A reminder in San Franciso Bay of the end of slavery in 1865.
Photo: dpa
Jesmyn Ward is one of the great names in contemporary American literature. At the same time, she is a pioneer, a figurehead of postcolonial storytelling. Ward is not only the first woman and African American to win the National Book Award, the most important literary award in the United States, twice. This honor was otherwise only given to William Faulkner, John Cheever, John Updike and Philip Roth. And no one was younger than at the time of the second award.
In her two novels, “Salvage the Bones” from 2011 and “Sing, Unburied, Sing” from 2017, Ward addressed marginalization and racial stigmatization of the African American population of the southern United States. Starting from the family microcosm, Ward painted a picture of a present in which the destructive legacy of colonialism and slavery is imprinted in all its facets. The peculiar speechlessness of the community, which results from a lack of historical self-confidence, from the lack of traditional experiences of self-efficacy, was made legible by Ward by transcending into natural religious and mythical traditions, the echoes of collective trauma hallucination.
In her new novel, Ward also zooms in on the stories, feelings and bodies of her protagonists in order to create a cosmos of collective experience of violence from the inner lives of the characters. This time, however, the gaze is directed directly into the historical abyss: Ward has written a novel about slavery.
“Let us descend”, released in the USA in 2023, is set in the period before the American Civil War and tells the story of a girl who grows up as a slave on a rice farm in Carolina and is ultimately sold to the owner of a sugar cane plantation in Louisiana. Ulrike Becker, who translated Jesmyn Ward’s first two novels into German, is once again responsible for the translation. A commendable and creative work has been done here, because “So we go down,” as the German title says, is characterized by a lyrical language that is rich in metaphors, metonymies and physical experience and spatial-historical conditions merge into one another in surreal border crossings lets. The use of poetic language, the typical Ward sound, should not obscure the hardness of the reading. Immersing yourself in the reality of an enslaved child’s life is full of horror, despite all the linguistic beauty.
The focus is on young Annis, who is kept with her mother by a plantation owner in Carolina. Annis’ grandmother was kidnapped from Africa as a warrior, pregnant, Annis’ mother was born into complete lawlessness. In this world of slavery, in which the women and men of the disenfranchised live separately from each other, the grandmother passed on the knowledge of self-sufficiency in nature and the art of fighting to her daughter. The spirit of resistance and the will for freedom, which is ultimately reproduced in Annis, is rooted in this secretly preserved ability.
The grotesque and totalitarian way in which slavery penetrates the collective history of the enslaved and extinguishes their own lives is nevertheless expressed in Ward’s main character, who was conceived during one of the plantation owner’s numerous rapes of his mother. Ward leaves no doubt: Slavery rests on the pillar of patriarchy alongside racism.
In the course of the plot, in which Annis is separated from her mother and finally, after she escapes her father’s incipient sexual assaults, is sold to a slave trader from New Orleans and finally to Louisiana, the adolescent girl goes through a walk through hell stinking world full of villainy, inhumanity and omnipresent death. In painting this Hades, Ward skillfully pulls out all the stops of her creative language, creating a nightmarish and very plastic reality.
As a resonance body for the collective experience of the racialized and enslaved, which knows no history, Ward allows chthonic gods to appear, elemental spirits with whom Annis communicates in her distress. Through her poignant portrayal of her character’s emotional life, Ward establishes a permanent contradiction to the world around her, an incompatibility that can only end in freedom or death.
This girl’s story is a tender and strong statement of humanity against racism, colonial thinking and a reign of violence.
Jesmyn Ward: So let’s go down. A.d. American English v. Ulrike Becker. Kunstmann, 304 p., hardcover, €26.