“We Ain’t Going Nowhere. We Here”

Survival and Witness in Jesmyn Ward’s Fiction and Nonfiction

Abstract

Jesmyn Ward’s oeuvre belongs to an area of the American literary canon that has notable antecedents in the novels of William Faulkner, Zora Neal Hurston and Toni Morrison, and her themes and style show also a polyphony and a sense of the tragic explicitly reminiscent of Ancient Greek tragedy. My article employs Christina Sharpe’s concept of the wake to analyze how – in her novels, memoirs, and nonfiction – Ward manages to work within that literary tradition and with the burdening history (both past and present) of Black people and to produce narratives in which there may be no space for redemption, but which nonetheless show a peculiar sense of hope, grounded on the concepts of survival and witness. In Ward’s writing, survival and witness become the elements that allow an unexpected radiance to shed among the desolation of her stories, thus involving readers in the act of becoming, they too, witnesses. These two
means of resistance and resilience have shaped Black people’s identity from the very beginning. A resilience that may appear pointless in the current racial waste land depicted by Ward, but which constitutes a powerful voice to reclaim dignity and humanity for her characters, her people.