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.
Forgiveness in the heart comes about when the walls of separation in the mind fall.
I've always been Sarah. My gender identity has always existed. I've always been a woman. Gay people aren't straight before they come out as gay, and transgender people are who they are before they come out and transition.
One cannot watch chimpanzee infants for long without realizing that they have the same emotional need for affection and reassurance as human children.
If a relationship is perfectly natural there will be a complete fusion of the happiness of both of you-owing to fellow-feeling and various other laws which govern our natures, this is, quite simply, the greatest happiness that can exist.
A woman's heart should be so hidden in God that a man has to seek Him just to find her.
I have learned to imagine an invisible sign around each person's neck that says 'Make me feel important.
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