A complex novel highlighting everything converse to the American dream

Throughout the story, ghosts are seen, voices are heard and spirits are invoked

REVIEWER: SUE TOWNSEND

IN a tweet, Margaret Atwood said: “This wrenching new novel by Jesmyn Ward digs deep into the not-buried heart of the American nightmare.” Strong words indeed. Another quote, this time from William Faulkner: “To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi”. Ward achieved literary fame in 2011, when she won the National Book Award for her second novel, Salvage the Bones, Following on from her first novel, Where the Line Bleeds, the characters in Salvage live in the fictional Mississippi Gulf Coast village of Bois Sauvage, based on Ward’s own native village of DeLisle. Now, having spent the last few years as an associate professor of English at Tulane University and, before that, in various academic posts, six years and two non-fiction books later, Ward has returned to fiction and to Bois Sauvage, with Sing, Unburied, Sing, a magical realism tale about race, family and the long shadow of history. This book has won the 2017 National Book Award for fiction. The family consists of Pop and Mam, a black couple farming their small holding; their daughter Leonie (in Ward’s own words: “an irresponsible mom”) and her children Jojo and Kayla. Leonie, a mother at 17, is hooked on drugs, married to a white man named Michael, whose cousin killed her brother and who is himself completing a jail sentence. Their son Jojo acts as a bridge between the grandparents who have raised him (Pop struggling with his memories; Mam dying of cancer) and his toddler sister, Kayla, who looks to him for comfort rather than from Leonie. Jojo has just turned 13, neither a child nor yet a man. The white grandparents refuse to acknowledge either Leonie or their mixed race grandchildren. When Leonie hears that Michael is about to be released from prison, she packs her children and her drug-addicted white friend, Misty, into her car and they set off on the long trip north to fetch him. The road journey occupies the main part of the story and is a dreadful (in the true sense of the word) odyssey full of meanness, dodgy drug deals and the two kids teetering between nausea and ravenous hunger. On the way back they are stopped by a white police officer who orders them all out and handcuffs them, including Jojo. To avoid the discovery of the crystal meth they have with them, Leonie swallows the baggie and they are released after Kayla obligingly vomits onto the officer’s front. Throughout the story, ghosts are seen, voices are heard and spirits are invoked. This is particularly evident in the final section of the book as Mam is dying. Jojo, who can hear what animals are thinking, is the endearing heart of the novel. The chaotic journey at its centre and Ward’s evoking of the region’s dark histories are more impressive than her attempts at magic realism in the second half. Nevertheless, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a brooding, pained meditation on the American nightmare.