Introducing
Your new presentation assistant.
Refine, enhance, and tailor your content, source relevant images, and edit visuals quicker than ever before.
Trending searches
Presentation by Joseph Matthews
Sing, Unburied, Sing shows three narrators on a road trip in Mississippi to pick up the family's father from Parchman jail: the son named Jojo, the mother named Leonie, and the ghost from the family's past named Richie. The mother battles addiction and her poverty from that addiction through the course of the trip. Jojo has to take responsibility for his baby sister and find a way to help Richie's ghost move on from the Earth. Thus, the novel centers around these three figures as they struggle through the harsh realities of racism, poverty, and addiction in Mississippi.
Overview
At the real heart of this novel, racism in the past and its effects on the present is the central issue. Ward goes into other themes like coming of age in the South, but the book's most important symbol points to racism. Ward uses a tree that harbors many ghosts of black people that were killed through hate crimes at the very end of her novel. This tree is both a reference to lynchings, where many African Americans were hanged from a tree, and a symbol of something literally deep-rooted and long-lasting. Therefore, Ward uses the tree as her message about the longevity of the ghosts from America's past.
As mentioned before racism is the major theme of the book, but poverty, addiction, and growth are also important topics Ward addresses. For instance, Ward has Leonie and her boyfriend, Michael, slowly slip into addiction as they start seeing less and less of their children and more and more of their dealers. Thanks to their irresponsibility, Jojo has to learn how to be a man from his grandfather, Pop, and how to provide for his little sister. Then, all throughout the novel, poverty is featured prominently, like at a meth dealer's house that is in shambles even though the family is doing decently in terms of income.Overall, Ward focuses on the issues plaguing the South.
"All the issues and the terrible circumstances that I write about, I see them all around me."-Jesmyn Ward
"Ward employs several strangely tethered narrators and allows herself to reach back in time while keeping this family chained to the rusty stake of American racism."
MacArthur Foundation. “Jesmyn Ward.” RSS, MacArthur Foundation, www.macfound.org/fellows/1002/.
Charles, Ron. “Jesmyn Ward's Powerful New Novel, 'Sing, Unburied, Sing'.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 29 Aug. 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/a-powerful-new-entry-in-the-literature-of-race-in-america/2017/08/29/45cb2008-8b89-11e7-91d5-ab4e4bb76a3a_story.html?utm_term=.6db313d38adb.