“And Now She Sings It”: Conjure as Abolitionist Alternative in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing

Abstract

“And Now She Sings It”: Conjure as Abolitionist Alternative in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing Joanna Davis-McElligatt In this essay I contend that Jesmyn Ward’S 2017 novel Sing, Unburied, Sing constructs conjure and, more specifically, conjure healing as a decarceral strategy—or what Angela Y. Davis terms an “abolitionist alternative” (105)—to counteract racism, class bias, patriarchal domination, ecocide, and the lingering violence of enslavement and its carceral aftermath. As an African diasporic syncretic system rooted in transformation, interrelation, collectivity, and radical change, conjure exemplifies what Mariame Kaba describes as a “justice infrastructure,” or a structurally creative justice system whose practice by Indigenous and/or African peoples has been suppressed by imperialist violence (62). Transformative justice, Kaba argues, requires rethinking all forms of complicity with carceral apparatuses, creating new structures that advance collectivism and interdependence, and reducing engagement with the criminal legal system; in other words, transformative justice is a call to “not only change how we address harm but also . . . change everything” (5). To that end, I adhere to Fred Moten and Stefano Harvey’s definition of abolition as a movement concerned both with the eradication of the prison system and “the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society” (114). I argue here that Sing, Unburied, Sing reclaims conjure as a model of transformative justice that advances the survival of Black people through rituals of healing and radical change, intracommunity interdependence, and by providing methods for the redress and prevention of harm. Though the narrative structure of Sing, Unburied, Sing intentionally disrupts space-time, the novel is primarily set in 2010s Bois Sauvage, [End Page 103] Mississippi, a racially-segregated rural town on the Gulf Coast saturated by the conditions of life in the afterlife of slavery—ecological precarity, structural underdevelopment, deep poverty, early death, and carceral state violence. Among the novel’s most urgent work is its close attention to the destructive effects of these spiritual, interrelational, and environmental forces on Black life. The novel follows a family of Black conjurers struggling to survive together: Philomène, the family matriarch, her husband River, their children Given and Leonie, and their grandchildren, thirteen-year-old Jojo and three-year-old Kayla. Just as the family is connected to one another through their unique conjure powers, however, so too are they cohered—and simultaneously fractured—by the violent intrusion of the carceral state. The primary action of the novel follows Leonie, Jojo, and Kayla as they make their way from Bois Sauvage to Parchman prison to pick up the children’s white father, Michael, where he has been incarcerated. While there, Jojo meets Richie, a boy-ghost killed by River during their own joint period of childhood incarceration at Parchman. Haunting all of the text’s characters, both literally and figuratively, is Given, whose murder at the hands of Michael’s racist cousin several years before the present moments of the text results in a traumatizing trial that offers the family neither justice nor reprieve. Over the course of the novel, conjure magic and healing emerges as the family’s most powerful way to resist and circumvent the complex of violences that accompany life in a carceral state. Whereas carceral logics advance isolation, dominion over the land, hierarchical stratifications between self and other (including animals, plants, land formations, and the universe), and authoritarian control of space-time, conjure values communitarianism, sacred ecological balance, and interconnected interdependence between all living things, existing things, and their domains. As I will make clear, conjure justice can be seen as an interdimensional intercollective healing event in which the individual and their community are inevitably changed. In its emphasis on the healing event as a necessary counterpoint to harm, conjure justice infrastructures resist modes of carceral (in)justice, in particular those that emphasize isolation, separation, and confinement as punishments. Most importantly, however, conjuration holds that life continues on in the spirit world after death; in Sing, Unburied, Sing, [End Page 104] orishas, loas, and saints answer prayers, the dead can...