read allegorically – as citizens supporting each other in the absence of the state. Using and developing Gary Johnson’s notion of “intradiegetic allegory,” it argues that Ward’s specific narrative strategies reveal intersections between the experience of traumatic violence and systemic or “slow violence.” Furthermore it examines Ward’s writing in the context of critical debates about the enduring uses of trauma as an interpretive framework. For instance, while Lauren Berlant’s influential argument for “moving away from the discourse of trauma … when describing what happens to persons and populations as an effect of catastrophic impacts,” suggests an emerging impasse between trauma and a new emphasis on the systemic, Ward’s writing urges us to consider the ways traumatic events are experienced in the context of systemic violence.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Essays by Moynihan (2015) and Benjamin Eldon Stevens (2016) focus respectively on Salvage The Bones’s key diegetic intertexts: William Falkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930) and the Medea myth as it appears in Edith Hamilton’s Mythology (1942). Other essays by Marotte (2015)and Cade Brown (2017) discuss Ward’s intertextual references to other African American pregnancy narratives such as Toni Morrisson’s Beloved (1987).

2. One vivid example of this is the unsettling scene in Sing, Unburied Sing when Leonie, Jojo, Kayla and Leonie’s friend Misty are pulled over by a state trooper who draws his gun on the vulnerable Jojo.

3. That the early 9/11 novels “domesticated” the attacks is an argument that was made by Pankaj Mishra in a long article in The Guardian in which he asked – referring to Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2006), Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (2005) and Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006): “Are we really meant to think of marital discord as a metaphor for 9/11?” (4). Richard Gray; Michael Rothberg made similar claims in essays that featured in a special issue of American Literary History (2009) and Martin Randall reinforced these in his book, 9/11 and the Literature of Terror (2011).

4. One example of this foregrounding of sibling relationships is in Sing, Unburied, Sing, where the sibling relationship between Jojo and toddler Kayla who he cares for is central; as Anna Hartnell has noted, thirteen-year-old Jojo is the “moral heart of the novel” (“Civil Rights to #BLM,” 298). Though the novel also explores their mother Leonie’s troubles as a parent, in the chapters that she narrates (the novel alternates between chapters focussed on the perspectives of Jojo, Leonie and the ghost, Richie), it privileges the ongoing effects of the traumatic loss of her brother rather than her struggles as a parent.

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Arin Keeble

Arin Keeble is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Culture at Edinburgh Napier University. His research focuses on twenty-first century literary responses to crises and disasters and he has published widely in this area, including in his recent monograph, Narratives of Hurricane Katrina in Context: Literature, Film and Television (2019).