Writing Pain, Finding Power: The Process of Grief and Loss in Jesmyn Ward's Men We Reaped

Abstract: The experience of pain and the urge to seek power have been juxtaposed in the history of African American women’s literature. Since a long time, African Americans had been subjugated and oppressed as a result of slavery and racism, which led to the interpretation of political underpinning of slavery in autobiographies and memoirs. In recent decades, the expression of grief in African American women’s literature, has garnered considerable scholarly attention. This article seeks to analyses the journey of grief and a way to find voice against the injustice done to five men close to the writer in Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped. The memoir is dedicated to the death of five young men who lost their lives in a span of four years. Through the first-person narration, the memoir enables the readers to experience the events and subjective experiences from the author’s intimate point of view, offering deep insight into the grief and trauma that shaped her life. The nonlinear structure of the memoir reflects the complexity of memory, grief, and the manner in which the past continuously informs the present. Employing Michael Cholbi’s Grief A Philosophical Guide, the study seeks to examine how Ward confronts the grief, recollects the traumatic experiences and breaks her silence over her past to rediscover the circumstances and her sense of self, which was subsumed in the broader context of racism.