Cycle of Violence

Dear Jesmyn Ward,

In your memoir Men We Reaped, you inspire readers with the eulogy of the men who were your friends, your family, your brothers. At the same time, the horror of the details in which you describe their deaths, the fury and grief behind "the thing that chased" you and killed the people dearest to you one by one, is at once excruciatingly painful and candidly evident (249). "By the numbers, by all the official records, here at the confluence of history, of racism, of poverty, and economic power, this is what our lives are worth: nothing" (237). Through the vignettes of your own upbringing, we see closely and personally the ways in which men are indoctrinated with toxic masculine expectations not for some upholding of tradition or culture, but for pure survival, while women are inevitably subjected to loss of their male family members. Violence surrounds African American people. They are subjected to violence regardless of their best intentions, and the only way to survive it is through violence. Yet, this process kills the men, gradually and all at once.

What can be done, Jesmyn Ward? What can we do to respond to this violent whirlwind of injustice and prejudice? To this day, the things that kill men and agonizes women of your race are not even recognized as the consequences of a nation-wide pandemic, of the domination of white supremacy that is hidden behind the façade of individualist blame - that black communities commit vice all on their own. The law doesn't help you. The police murders you and excuses white murderers. The 'people' say this has nothing to do with them, or worse yet, that this does not exist. 'No one says racist things like that in real life,' I heard countless times on the very campus you lived in for years. As you say, "There is a great darkness bearing down on our lives, and no one acknowledges it" (250). It is all so conveniently swept under the rug, suffocated while those who dare not speak of the entity step all over it.

"Men’s bodies litter my family history," you being your memoir, "The pain of the women they left behind pulls them from the beyond, makes them appear as ghosts" (14). The kind of suffering that black women in America are subjected to is interconnected, yet vastly different from that of men. "It was easier and harder to be male; men were given more freedom but threatened with less freedom" (99). We painfully see that in your mother, constantly abandoned by her father and husband. We see that in the helpless loss you feel of the men in your life, who come and go as they please, and most often without a choice. We cannot ignore the great degree of violence and neglect that black men impose upon black women, though both are prejudiced under the same darkness of racism. Yet, how can we address a violence that does not stem from entitlement, but rather a cycle of violence stemming from racism? To end that cycle, the root must be addressed and abolished. In the mean time, when that end seems far from our reach, how do we help women and men who suffer everyday from a legalized, normative violence? Perhaps there is no one answer, but the process is what counts, and your memoir is a testimony to that process of questioning, with the rage and resistance it requires.