My people are still poor. They're still working class. All of the characters that I write about are inspired by the community that I'm from.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the author's deep connection to their working-class community and highlights the struggles of their people.
Jesmyn Ward emphasizes the impact of her background on her writing, drawing inspiration from the challenges faced by her community. She acknowledges the ongoing struggles of poverty and the working class, suggesting that her characters are a reflection of the real experiences and emotions of those around her. This statement reveals the importance of authenticity in storytelling and the responsibility of the writer to represent their community's voice.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of representation in literature, one might quote Ward to highlight the connection between authors and their communities.
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.
Find fault when you must find fault in private, and if possible sometime after the offense, rather than at the time.
When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces. The man who'd introduced them didn't much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.
All the feeling which my father could not put into words was in his hand-any dog, child or horse would recognize the kindness of it.
I want to spend my time with people who don't look to be respected. But such good people won't want to spend their time with me.
There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.
If your mother did not know how to love herself, or your father did not know how to love himself, then it would be impossible for them to teach you to love yourself. They were doing the best they could with what they had been taught as children.
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