Coming Back Home to Oppressive Mississippi: A Figurative Study of Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped

Michał Choiński

doi:10.7311/pjas.15/1/2021.11

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to discuss the figurative aspects of Jesmyn Ward’s The Men We Reaped (2013). In her memoir, Ward demonstrates the connections between the systemic racism in the US South and the tragic stories of five African-American men who were close to her, and who died between 2000-2004. The tragic loss of these lives is presented through a number of figurative images which present the region through the metaphors of predatory animals, physical burdens and uncanny doubling. Also, the article reflects on how Ward coped with the trauma of loss through her writings, and how, in numerous interviews, she justified her decision to return home to Mississippi and to settle there, in spite of the systemic racism and the trauma of loss.

Highlights

The aim of the paper is to discuss the figurative aspects of Jesmyn Wards’ The Men We Reaped (2013)
Jesmyn Ward explained her key preoccupations as a writer: “How does the past bear fruit? And why are we often so blind to it? I find myself writing around that question again and again with different sets of characters” (267)
The tragic deaths are inevitably connected with systemic racism of the South and social adversities that the members of the AfricanAmerican community in Mississippi are forced to struggle with

Summary

Southern Homecomings

The theme of a departure from home and a subsequent return played an important role in the literature of the American South in the 20th century. Burger’s series of interviews with people who came back home demonstrates that apart from being a confrontation with childhood memories and traumas, the act of homecoming is oftentimes an emotional process of healing and personal growth. Fitzhugh Brundage, observes that a plethora of memoirs that emerged from the poor South, gave rise to an entire “social history of remembering in the South” (3) These memories, among which one may include Harry Crews’s A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (1978), Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), or Rick Bragg’s All Over but the Shoutin’ (1997), tell the tales of Southern racial, social and economic struggles. Jesmyn Ward’s memoir follows a long tradition of Southern writing in which the act of homecoming becomes a vital element of the fundamental critique of the region

Narrative Ruthlessness

Findings

The Burden of Homecoming