To learn Jesmyn Ward is to be carried by her epic, transformative language to the darkish coronary heart of the American South and, as soon as there, to be shocked by the stark magnificence of the area’s individuals. Let Us Descend, the Mississippi writer’s fourth novel, brings Ward’s intimate data of place to the pre-Civil War South, the place her fascinating narrator, teenage lady Annis, is enslaved. A two-time National Book Award winner (2011’s Salvage the Bones and 2017’s Sing, Unburied, Sing), Ward writes within the traditions of William Faulkner and Toni Morrison—however this story is unmistakably her personal.
The journey begins at a North Carolina rice plantation owned by the enslaver who fathered Annis via rape. In a shady clearing within the woods, Annis’ mom teaches her to combat, but their relationship is one of intense tenderness. When the enslaver sells Annis’ mom, our heroine is left grief-wracked. Before lengthy, she too is bought downriver on a harrowing march to the slave markets of New Orleans. In North Carolina, she eavesdropped on her white half-sisters’ classes about Dante’s Divine Comedy. Now, Annis acknowledges her personal descent via the circles of hell.
Let Us Descend is infused with the supernatural. Spirits method Annis on her journey, providing safety and oblivion. Astute and intuitive, Annis steels herself in opposition to temptation, grounding herself in recollections of her mom. The theme of mothering extends to the care Annis presents to and receives from the women and girls round her, which permits the characters to keep up their dignity and assert their humanity. These interactions are a balm not solely to Annis but in addition to the reader. Ward continuously reminds us that oppressed individuals retain “soft parts” that the evils of slavery can by no means actually contact.
Though Annis seldom speaks and her dialogue typically consists of single, brief sentences, her ideas sing with Ward’s signature lyricism. Ward’s selections of first-person level of view and current tense anchor us in Annis’ creativeness. The narrator footage her mom’s eyes “shriveled to pale raisins”; the ropes that bind her are “abrasive as a cat’s tongue on my open wrists”; a dying man is “a tunneling worm, shifting the earth above him.” These vivid observations and poetic interpretations categorical her resistance in opposition to bondage, her abiding understanding of magnificence and her will to outlive.
We generally overlook that the descent in Dante’s Divine Comedy is a journey towards God. Ward’s reimagining of slavery is the profound manifestation of that chance.
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