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.
Interpretation
Hip-hop serves as a vital means of expression and understanding for the characters in my writing.
In this quote, Jesmyn Ward emphasizes the significance of hip-hop as a cultural touchstone for her generation, paralleling it to the blues of earlier times. She suggests that hip-hop provides a unique linguistic framework through which her characters navigate and interpret their experiences in the world, thus highlighting its role not just as music, but as a vital form of storytelling and self-expression.
In practice
In a discussion on contemporary music's influence on society, you could quote this to emphasize hip-hop's cultural importance.
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.
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.
I think people make certain assumptions about what they're interested in reading or what others would be interested in reading, and when they think of poor black people in the South, they don't think people are interested in reading about those people.
Maybe I am not very human - what I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.
If you want a bourgeois existence, you shouldn't be an actor. You're in the wrong profession.
I love theatre - it's where I started - and I've directed a play myself. I'm not sure if I want to direct a film, but certainly, as an actress, I'm always thinking, 'Surely this must be my last film.'
A person who's only suffering can't write a poem. There are choices to be made, and you need to be objective.
If we don't tell our own stories, no one else will.
...And, all at once, the moon arouse through the thin ghastly mist, And was crimson in color... And they lynx which dwelleth forever in the tomb, came out therefrom. And lay down at the feet of the demon. And looked at him steadily in the face.
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