My brother died when he was 19, so a part of me indulges and thinks that some part of him that made him uniquely him is out there, on another plane. So inventing the fictional afterlife in 'Sing, Unburied, Sing' was a way of making that wish real.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the belief in an afterlife and how personal loss inspires creativity.
Jesmyn Ward expresses the deep emotional impact of losing her brother at a young age and how this loss influenced her creative process. In her work 'Sing, Unburied, Sing', she embodies her desire to believe that a part of her brother continues to exist in some form, and through fiction, she seeks to reconcile her grief with the hope of an afterlife. This highlights how personal experiences, especially loss, can drive artistic expression and shape narratives about existence beyond death.
In practice
In a personal reflection on loss during a speech.
I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans - but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?
In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It's not as though my life won't be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will.
The ugly heart of the South still beats with this idea that one group of people is worth less.
Katrina silenced me for two years. I wrote a 12-page essay on my experience in Katrina, and that's it. I didn't write anything for, like, two, two and a half years after Katrina hit because it was so traumatic.
Hip-hop, which is my generation's blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world through language.
With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of their personality. It's important to me that they're complicated and that they're human.
In this breaking-through, I receive that God and I are one. Then I am what I was, and then I neither diminish nor increase, for I am then an immovable cause that moves all things.
Whoso will pray, he must fast and be clean, And fat his soul, and make his body lean.
The more we come out and do good to others, the more our hearts will be purified, and God will be in them.
No one … can entirely step out of his time, that despite his keenness of vision his thinking is in many ways bound to be influenced by the mentality of his time
All drugs of any interest to any moderately intelligent person in America are now illegal.
A King (as such) is not a great man. He has great power, but it is not his own.
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