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.
Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.
Dating is pressure and tension. What is a date, really, but a job interview that lasts all night?
In the confusion we stay with each other, happy to be together, speaking without uttering a single word.
It was like she was cheated. Only nobody had cheated her. So there was nobody to take it out on. However, just the same she had that feeling. Cheated.
Marriage is the most natural state of man, and... the state in which you will find solid happiness.
If you're black, you got to look at America a little bit different. You got to look at America like the uncle who paid for you to go to college, but who molested you.
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