Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has received the MacArthur Genius Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency, and the Strauss Living Prize. Usually, I pick out a few details from the author’s biography, but this time, I’ll just copy/paste the little bio from her Amazon page.

They were technically free, but in many ways, still caged in oppressive systems. Here we have a bird that isn’t technically in a cage, but is still trapped in the past-an apt comparison of African-Americans in the post-Civil War South. Caged birds are symbolic of oppressed people in literature. In this instance, the bird and the ghost are the same. The bird dropped to the ground, dug its beak into the black earth, and I remembered my name: Richie. The bird swooped down on the men’s heads. Saw building clustered at the edge of that field, unto the ends of the earth. Saw other men walking in circles around them with guns. I landed in a field of endless rows of cotton, saw men bent and scuttling along like hermit crabs, bending and picking. Here is an excerpt from page 140 of Sing, Unburied, Sing : The victims of the past are often compared to birds. Ghosts and Birdsīird symbolism also plays a role in this novel. Some bits remind me of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. It uses touches of magical realism just as deftly as One Hundred Years of Solitude. The novel feels like it belongs in the same world as Their Eyes were Watching God. It means learning from past techniques and uses the best of them to create something new. But this is an excellent example of what I mean when I say stealing. It’s a wholly original work with a voice all its own.

Learning From the Greatsįirst off, I’m not saying that Jesmyn Ward is plagiarizing anything. In addition to that, her brother, Given, was murdered, and his presence is felt throughout the novel. Like the Breedlove family in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, we learn about her painful past and why she’s headed for self-destruction. She is obsessively in love with her children’s father, who is himself an addict. In the 90s, every made-for-tv movie seemed to be about crackhead moms living in poverty, but in the hands of Ward, Leonie is a fully fleshed-out character. Twenty years ago, she would have been a cliché villain. Leonie disappears for weeks, leaving her two children with her elderly parents. Jo-Jo’s mother, Leonie, is one of the POV characters and is a drug-addict.

Sing unburied sing