We Hope Again
Essays by Jesmyn Ward offer a map toward recovery after despair
Think of Jesmyn Ward’s On Witness and Respair as a retrospective. One that, with its stride toward hope, embodies the African principle of sankofa: looking backward to look ahead. In this new collection of essays and speeches, Ward reminds us why she is a preeminent Southern writer. A Mississippian, to be sure, Ward gathers previously published works, along with several unpublished, to create something new — a map to hope for her home state, and all of us.
Ward, a professor of creative writing at Tulane University, is also author of Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), and Salvage the Bones (2011), both of which earned her the National Book Award for Fiction, as well as Let Us Descend (2023).
On first glance, the word respair may seem like a typographical error. It is not. Respair, a term not popularly used since the 1500s, defines a feeling of fresh hope, or recovery after despair. The staggering pain that Ward juxtaposes in these pages, the death of her brother with the death of Trayvon Martin, warrants such a word to describe the way forward in the aftermath. Ward’s younger brother appears in many of these works, written at various stages of her career. He is the thread. Her first struggle toward respair is in the year 2000, when he is killed by a drunk driver. She writes in a simple, standout sentence, “Joshua died.”
Those who are familiar with Ward’s prose know its lushness. How she stacks clause upon clause, with descriptions that almost drip from the page: “I’d grown up at the bottom end of the state, in a landscape riven by rivers and thickly forested, where my folks had scratched out a living for decades, planting and harvesting, losing everything every thirty years or so when hurricanes flattened us.” Beauty, desolation, and then respair. Ward moves between poetry, memoir, and analysis with a literary litheness that invites us to forget genre for the time that we spend with her.
The book traces her family history through her father, mother, and grandmother. She begins with her grandmother, Dorothy Temple, to whom the collection is dedicated. In “Why Fiction Matters” — which we discover is why all storytelling matters — she introduces us to a woman born the only surviving twin, who survived her own mother’s postpartum depression and survived the Klan. Dorothy Temple is Ward’s first storyteller and the one who admonishes Ward to “Tell it straight. Tell it all.” This charge forms Ward’s framework throughout the entire book. She deals with the beauty and ugliness. Her heroes have their evils, too.
At the center of the intertwining histories of her family is what Ward calls “blood dread.” She defines blood dread as: “That feeling of remembering oppression, remembering brutality, as it passed from generation to generation along with my family.” For Ward, these are not just epigenetics; this is a visual reliving of all that pain. In the titular essay, “On Witness and Respair: a personal tragedy followed by a pandemic,” she laments about the blood dread that she will pass on to her children in the wake of their father’s sudden death due to COVID-19. The blood dread grows with every generation.
Ward’s essays overlap in theme, but also in timeline. The benefit here is that we get a period of her life mentioned very briefly in one essay, and then zoomed in, analyzed for beauty and meaning, in the next. For instance, in “Cocoon of Sound” she recounts, “When I graduated, I tried to return to Mississippi or Georgia, but I couldn’t. I was a humanities major with no connections.” Yet in “Mercy in Motion” she slows down that summer after graduation. We discover that it is not just that she could not return, but that she could not make a living in the place that reared her: “I went to friends’ houses to use their computers to search for jobs. I filled out job application after application, printed out and mailed multiple resumes, but my English BA and my communication MA were virtually worthless in the Southern coastal economy.” In this way, she honors the urging of her grandmother to tell it all, tell it again.
Sometimes the word to describe both our experience and what we want for our world is so far from our present reality that we must travel centuries. Ward has gone this distance and returned with the word that encourages us to survive and tell the story of that survival. Respair. We hope again.
Kashif Andrew Graham is a writer and theological librarian who received the 2023 Humanities Tennessee Fellowship in Criticism. He enjoys writing poetry on his collection of vintage typewriters and is at work on a novel about an interracial gay couple living in East Tennessee.
