Dear Jesmyn Ward aka Mimi (if I may call you that),
I think all authors of fiction have a bit of god complex. As an author of fiction, you have total autonomy over constructing characters, entire people. I am honestly afraid of having all that power over people I write into the world even if they are just fictional people. Having enough separation your characters to choose when to be the benevolent God or the protector and the Old Testament God is difficult. It's always hard. We strive to make complex characters that have the fullness and many dimensions as real people. We love our characters so much that we can't allow the wolf of darkness destroy them as it did with men you cared about in reality. We seem to have to make a choice between preserving characters and making novels real when real young black people in our world have never been preserved. It is almost impossible to have both.
Luckily in creative nonfiction or memoir, we don't have to worry about any god complex. We, the writers, have the structure of real life to follow and have to create much less. We just have to face our grief and other burdens. We just have to make grief and burden aesthetically pleasing to read. We get to make reader empathize with the constant tearing from past to present, the feeling of going backwards in time and never forward. We do this, and it might make us feel better.
I wonder if you think your writing in your memoir captures your life, Roger, Demond, C.J., Ronald, and Joshua accurately enough, if you think it has preservation and destruction of beauty. Your words are pungent and seem to convey so much about your life that I would have never known from seeing you speak about Salvage the Bones during New Student Orientation this past fall. I hope your think this book captures "all the terrific grace" of yourself and the men you cared for so much. I hope everything you convey in this book gave you more clarity than the "awkwardly bent, blurry," frozen moment of C.J. captured by your camera.
Always Forward,
Kory
Yes! I 100% agree with this post. Also, such an accurate title!
ReplyDeleteI read this again after Tuesday's discussion and I completely agree! Especially when she mentions how she was writing a book, but it didn't seem to have enough depth because she didn't want her characters to experience life in the way she had.
ReplyDeleteThis is such a good point! I loved that line in the book because it captured something both so honest and so heartbreaking. She was writing about real issues affecting her community, but she had to protect her characters and her loved ones at the same time.
ReplyDelete