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.
And that's the insult of it, how always it comes back to a woman being a "good" mother in the world's eyes or a "bad" mother, how everything in a woman's life is funneled through her body between her legs.
You have to see and smell and feel the circumstances of people to really understand them.
Marriage is sanctified when it is cherished and honored in holiness. That union is not merely between husband and wife; it embraces a partnership with God.
Bitter words normally evaporate with the moisture of breath, after a quarrel. In order to become permanent, they require transcribers, reporters, complicit black hearts.
I know that I need honesty from the people I interview. I also know that the truth is more interesting than made up stuff, and also, people don't connect with you if you're not honest.
This industry is tough on relationships. I've always thought that my wife should have a credit up alongside mine because I couldn't do what I do without her support.
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