People ask me all the time, 'Why did I move home?' As well as I can articulate it, that's why. I moved home because I love the community that I come from.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a deep appreciation for one's roots and community.
Jesmyn Ward highlights the importance of community and belonging, explaining that her decision to return home is driven by love for the place and people that shaped her. This reflects a sentiment many feel towards their hometowns, emphasizing that personal connections often outweigh other motivations in life.
In practice
In a personal essay reflecting on one's upbringing.
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.
If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.
Relationship are part of the vast plan for our enlightenment.
Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.
Isn't that the problem? That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion (as it were) for passion?
The people who have adored me-- there have not been very many, but there have been some-- have always insisted on living on, long after I had ceased to care for them, or they to care for me.
Do not bring people in your life who weigh you down. And trust your instincts ... good relationships feel good. They feel right. They don't hurt. They're not painful. That's not just with somebody you want to marry, but it's with the friends that you choose. It's with the people you surround yourselves with.
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