Women’s Prize 2018: Sing, Unburied, Sing

“After the first fat flush of life, time eats away at things: it rusts machinery, it matures animals to become hairless and featherless, and it withers plants”

Jesmyn Ward’s fifth novel Sing, Unburied, Sing is the first one I’ve read by her, but I’ve been hearing great things for a while. This is why I jumped to read this as my first pick from the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist, and I was definitely impressed. I’m always cautious of categorising something — a book, a film, or whatever — as “important”. Not only is it very subjective and has become a buzz-word of sorts, a book isn’t good just because it deals with “important” themes, often meaning current political or social issues. A book can claim to be ‘about race’ or ‘about feminism’ but it’s the execution that matters; I don’t care for base-level observations about what’s oh-so-wrong with our society, I enjoy deep analysis about all sides of the issue, and that’s what Ward does well with Sing, Unburied, Sing.

This novel is a probing look at racial tensions in the US, alongside a deeply affecting study of an African-American family living in Mississippi. It’s about the ghosts that haunt this family and keep them tethered to their past. And in just 285 pages, Ward manages to balance a deep, convincing character study of this specific family and their complicated relationships with one another, whilst zooming out to locate them in a much wider conversation on the African-American experience.

There are two main narrative voices in this book: JoJo, the thirteen year old son of a black mother and white father, and his mother, Leonie. This is one complicated family. JoJo and his 3 year old sister Kayla are primarily cared for by their elderly grandparents. JoJo and Kayla’s father, Michael, is in prison. Their grandmother is dying, their grandfather is haunted by memories of his own incarceration. Their white grandparents are racist assholes, so refuse to have a relationship with the children. And Leonie’s brother Given was killed in his youth by Michael’s cousin. And Leonie sees him as a ghost when she’s high. Leonie is an absent mother, and disappears for periods of time on drug-fuelled benders.

The centre of the narrative is a road-trip to Parchman prison, to pick up Michael, who is being released. Leonie decides that, along with her friend Misty, she’s also going to bring along her children to welcome their father home, in an attempt to re-establish herself as a mother to these two children who don’t see her as one. Her all-encompassing relationship with Michael — which frequently flits between passion and hatred — and her desire to have them back as a family unit is a way of seeming that way on the surface, though, because Leonie doesn’t have a maternal bone in her body. What really impressed me with this novel is Ward’s ability to write so wonderfully whilst writing about such ugly things. Not a thing is sugar-coated in this story, and it mimics JoJo’s own realisation — as he learns what it means to be a man — that life is truly unjust.

I won’t lie to you, there are parts of this book that are not fun at all to read. Kayla spends much of the car journey to Parchman sick, and there are some really lovely, elaborate descriptions of her vomiting. And the journey home is no less visceral; their car is pulled over by the police, and Leonie has to swallows her entire bag of meth, which has a hole in it. The words that follow describe the drug working its way into Leonie’s system:

“I bend in half, my mouth in my elbow and knees, and moan. Wish it was Mama’s lap. My jaw clacks and grinds. I swallow. I breathe. All delicious and damned.”

I loved the character of Leonie. Or rather, I love how authentic she felt; her personality is very unlikable. But Ward made her real, not reduced to one aspect of her personality. Leonie is a drug addict and neglectful of her children, yes, but she’s also plagued by memories of her murdered younger brother. And whilst she thinks some awful things about her children, you can really feel the struggle of someone who may not have wanted to be a mother, who is still a child herself really.

“I’m tired of this shit,’ I say. I don’t know why I say it. Maybe because I’m tried of driving, tired of the road stretching before me endlessly, Michael always at the opposite end of it, no matter how far I go, how far I drive. Maybe because part of me wanted her to leap for me, to smear orange vomit over the front of my shirt as her little tan body sought mine, always sought mine, our hearts separated by the thin cages of our ribs, exhaling and inhaling, our blood in sync. Maybe because I want her to burrow in to me for succor instead of her brother. Maybe because Jojo doesn’t even look at me, all his attention on the body in his arms, the little person he’s trying to soothe, and my attention is everywhere. Even now, my devotion: inconstant.”

In Sing, Unburied, Sing, Ward invokes two masterpieces of southern American literature as she establishes herself within this literary tradition. The most obvious one is Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying; Ward has stated that this was a source of inspiration for the book’s multiple first-person narrators, and the plot itself is closely tied to that of Faulkner’s as well. Another reference that readers might recognise is to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, in which a former slave is haunted by the ghost of her daughter, the one she murdered to save her from a life of slavery. One of the ghosts in Sing, Unburied, Sing mimics this pretty clearly: the ghost of 12 year old Richie, Pop’s former inmate at Parchman prison, who he killed to spare him further suffering after an attempted escape. The other ghostly presence — Leonie’s brother Given — also serves as a reminder of the continued brutality of racism in the United States. Given, a popular footballer player in high school, was friends with both his black and white teammates, including Michael’s cousin. Despite his father’s warnings about white people, Given went hunting with a group, and after winning a bet with Michael’s cousin, was shot and killed by him. Of course, following this, it was described as a ‘hunting accident’. Although the ghosts in this book do offer some insight into the historical suffering of African-Americans, I felt that that they — particularly Given — were at points ineffective, and didn’t add much to the story.

I loved Sing, Unburied, Sing and was thoroughly captivated by Ward’s prose and her characters, but this book has also been described as weaker in comparison to her previous works. So I’ll definitely be picking one of those up soon, because I’m sure I’ll adore them just as much.