’There are many stories I could tell’: Cultural Memory and Trauma in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing

Emlékezet, trauma és gyógyulás Jesmyn Ward Salvage the Bones és Sing, Unburied, Sing c. regényeiben

Khedhir, Yesmina

Gaál-Szabó, Péter

Irodalom- és Kultúratudományok Doktori Iskola

Bölcsészettudományi Kar::Angol-Amerikai Intézet

2024-06-11T10:32:27Z

2024-06-11T10:32:27Z

2024

2024-06-25

African American Literature

American South

Jesmyn Ward

memory

trauma

haunting

eco-memory

motherhood

familial care

healing

survival

afro-amerikai irodalom

az amerikai Dél

anyaság

családi gondoskodás

emlékezet

kísértés

gyógyulás

Jesmyn Ward

ökoemlékezet

trauma

túlélés

Irodalom- és kultúratudományok

Bölcsészettudományok

Abstract The dissertation examines the multiple aspects of memory and trauma in Jesmyn Ward’s two critically acclaimed novels, Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017). I argue that Ward recovers past and more recent memories and traumas to turn them into narratives of individual and collective survival and healing. The major mechanism of survival/healing Ward emphasizes is reconnection: to the past, nature, the family, and the community. The reward of such reconnection is a grounded sense of identity and community through a reconfigured knowledge of the past. In light of key notions related to memory and trauma studies that I explain in the first introductory chapter, the dissertation identifies four major tropes in Ward’s two novels addressed in four respective analytical chapters: haunting, ecomemory, motherhood, and familial care. The trope of haunting reads the ghost figure from two different perspectives and identifies two major functions in connection with it. While most critics tend to link the ghost figure to magic realism or to the Southern Gothic tradition, I examine it, first, from an Africanist perspective to define it accordingly as a tool for cultural reclamation. Second, the ghost plays the role of historical “revisioning” by invoking individual and more historical traumas, slavery and lynching in particular, while connecting them to their ongoing legacies in the present lives of the main characters. Haunting proves also important in the way it instigates healing, allowing traumatized characters to face their violent past, verbalize their traumas, and ultimately come to terms with them. The trope of ecomemory offers an ecological reading of memory and trauma in the two novels based on Kimberly Ruffin’s “ecological beauty-and-burden paradox.” It shows, in the first part, the symbiotic and healing relationship between the characters and their Southern landscape in Sing. As a female healer and Vodou practitioner, Mam, the matriarch of the family in the novel, cultivates a spiritual connection with the land. Her masculine counterpart, Pop, maintains a similar harmonious relationship with nature in line with his African, Christian, and Native American beliefs and worldviews. Moving to the burden aspect of Ruffin’s ecological dichotomy, the second part of the chapter focuses on environmental racism and ecological trauma in Salvage. It examines the Batiste family’s “disposability” in their environment as well as their struggle with Hurricane Katrina, a natural disaster that I also read as an individual and a collective/cultural trauma. The third aspect relates to motherhood as a central topic in Ward’s cultural narratives. While the experience of motherhood is represented as intrinsically traumatic in the two novels, it also emerges as a source of strength and power for the Black female. Through two contradictory maternal figures—the two female protagonists in Salvage and Sing, Esch and Leonie, respectively—Ward emphasizes the role of motherhood in coping with trauma by showcasing the redeeming potential of reconnection with motherhood and underscoring the cultural dissociation that results from the disconnection from the motherline. The last aspect of care reveals the strength of the Black family and stresses the healing power of familial/communal love. Through the example of two poor yet resilient Black families struggling with both past and current traumatic instances, Ward forges in her two novels a culture of care that centralizes familial bonds, including sibling relationships and the nurturing role of the Black male in affecting healing on the individual, familial, and communal levels.

angol

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https://hdl.handle.net/2437/372311