Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend Takes Readers on a Magically Harrowing Journey https://ift.tt/tzo6Sef
Two-time National Award Book-winning novelist Jesmyn Ward’s newest offering, Let Us Descend, opens in the rice fields of North Carolina with the line, “The first weapon I ever held was my Mother’s hand.” Ward then carries her readers to Louisiana, delving into the depths of a place both rich and necessary to fully understand the story’s protagonist, Annis. When Annis, a young enslaved girl, is nearly assaulted by the same man who also assaulted her mother, Sasha, and fathered Annis, the two women are parted. Sasha is sold to another forced labor camp for stopping her daughter’s attack, and armed with the weapons her mother provided, Annis must embark on a path that will require all the grit and determination her mother tried to instill in her from a young age, including combat training Sasha once learned from Annis’ grandmother, an African warrior queen stolen and brought to America. Now, Annis carries only the stories of her mother and her grandmother, and their family’s history prior to their lives in America.
But the loss of her mother is only the first of many hardships and losses which Annis faces. Through it all, she must remain true and resilient, even when she and Safi, a fellow enslaved woman she falls in love with and finds comfort in, are sold and sent on a harrowing journey. As they march, beaten and belittled, through swamps from sunup till sundown, both nearly drowned and starved, and even when Safi finds a way to escape and leave, Annis holds her mother’s lessons close in order to survive. Along the way, Annis encounters a wind spirit who calls herself Mama Aza, after Annis’ warrior queen grandmother. But though fickle Mama Aza protects Annis from the other spirits and shows Annis many truths of her history, Annis must also battle with her, and decide if she is to be trusted. Once Annis reaches Louisiana though, there is only more pain, more hunger, and more abuse. From inside a dug grave, Annis ponders, “Didn’t Mama say I was my own weapon? That I was always enough to figure a way out?”
If the story sounds complex, it is. While not an easy read, however, it is necessary. And although magical realism isn’t for everyone, the magic of Let Us Descend is essential, if not, at least partially, the point. Early on, Annis’s sisters – the daughters of the same man who fathered her – are learning about the epic Italian poem, The Divine Comedy, and more specifically, “Dante’s Inferno.” The first line, “Let us descend and enter this blind world,” charts Dante’s path through his own refining fire, just as Annis must traverse hers, for it is in the descent that she learns to take the weapons provided, sharpen them, and begin the ascent.
Ward herself was grieving as she wrote the novel. The losses she herself endured are no secret — her award-winning nonfiction book, The Men We Reaped, discusses them as well as more about what the Black community in America has faced. These hard-to-swallow facts are mirrored in the abuse, loss, grief, and destruction Annis faces. Ward whimsically weaves together the mystical and real, like when the spirit that guided her mother and grandmother also guides Annis, and it is that magic which draws the reader out of reality to allow for the story’s absorption.
Let Us Descend is a story of hardship, mistakes, and one brutal journey after another. It is a story of loss, grief, and devastation. But above all else, it is the journey of a woman, her mother, and her grandmother, and of these characters’ legacy of courage and strength. It is a story of both origin and resilience, and of descending into the inferno and coming out the other side. Let us Descend is a novel of lush prose, and a prolific history of sadness succeeded by hope, which Ward perfectly summarizes:
“Her voice lingers in the air: the crust of pie around the edges of the pan, the pan that we scrape to savor in the hot corners of the kitchen, the buttery crumb rich in our mouths, but only enough to hint at the cinnamon, the nutmeg, the sugar we are sowing and watering and bludgeoning to green, to bristle skyward I the fields, the sugar one can smell, smell when leaning in close to the verdant stalk, rich in the fiber, and how the stomach feels full for a moment with a quick inhale, full and ragged, over leavings, so I do it now, breathe in deep to pull that leftover sweetness from the air down deep into me, to cull Mary’s honeyed song from the darkness into me, so that for one blink in the bowels of this rotten house, tenderness is a touch in my bones.”
Let Us Descend
Jesmyn Ward
Published: October 3, 2023
Simon & Schuster, New York
0 Commentaires