Mapping the Lost Home: Psalm 137 and Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing

Abstract

Mapping the Lost Home: Psalm 137 and Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing Rachel Ewing Jesmyn Ward’s 2017 novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, tells the story of Jojo, a thirteen-year-old biracial boy in coastal Mississippi, and his family as they struggle to navigate issues of grief and addiction rooted in the generational trauma of racist oppression. When Jojo’s father Michael, a former meth cook, is released from the Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman Farm, Jojo accompanies his mother Leonie, baby sister Kayla, and questionable family friend Misty on a road trip across the state to bring Michael home. Although the family is temporarily reunited, theirs is not a happy ending. Grandmother and matriarch Philomène dies of cancer; Jojo learns the horrific truth about his beloved grandfather River’s own time as a prisoner; and Leonie and Michael’s meth addiction intensifies. Anxious and restless, Jojo begins walking the woods near his home. In the final pages of the novel, such a walk leads him to something strange: a tree full of ghosts, with bird-like spirits perched two or three to a branch “all the way up to the top, to the feathered leaves” (282). The vision, which Kayla also sees when she and River follow Jojo, evokes the horrors of lynching, the “strange fruit” of Abel Meeropol’s poem and Billie Holiday’s famous song. Readers might also think of the tree of crucifixion, or the baobab tree of African legend.1 Considered alongside the ghosts’ behavior, however—the [End Page 143] “speaking” of the trauma of their death, and their longing remembrance of “home” when Kayla sings—the tree of ghosts functions as a modified iteration of the poplar(s) (or willow[s]) of Psalm 137, sometimes called the Tree of Lamentations, in which the exiled Judean singers hang their harps on the bank in Babylon. 1By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.2There on the poplars we hung our harps,3for there our captors asked us for songs, our tormentors demanded songs of joy; they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” 4How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land?5If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill.6May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you,if I do not consider Jerusalem my highest joy.2 The psalm has a long history in resistance art. Rose Lucas, among many others, explains its adaptation to “articulate Caribbean and African-American experiences of colonisation and its resistant voices” (2) to express an important liberation theme in Rasta reggae music, and to contrast European and Indigenous experiences in Australian culture. In linking the landscape of the Mississippi coast to the site of exile on the riverbanks of Babylon, Ward brings these associations to bear. As we will see, the adaptation of the psalmist’s tree and the actions of the ghosts—the “speaking” of their trauma, their participation in Kayla’s song, and their refusal to leave the branches—allows the final scene of the novel to encompass both cathartic release and a lament for the loss of a symbolically complex “home,” a lament for a loss that is both past and ongoing, atemporal and rooted in a history of racial oppression. [End Page 144] Avoiding overly simplistic optimism, the ending of the novel is an expression of trauma that in its very existence resists erasure, a complex act of mourning that maps the contours of an unbearable vanishing point as well as a possible path forward. I The adaptation of the tree of Psalm 137 emphasizes “home” as a symbolic and psychological space. Composed after the burning of Jerusalem, the psalm is a lament not only for a physical homeland and cultural identity but also for social bonds previously used to define subjecthood. In the novel, the ghost of the murdered Richie, a boy who served time in Parchman with River, explicitly connects the concept of home to love and family, rather than physical space: “Home...