“It Would Take a lot of Wisdom to Say ‘Go slow’”: Faulkner’s Public Sights on Race, the American Press and the Response of the Civil Rights Movement

In her fourth novel, Let Us Descend (2023), Jesmyn Ward demonstrates her ability to address the historical and current traumas of the black community, this time through the genre of the neo-slave narrative. The novel tells the story of a fall into the abjection of the slave experience. But it is also, and above all, a tale narrated by a voice invested with a singular poetic power: each new ordeal leads the young narrator, Annis, to further test her determination to survive; her voice thus draws on unthinkable resources that contribute to its singularity. This article contends that it is through the adoption of lyrical writing that Ward in turn appropriates the codes of the neo-slave narrative. After tracing the descent into hell that gives the novel its direction, it is the emergence of a collective voice that is at the heart of the argument. The dark lyricism of Annis’s voice is the subject of close readings that finally attempt to uncover the poetic strategies Ward employs to make an unspeakable experience heard.