what is they?

dear jesmyn,
while reading your memoir, i keep going back to the question that is posed periodically throughout the memoir, "what is they?" i'm not done reading the book yet, so i don't know if you eventually come up with a definitive answer, but what i do know is that they seems to be a looming, inevitable power that determines the destiny of the black men in your life.

"they killed my brother." // "they picking us off, one by one."

i interpreted they as the symbolic white man whose white supremacist ideals permeate and form the very foundations and structures of this nation. these structures are meant to keep poor blacks poor and perpetuate government-rigged cycles of violence, drugs, and mass incarceration. they is everywhere. they pervades the very air inhaled in poor black neighborhoods. there is not a day that goes by without they plaguing the hearts of black mothers and black sisters with fear. they kills black men's bodies, boot heel on throat, and calls it an accident.

you said that your brother taught you that "love is stronger than death."

loving and taking care of each other is resistance. may we always love and take care of ourselves and each other fearlessly.


faatimah

On the Anesthetized Politics of Race

Dear Jesmyn,

What strikes me about your memoir thus far is the dichotomy between dulled deaths and the urgency to humanize, and put face and self to, the dead. That is, death is mentioned almost casually, as though to emphasize the quotidian terror Black folks face and the probable nature of Black men dying young, and dying quite unnaturally. At the same time, however, you are consistent in providing context regarding the time of death, the background of the life lost, and the collective trauma this induced upon you, your family, and your friends.

This made me think about how language and the constant recurrence of terror against Black people has anesthetized others to the magnitude of atrocities. This, combined with policy, ideology, culture, perverted infatuation with militarization as a means of American masculinity, etc. have left white people either turning a ("color")blind eye to white terrorism and power-pleasure dynamics, or in superficial and often times performative "solidarity" with people of color.

What shift must occur for the anesthetic to wear off? Cultural? Political? Personal ideology? Or all of these at once? And how is that shift achieved?

Men We Reaped

There was a specific passage in the Men We Reaped where you explained how families transitioned to a matriarchal family structure from the nuclear structure. I feel like all the things you talk about in the memoir relate back to these ideas of a necessary matriarchal structure, of how men and the idea of masculinity require women to hold it up. When you talk about how much time and care your father lavished on the motorcycle, using desperately needed funds to buy this symbol of personal and solitary freedom, I feel like it provides context to the larger historical moment.
    I was also really moved by the scene where you talk about fiction writing and how difficult it was to make your male characters reflect the reality of the men in your life. It made me thin about how much maliciousness is required to write “real life”. I feel like memoir is such an interesting genre because it blends fiction and nonfiction, so that people in our lives take on the qualities of characters while still retaining the things that make them them. 

Dear Jesmyn

Dear Jesmyn,

Thank you for being brave and sharing your story. Men We Reaped is groundbreaking in the sense that it speaks about real life, important, topics that are rarely touche don by mainstream culture. The idea that Black men are expected to die young, and that the people around them are expected to deal with this fate silently and without protest. I really connected to the idea that even though her life in Mississippi and Louisiana were painted with crime, death, racism, and poverty, when she was at Stanford she still missed it and needed it in a sense. The idea that even though places are less desirable than this school we all attend, there is something real about and honest about the idea of home. Even though home has crime, and poverty, and chaos, it is still a place that grounds me. Thank you for talking about the reality of being an outsider and a Black woman at Stanford and how the reality of Black existence does not really line up with the expectations of student life at Stanford. I am sorry for the loss of your brother, but I want to deeply thank you for talking about it and how you coped with a phenomenon that effects so many Black women.The death of Black men is something that is expected and at the same time ignored by so many, so thank you for shedding light onto the the subject and sharing your life with us.

To Jesmyn Ward

Dear Jesmyn Ward,
I thought a lot about the entanglements you described in your writing. In thinking
about the racial entanglements that blur boundaries or the entanglements of
different histories in your mention of the Black Panthers. Is there a way to tell
history that includes these entanglements? You focused heavily on the
physicality of places and people with specific attention to detail. Is this writing
style related to when you wrote that “Like all children, they were the children of
history and place”? In this same way do you feel yourself having an identity
distinguished from those around you, or are you an embodiment of your town
and community. Additionally, what do you think the point of history is, and why
do you seek to preserve it? I also read Salvage the Bones, and your writing
often mentions dogs/wolves as well as the impact of different hurricanes on
communities. I also acknowledged I am quick to undervalue fiction writing
because it is not completely objective, yet I also know that nothing ever is.
As Virginia Woolf said, “Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts
the better the fiction.”

Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward,
You spoke about both your mother’s and your father’s childhood. How they both came from similar situations, yet how they both handled their lives differently. How because your mother was a girl, she felt a greater responsibility to be a motherly figure for a majority of her childhood. Yet because your father was a boy, he was allowed freedom, freedom your mother could never have because of her gender. This made me think of the cycle of violence and the idea of masculinity and how deeply both of those are rooted. How even though Black people were never free in that time, at least in the truest sense, how there was still the levels of freedom based almost on anything else.
I love the way you speak honestly. This book is one everyone should read, as it speaks about a cycle of struggles that few people understand. It sheds light on how each person handled similar struggles very differently, how people who are oppressed do their best to oppress the tragedies that are happening around them. There is such a skewed view of both Black men and women, especially when looking at emotion, and this directly corresponds to the expectations that both themselves and others set for them. I appreciate you shedding light on these ideas.

To Jesmyn

In your depiction of the depths of American poverty, how do see the representations of manhood in your environment defining your own identity? As desperation and disaster play a role in the stories you choose to tell, how did you see these experiences contribute to many of the themes present in black American manhood?

Esther