We Are Here: Jesmyn Ward’s Black Feminist Poethics of Place in Men We Reaped

Abstract

This essay explores how, in her memoir Men We Reaped, Jesmyn Ward confronts Mississippi’s pervasively anti-Black landscape and maps an oppositional geography that documents Black life in the landscape while also accounting for the constant movement brought on by slavery’s afterlives. Throughout the work, Ward engages in what the author terms Black feminist reaping, which operates as a cartographic practice that makes visible Black subjects situated at the margins of places that are designed to suppress and confine them. Through Black feminist reaping, Ward enacts a Black gathering—a countermobilization against the ways the plantation and its politics continue to reemerge in Mississippi’s geography and US geographies more broadly. In the process, Ward produces new geographic knowledges that highlight a Black viability, which undergirds sustainable communities and complex Black subjectivities.

Keywords:

• Mississippi
• cartography
• Black feminism
• slavery
• oppositional geographies

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, x.

2 Bledsoe, Eaves, and Williams, “Introduction,” 6–11. My understanding and invocation of “Black geographies” is rooted in the work of Bledsoe, Eaves, and Williams, who write, “While continuing the tradition of critiquing the oppressive aspects of racialization, Black Geographies are also fundamentally concerned with highlighting the various ways Black communities create their own unique political practices and senses of place, thereby acknowledging the spatial capacities of Afro-descendant populations” (8).

3 McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” 3.

4 Ward, Men We Reaped, 8.

5 Ibid.

6 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, xi.

7 Cervenak, “Black Gathering.” Cervenak generatively reads the sculpture of the artist Leonardo Drew for how he engages in a practice of collecting that is engendered by formulations of Black life as disposable. He instead forwards an ethic anti-posabilty or non-disposability that asserts the value of Black life (4). This framing informs how I invoke the notion of “Black gathering” in this piece.

8 Ward, Men We Reaped, 8.

9 Ibid., 240.

10 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 54.

11 Ibid.

12 Da Silva, “Black Feminist Poethics,” 81.

13 Ibid., 82.

14 Williamson, Scandalize My Name, 16.

15 McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” 2.

16 Sexton, “Social Life,” 28.

17 Henery, “Where They Walk,” 86.

18 Ibid., 87.

19 Williamson, Scandalize My Name, 20.

20 Ibid., 21.

21 Ward, Men We Reaped, 251.

22 Ibid., 21.

23 Ibid., 236.

24 Ibid., 127.

25 Ibid., 111.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid., 125.

28 Ibid., 19.

29 McKittrick and Woods, “Black Geographies,” 6. I take my cue here from McKittrick and Woods, who call for articulations of Black geographies that account for communities that have “struggled, resisted, and significantly contributed to the production of space”.

30 Hartnell, “When Cars Become Churches,” 214.

31 Allen, Lawhon, and Pierce, “Placing Race,” 1010.

32 Ward, Men We Reaped, 118.

33 Ibid., 38.

34 Ibid., 127.

35 Ibid.

36 Sharpe, In the Wake, 18.

37 Ibid., 22.

38 Palmer, “‘What Feels More?’”

39 Sexton, “Social Life,” 28.

40 Ibid.

41 Ashley and Billies, “Affect & Race (Blackness),” 11.

42 Ward, Men We Reaped, 41. Rog’s words call up a long history of blues music and the notion of “laughing to keep from crying.” Langston Hughes notably produced a book of the same name and Danielle Morgan offers a powerful contemporary analysis of this concept in her work Laughing to Keep from Dying.

43 Ward, Men We Reaped, 231.

44 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, xii.

45 Ward, Men We Reaped, 231.

46 Ward, “On Witness and Respair.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stacie McCormick

Stacie McCormick is an Associate Professor of English at TCU (Texas Christian University). She is also the author of Staging Black Fugitivity published in 2019 with The Ohio State University Press in their Black Performance and Cultural Criticism Series. The book examines black dramas on slavery produced in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Her articles, theatre and book reviews have been published in Modern Drama, MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the US), Theatre Journal, College Language Association Journal, Imagining the Black Female Body, and others. She is currently editing a special issue on Toni Morrison and Adaptation for College Literature.