Alexandra Tangarife
Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing is a polyvocal narrative that touches on death, institutional racism and multigenerational trauma. The novel explores the trials and tribulations of a broken Mississippi family through the perspective of a twelve year old boy named Jojo, his mother Leonie, and a ghost by the name of Richie. Inherited family trauma is at the forefront of this novel as it unveils the effects of slavery and how stress factors and behavioral responses translate across generations. The impermanence of trauma is discovered in multiple parts of the novel including the spirit of Richie who embodies the metaphor of “ghosts from the past” can linger if unresolved. Mark Wolynn’s It Didn’t Start With You affirms the festering of trauma and it’s ability to translate genetically across generations and creates toxic cyclical behavioral responses.
From River’s killing of a twelve year old boy in Parchman Prison to Leonie’s self-destructive relationship with paraphernalia, there is unignorable evidence of inherited trauma and its stressors carrying from one generation to the next. Wolynn and Ward’s text create a conversation on the genetic stressors of ancestral, Black trauma and how figures from Sing, Unburied, Sing fit the inherited family trauma model.
