coming-of-age | Mohammad Moshtaghi

Sing, Unburied, Sing

Thu, 27 Dec 2018 12:00:00 -0700

Sing, Unburied, Sing is a work of lyrical beauty on a backdrop of persistent ugliness and cruelty, a masterpiece in storytelling set in a world of narratives forgotten or ignored, a page-turning delight built atop a visceral and aching pain. In Sing, Unburied, Sing, Ward gifts us with the story of a 13 year-old named Joseph whose White father Michael is in Mississippi’s maximum security prison and whose Black mother Leonie is gone and high more than she isn’t. Joseph lives with his Black grandparents — two hardened but caring strongholds of wisdom and love, both carrying a lifetime of sorrow but only one carrying cancer — and his 3 year-old sister Kayla, who seemingly adores her big brother more than anything or anyone else in the world. A kind of mystic spiritualism hangs over Ward’s world and characters, so when a sudden road trip drags Leonie, Joseph, and Kayla from their coastal home deep into the heart of Mississippi, the present and all its struggles never seem far from the brutal past that created them.

The rural South is not a kind place in Sing, Unburied, Sing, and the descriptions of its natural beauty are too often marred by the countless Black men and women whose lives ended violently on its soil. As a reader, you experience this world primarily though the eyes of Joseph, who knows the hardship of his own life but has not entirely lost his innocence or, as is the case for his grandfather Pop, had it taken away from him. Ward expertly weaves rich family history and flashbacks into the present narrative so that it seems multiple stories are always unfolding together, heightening our ability to see the connections between them. These exact sort of connections are pregnant with one of Sing, Unburied, Sing’s primary themes: that we cannot separate the modern South and its deep, infected scars from the history that shows us how those wounds were inflicted, and that this history has roots not in big movements and national news, but in every sullen lynching tree and unjust court ruling.

Take, for example, the following passage that showcases Ward’s ability to tie a conversation about the past together with the current feelings of the narrator, who has just had his first encounter with police brutality (feel free to skip this if you wish to avoid even minor spoilers).

“My name?” he says.

Richie, I mouth.

He looks like he wants to smile but doesn’t.

“He told you about me?”

I nod.

“He tell you how he knew me? That we were in Parchman together?”

I huff and nod again.

“They don’t send them there as young as you no more.”

My wrists won’t stop hurting.

“Sometimes I think it done changed. And then I sleep and wake up, and it ain’t changed none.”

It’s like the cuffs cut all the way down to the bone.

“It’s like a snake that sheds its skin. The outside look different when the scales change, but the inside always look the same.”

Like my marrow could carry a bruise.

[…] I have to look away from the wrong of the boy folded onto the floor of the car, so I stare out the window at the tall trees flashing past and think about the gun. Even though it reminded me of so much cold, I think it would have been hot to touch. So hot it would have burned my fingerprints off.

— Sing, Unburied, Sing, pages 171–172.

Enough cannot be said about Ward’s ability to craft prose that reads like grand poetry and easy conversation all at once. Her descriptions are delightful and vivid: every texture is tangible, every climate palpable, every smell immediately recognizable. Only when it comes to the occasional cultural subtlety or clever trick does Ward seem to slow down, as if to gently stoop to our understanding and check that we’re keeping up. Take, for example, this gem (no spoilers, so read freely):

There are people: tiny and distinct. They fly and walk and float and run. They are alone. They are together. They wander the summits. They swim in the rivers and sea. They walk hand in hand in the parks, in the squares, disappear into the buildings. They are never silent. Ever present is their singing: they don’t move their mouths and yet it comes from them. Crooning in the yellow light. It comes from the black earth and the trees and the ever-lit sky. It comes from the water. It is the most beautiful song I have ever heard, but I can’t understand a word.

I am gasping when the vision passes. The dark underbelly […] looms before me: creaking then silent. I look to my right and see a flash of the water, the rivers, the wilderness, the cities, the people. Then darkness. I look to my left and see that world again, and then it is gone. I claw at the air, but my hands strike nothing; they rend no doorways to that golden isle.

Absence. Isolation. I keen.

— Sing, Unburied, Sing, page 241.

The questions that this novel leaves about what hope and healing look like in the rural South are pertinent ones, and their delivery is somehow both searing and soothing, holding our feet to the fire while knowing it is what we need most. I am very thankful to have read my first Ward novel, and hope to have caught my breath by the time she releases another.

The Bronze Bow

Wed, 18 Jan 2017 12:00:00 -0700

This story is a powerful one, using Israel at the time of Jesus not as a backdrop but as a fully manifested world. Daniel, a teenager by our standards but a grown man by theirs, makes a vow to live and to die for God’s Victory, a victory he believes can only be achieved when the despised Romans are driven from their land. His desire for his people to be free quickly and characteristically becomes marked by an intense hatred for the Romans, and this hatred becomes the very fabric of his existence. However, as his friendship with scholarly twins Joel and Thacia develops and he adopts the responsibility of caring for his sister, he bruises himself against the rigidity of his own resolve, all the while being lured inexplicably to the words of the teacher Jesus. The tension between his longing for the destruction of the oppressor and Jesus’s countercultural message of a Kingdom already come wage a war in Daniel’s mind as he gathers recruits to fight for The Cause. But it requires everything that Daniel had put his hope in — The Cause, his self-sufficiency, and his hatred — to fail him before he encounters Jesus radically and transformatively, giving him a way to be at peace with everything he had run from and with everything he would now live into.

Reading this book made me feel a kind of pained longing that I don’t usually feel. I read it in a time of my life marked by dryness: the absence of a pulsing, vibrant relationship with God. And every time Speare depicted Jesus speaking to the children, whispering to the crippled, or touching the lame, my heart ached. I began to crave that Jesus, the giver of life and hope to the lonely and rejected. I wanted so badly to see him more — much more than Daniel did most of the time, which left me frustrated in watching Daniel accidentally but continuously perpetuate the very brokenness that haunted him instead of turning to the one that breaks every chain.

As frustrated as I was with Daniel, it’s clear that the Jews of Israel were much more frustrated with Jesus. The Zealots wanted him to repel the forces of Rome, but he would not fight. The people of Capernaum wanted him, but not all understood him. The crowds wanted to crown him king, but instead he slipped away into the hills at night to pray. And yet, he upheld that the Kingdom of Heaven had come. While much of the “history” is familiar and biblical, The Bronze Bow provides a window from which to watch people grapple with their own expectations as they looked for deliverance from a situation they deemed “all wrong,” “backwards,” and “not what God would want.” I think there’s an important lesson to be learned there.

“If he is the Messiah, how soon will he lead us against the enemy?” Simon walked on for a time without answering. Finally, he spoke. “He will never lead us against Rome, Daniel. I have given up all hope of that.”

[…] “Then why do you stay with him?” All the boy’s bitterness broke through the reproach.

“Where else could I go?” Simon answered.

“What has he offered you that is worth more than Israel’s freedom?”

“He has offered me the kingdom.”

Daniel’s anger was rising. “When do you think you’ll have this kingdom?”

“You will not understand this,” said Simon. “In a way, I have it already.”

“That’s fine!” the boy’s scorn was close to tears. “You have the kingdom! You can shut your eyes while all around you–”

“I have not shut my eyes,” said Simon. “I know well enough that nothing in Israel is changed. But I know that it will be, even if I never live to see it with my own eyes.”

“Listen to me, Daniel,” he went on. “You’ve seen him caring for those people — the ones so low that no one, not I or anyone else, cared what happened to them. When I see that, I know that the God of Israel has not forgotten us. Or why would He have sent Jesus to them, instead of to the rich and learned? Like a shepherd, he says, who will not let any of his sheep be lost. I’m a poor man, and ignorant, but I know now that with a God like that I am safe.”

[…] “What has he done to prove it? How do you know you’re not risking your life for nothing?”

“We can never know,” Simon answered slowly. “God hides the future from man’s eyes. We are forced to choose, not knowing. I have chosen Jesus.”

— The Bronze Bow, pages 243–244.