Remnants of Influence: Reminders of Craft and Art
An Intertextual Analysis of Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing
by Staff Writer Rasheeda A. Saka ’20
Published on September 5th, 2017 and awarded the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction, Jesmyn Ward’s third novel Sing, Unburied, Sing follows a young Black American woman, Leonie, and her two children, Jojo and Kayla, as they journey to reunite and return home with Michael, Leonie’s white lover and father of her two children, from Mississippi’s State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman Farm. The novel is set in the deep South, stretching across Louisiana and Mississippi where racial tensions remain high and permeate the text with ghostly and dangerous echoes. As such, this interracial family must navigate their own tenacious relationships, ensnared in the swamp of Southern racism and strife.
Throughout this novel, we are confronted with gory images of Black death, the unspeakable horrors and traumas of the past, and the damning bleakness of a sorry future. Rich in lyricism and harrowing imagery, Sing, Unburied, Sing alternates between three powerful voices (Leonie, Jojo, and Richie) in order to reveal the effects of their mutual plights: a young woman who is addicted to drugs and desperate to return to her lover while haunted by the ghost of her dead brother, Given, whose death was occasioned by her lover’s cousin; a young teenage boy who struggles to take care of his baby sister while trying to make sense of his world; and a dead boy — a ghost — unable to move onto to his next life without coming to terms with his own lynching, respectively.
Ward’s novel is grounded in a strong sense of narrative momentum, flitting into the lyrical and the poetic while remaining grounded in the prosaic. With so many perspectives present in her prose and so many voices crying out to us in the medley of chaos, one cannot help but notice, too, the different literary voices which call out to readers. Though I imagine there are perhaps many, the great literary predecessors that came before this novel whisper between the lines which both enriches and deepens our understanding of Ward’s text.
An astute reader would call this relationship between literary texts “intertextuality” while others may simply describe it as “stories in conversation with each other.” Regardless, it is important to recognize how literary predecessors have paved the way for certain conversations to be at the forefront of our consciousness. Ward’s novel not only aligns with past literary works but also departs from them, thereby complicating and nuancing critical ideas with a contemporary perspective.
Nonetheless, before I arrive at these analyses, I must first recount the very occasion that led me to consider the lens of intertextuality in the first place.
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On December 23rd, 2017, Sadia’s Shepard’s short story Foreign-Returned was published in The New Yorker. In Shepard’s story, we follow the protagonist, Hassan, as he attempts to forge a new life for his wife and himself in America amidst growing political tensions. Foreign-Returned has been praised for its depth and nuance in character, depicting the thorny realities of class struggle and a disintegrating sense of cultural identity.
However, only a few days after the story’s publication, American novelist and critic Francine Prose, author of Reading Like a Writer and Lovers at the Chameleon Club, made several posts on Facebook, accusing Shepard of plagiarism. She wrote:
“A few sentences into Sadia Shepard’s story “Foreign-Returned,” I began to get the eerie feeling that I knew exactly what was coming next (Fiction, January 8th). And, in fact, I did, because almost everything that happens in Shepard’s story happens in Mavis Gallant’s story The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street published, in The New Yorker, in 1963. Scene by scene, plot turn by plot turn, gesture by gesture, the Shepard story follows the Gallant — the main difference being that the characters are Pakistanis in Connecticut rather than Canadians in Geneva. Some phrases and sentences are mirrored with only a few words changed.”
After reading the short story myself, I too found harking similarities between the two pieces as Prose had discerned. The similar power dynamics, themes, and motifs began to rattle my mind too as something wrong, something obscene — a terrible act committed. Plagiarism. Nonetheless, as Prose mentioned herself, the identities of the characters remained different, as well as their circumstances and station, if you will, in society. In Shepard’s story, being a person of color has tremendous consequences and implications which differ vastly from two white Canadians who have returned to their mundane lives from a post-World War II Europe: lives which would likely never be affected by xenophobic and Islamophobic sentiment and hate crimes as they feature in Shepard’s story.
Even so, most short stories in The New Yorker are paired with a featured interview with the author of said story. In Shepard’s interview, she gave explicit credit to Gallant’s story, stating:
“This story owes a great debt to one of my favorite short-story writers, Mavis Gallant, and specifically to her story “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street.” “Ice Wagon” is a story that I return to year after year, trying to put my finger on what the peculiar alchemy between her characters is and why the story works the way that it does. I remember reading Gallant’s story — which is largely about Canadians working in Geneva — and thinking, This feels so Pakistani. Gallant’s ability to create a fictional world that conveys a sense of truth that feels universal, or that might be applicable to a completely different context, is incredibly exciting to me.”
Yet this was not enough for Prose. In her initial aforementioned comment, she was aware of Shepard’s admiration with Gallant, but still punctuated her criticism by stating, “Is it really acceptable to change the names and the identities of fictional characters and then claim the story as one’s own original work? Why, then, do we bother having copyright laws?”
While many other distinguished writers like Linda Leith agreed with Prose, there was another group of fiction writers — among them Marlon James, 2015 Man Booker Prize Winner for his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings — who challenged Prose’s critiques. James wrote:
“So after seeing all the self righteous venom being dished out on Sadia Shepard’s story in the New Yorker, which she has been clear from the get go was a deliberate homage to Mavis Gallant’s story, I, because I keep all my receipts, went back to that lovely time when Jonathan Safran Foer took as much as he wanted from Jessica Soffer’s “Beginning, End” which appeared in Granta. You know, to see if anybody in this pile-up was just as vigilant back then. Surely they complained over Facebook? Surely they emailed the New Yorker Editors? Surely they went down like a motherf**ker to tell him to go find his own voice, and not get one from a lesser known writer who was once in his then wife’s creative writing class? Surely in all their righteousness they did everything they could to snuff out his career for something that even he had to come out and defend by stating the obvious (Oh wait, that part didn’t happen). Of course it must have happened, and I just missed it, right? Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
And with his comments, racial arguments emerged. If in fact many authors — white authors — had taken similar elements of another’s fiction and revamped it in their own work, to then receive praise of adroitness, cleverness, and mastery of the literary arts, why then must it follow that, when a Pakistani-Muslim woman writer attempts such a thing, she is lambasted as a phony and accused of plagiarism? It must be, as several writers concluded, because of the very nature of her identity that such an uproar had occurred. And it was no help that Prose herself, being situated as a white woman author, was the one who offered the initial critiques over social media.
Throughout the entire ordeal, I found myself remembering the adage my previous Creative Writing professor, Neel Mukherjee, always offered during class: “literature is always in conversation with other literatures — past and present.” I have found this statement to almost be an absolute truth.
What would we be — more importantly, what would art be — without the influence and work of other artists who came before us and currently? In Ecstasy of Influence, Jonathan Lethem’s article in Harper’s Magazine, he maintains that:
“Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one’s voice isn’t just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.”
And we see this all around us. A wealth of literatures, for example, have been readapted directly from Shakespeare’s plays: Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Adam Bertocci’s Two Gentlemen of Lebowsi, Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. Even in my 14th to 18th-century English course, my professor said that when writing The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer borrowed many, many stories from a poet that had been largely unknown at the time, Giovanni Boccaccio. And who can forget Gertrude Stein’s iconic line: “a rose is a rose is a rose.” Hemingway later parodied it in his inscribed copy of Death in the Afternoon after the dissolution of their friendship: “a bitch is a bitch is a bitch.”
Keeping this pressing phenomenon of literary influence in mind, I want to discern and highlight the most likely sources informing Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward: namely, Pulitzer-Prize and American Book Award winner Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Nobel Prize laureate William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and esteemed writer Richard Wright’s poem Between the World and Me. By no means do my analyses attempt to conclude neatly that the following writers must have had an influence on Ward while she wrote her novel, as there is no way to acquire that information except from Ward herself. I merely mention these writers because their works have been canonized and engage critically with ideas of family, race, and the South. To simply overlook such intertextuality would be to miss an essential piece of any conversation worth having around Ward’s novel.
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Morrison and Ward: The Living Haunt the Dead, and the Dead Haunt the Living
Just as the dead haunt the living in Toni Morrison’s highly acclaimed novel Beloved, so do the dead in Ward’s haunting tale. The dead in Ward’s case is Richie, a twelve-year old black boy who was sent to Parchman for petty theft when he tried to provide food for his starving younger siblings, and Given, Leonie’s brother, killed by a white man in a hunting accident. Throughout the novel, Richie spends his time in Parchman with Jojo’s grandfather, Pop, who does not talk about his time in prison explicitly. Pop usually offers Jojo terse anecdotes or uncontextualized comments — in other words, crumbs of the past. Whenever Jojo comes close to discovering the true nature of Pop’s time in Parchman, Pop is taciturn — downcast and dolorous. Jojo nevertheless recognizes Richie immediately, seeing him for the first time after being reunited with his father at Parchman.
The dead in Morrison’s case is Beloved, an ambiguous woman whom many presume to be Sethe’s dead daughter materialized. Many would argue she returns to haunt Sethe not only for shooing away her ghostly presence from their house, 124, but also because Sethe butchered her daughter in the first place, so that Beloved would not have to return to American chattel slavery.
Unlike the dead in Morrison’s novel, Richie has not returned merely to haunt the main characters. More importantly, he wants to move on to his next life, but cannot on his own: he needs the help of Pop to do so. At this point in the narrative, it makes sense for readers to be puzzled by the lack of details surrounding Richie’s quest. However, by the end of the novel, we learn more about the cause of his violent death: fed up with the woes and cruelty of prison life, Richie resolved to escape. And he did — if for only a moment. Once he was captured, the white prison guards tortured him — skinned him alive — and to suspend his suffering, Pop killed him.
Like Sethe’s murder of her own child, Pop killed a young boy akin to his child to prevent the unruly suffering and the burden of living a life in a world where black bodies are treated as disposable and subhuman. The key differences, though, lie in gender and temporality. Pop is a man while Sethe is a mother. The story of the former takes place not during antebellum American chattel slavery but rather during the age of mass incarceration and chain gangs as a new kind of slavery. These differences are critical at this time as we discuss the complexities of race and the continued subjugation and policing of Black Americans, via what many call new institutions of slavery and oppression.
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Faulkner and Ward: Perspective, Time, and Death
As I mentioned previously, Sing, Unburied, Sing does not follow one character and instead alternates between three perspectives. The choice to vacillate between characters in this way is not a new one. Ward being the Southern writer she is having grown up in DeLisle, Mississippi, I will now turn to one of the most prominent Southern writers in American history who practiced a similar narrative technique in a novel centering on the precariousness of a family dealing with death and honoring the dead: William Faulkner’s 1930 As I Lay Dying.
Presumably, As I Lay Dying was written in a frenzy — only over the course of six short weeks. This novel follows fifteen different characters as they attempt to reconcile the death of their wife and mother, Addie Bundren, and grapple with her wish to be buried with her other relatives in Mississippi rather than with her own family members.
A similar turmoil is present towards the end of Ward’s novel when Leonie struggles to accept that her mother, Mam, wants to die, and the ways in which her mother needs Leonie to be an accomplice in it. From a different perspective, we also learn of Jojo’s desire to help Richie pass on to his next life. At the same time, Mam passes away, and in turn Jojo grows to resent his mother. In both Faulkner’s and Ward’s work, we trace the lives of characters who embrace death in selfish and selfless ways — both the virtuous and the flawed. Yet, moving beyond this, Ward brings more complex dynamics to familial relationships and death with regards to race, spirituality, and mysticism as they reconcile their own skeletons and inner demons.
In As I Lay Dying, we follow a family traveling by foot to bury their matriarch, whereas in Sing, Unburied, Sing we follow a Black family traveling to a state penitentiary. It is this journey and analogous sense of movement which recalls a specific past, informing how characters will contend with their uncertain futures. In other words, through the journey, many characters face unbearable pain — consider, perhaps, Anse’s refusal to accept aid and nourishment from strangers, leaving his dysfunctional family hungry and homeless; or perhaps Leonie’s inability to look after her children even though they are tired and sick, begging for proper nourishment from a woman who is blinded by her own love for Michael. In the chaos of Sing, Unburied, Sing, we begin to understand how larger conversations about intergenerational trauma and institutional systems (i.e. mass incarceration, the legacies of slavery, the “war on drugs”, etc.) affect and are reflected by a singular familial unit.
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Wright and Ward: Some Things Are Just Between the World and Me
Richard Wright’s poem Between the World and Me, published in the July/August 1935 Issue of the Partisan Review, captures what it means to bear witness to trauma in the profound and excruciating ways. The speaker of this poem “stumbled suddenly upon the thing” one morning, quickly thrusting us into the moment of a Black man’s lynching. The scene is grisly: “a design of white bones slumbering forgottenly”, “a vacant shoe, an empty tie, a ripped shirt, a lonely hat/ and a pair of trousers stiff with black blood.” Upon witnessing the “eye sockets of a stony skull,” the lynching event materializes and the victim’s death is imminent: his “dry bones stirred, rattled, lifted, melting themselves / into my bones. The grey ashes formed flesh firm and black, entering into my flesh.” And thereafter, he receives his “baptism of gasoline” set in a “blaze of red”. This poem is meant to convey the very real fears of an unwarranted death, and the uneasiness of living in America for Black people whose lives are considered valueless.
In Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, a similar scene appears in the last chapter of the novel. With Mam gone, both Leonie and Michael become absentee parents, wandering in and out of Jojo’s and Kayla’s lives while indulging themselves with hard drugs and alcohol. Jojo finds himself walking in the woods when he encounters a tree filled with ghosts:
“They are full with ghosts, two or three, all the way up to the top, to the feathered leaves. There are women and men and boys and girls. Some of them near to babies. They crouch, looking at me. Black and brown and the closest near baby, smoke white. None of them reveal their deaths, but I see it in their eyes, their great black eyes. They perch like birds, but they look as people. They speak with their eyes: He raped me and suffocated me until I died I put my hands up and he shot me eight times she locked me in the shed and starved me to death while I listened to by babies playing with her in the yard they came in my cell in the middle of the night…” (Ward 282).
The frenzy of this chilling image recalls that of Wright’s speaker upon being figuratively thrust onto the body of a Black man who was lynched. Though Ward’s image is of not one person, but many, there is a common feeling of being able to sense the deaths of those unknown to you — but could very well be you — on a visceral level. This feeling is essential to understanding intergenerational trauma and death that lingers. Ward offers a hopeful form of healing when Kayla, Jojo’s baby sister, begins to sing to the ghosts in a “song of mismatched, half-garbled words” (283). In response, “the ghosts open their mouths wider and their faces fold at the edges so they look like they’re crying, but they can’t” but they soon “smile with something like relief, something like remembrance, something like ease” (Ward 284).
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Ultimately, one can conclude that almost all art is in conversation with other arts, past or present (or even both). As we see by analyzing Jesmyn Ward’s novel Sing, Unburied, Sing, recognizing intertextuality does more than deepen our understanding of integral themes in these works of literature. Doing so also calls us to perceive other factors previously unconsidered. Like the case of Sadia Shepard’s Foreign-Returned, different perspectives emerge on race, politics, and institutional oppression when we read intertextually.
The remnants of influence that we find between works of literature, and all works of art more generally, should serve as a reminder that we are all trying to tell stories which are ultimately part of one story — a story of humanity in all of its multifaceted and varying forms.
Works Cited
Lethem, Jonathan. “The Ecstasy of Influence.” Harper’s Magazine, Harper’s Magazine Foundation, 2007, harpers.org/archive/2007/02/the-ecstasy-of-influence.
Shepard, Sadia. “‘Foreign-Returned.’” The New Yorker, The New Yorker, 23 Dec. 2017, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/08/foreign-returned.
Treisman, Deborah. “Sadia Shepard on the Nuances of Immigration and Cultural Identity.” The New Yorker, The New Yorker, 22 Dec. 2017, www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/fiction-this-week-sadia-shepard-2018-01-08.
Ward, Jesmyn. Sing, Unburied, Sing. Kindle, ed., Scribner, 2017.
Wright, Richard. Between the World and Me. Retrieved from: https://www.mun.ca/educ/faculty/hammett/between.htm.
