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.
There's an African proverb: 'When death finds you, may it find you alive.' Alive means living your own damned life, not the life that your parents wanted, or the life some cultural group or political party wanted, but the life that your own soul wants to live.
By the by, if the English race had done nothing else, yet if they left the world the notion of a gentleman, they would have done a great service to mankind.
I ask the fundamental question of rationality: Why do you believe what you believe? What do you think you know and how do you think you know it?
If companies can refuse to provide coverage for women, what other objections to the Affordable Care Act will we see based on 'religious grounds'? For that matter, will 'religious freedom' be used as an excuse to discriminate against other minorities and disenfranchised groups across the board? Where will it end?
I don't believe in that kind of American John Wayne individualism where people pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Someone changed your diapers. And if that's the case, you ain't self-made.
The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.