My people are still poor. They're still working class. All of the characters that I write about are inspired by the community that I'm from.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the author's deep connection to their working-class community and highlights the struggles of their people.
Jesmyn Ward emphasizes the impact of her background on her writing, drawing inspiration from the challenges faced by her community. She acknowledges the ongoing struggles of poverty and the working class, suggesting that her characters are a reflection of the real experiences and emotions of those around her. This statement reveals the importance of authenticity in storytelling and the responsibility of the writer to represent their community's voice.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of representation in literature, one might quote Ward to highlight the connection between authors and their communities.
I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans - but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?
In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It's not as though my life won't be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will.
The ugly heart of the South still beats with this idea that one group of people is worth less.
Katrina silenced me for two years. I wrote a 12-page essay on my experience in Katrina, and that's it. I didn't write anything for, like, two, two and a half years after Katrina hit because it was so traumatic.
Hip-hop, which is my generation's blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world through language.
With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of their personality. It's important to me that they're complicated and that they're human.
After telling the hard facts to anyone from lover to friend, I have changed in their eyes. Often it is awe or admiration, sometimes it is repulsion, once or twice it has been fury hurled directly at me for reasons I remain unsure of.
when you [lose someone], it feels like the hole in your gum when a tooth falls out. You can chew, you can eat, you have plenty of other teeth, but your tongue keeps going back to that empty place, where all nerves are still a little raw
Where there must be a choice, a girl will choose Daddy. Even if you are Mommy, you concede that this must be so: you remember when you were a girl, too.
I don't think there should be anything that women are embarrassed to talk about in the 21st century, because for the last 100,000 years, men have said everything that's on their minds and described everything they have done.
There's nothing wrong or evil about having a bad day. There's everything wrong with making others have to have it with you.
It is an important distinction to note that she looked not only as if she had taken good care of herself, but that she had good reason to have done so. (...) She looked to be in such total possession of her life that only the most confident men could continue to look at her if she looked back at them. Even in bus stations, she was a woman who was stared at only until she looked back.
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