The Obscure Word That Helped Novelist Jesmyn Ward Process Her Grief

When I buried my father, a man who bequeathed me his entire face but very little of his time, I turned to words from Jesmyn Ward. I didn’t feel appropriately shaken, and certainly this was a problem. By my late 20s, half my family spanning four generations were dead, each person lost to some calamity of health or circumstance, so I had learned to turn shock into productivity, action. I could not stop the bullet that killed my sister or the fire that took my uncle, but I knew where to get good card stock for an obituary.

When I picked up Ward’s 2013 memoir, Men We Reaped, I wasn’t trying to feel so much as understand. Our society is built to incentivize the ephemeral, and as a millennial at the dawn of the Instagram era, I worried about my ability to compartmentalize and move on; to turn the active, lifelong work of grieving into a concrete task to be checked off on a to-do list. I could no longer remember my grandmother’s voice, and shouldn’t that fact make me cry?

It didn’t, but reading the prologue of Men We Reaped got me close. In it, Ward lists the five young Black men in her life who died in a brutal four-year span and described how the weight of those tragedies nearly silenced her until she found an escape through her own form of productivity: her work. “My ghosts were once people,” she wrote, “and I cannot forget that.”

I suddenly didn’t feel so guilty about not crying. I recognized the work of writing and remembering as their own daily rituals of grieving, of paying homage. Recently, I spoke with Ward about her new book, __On Witness and Respair_, a collection of nonfiction essays spanning more than a decade. The collection takes its name from a viral essay she wrote for Vanity Fair at the start of the pandemic about losing her partner, then learning to reckon with that loss as the world began to tally its own. Our conversation touched on creative form, the process of writing, and why place—in this case, Mississippi—has become so central to her own narrative.

A lot of your writing deals with loss, including the sudden passing of your partner in 2020 and the death of your brother 20 years earlier. How has your grief shifted over time?

I knew from losing my brother that the first two years were basically lost. It’s just a haze. Waking up every day with the shock of someone’s absence as the first thing you encounter. After that, you move into the work of grief. For me, that’s learning how to carry the love you still feel for someone while navigating your life. It’s been six, going on seven years since my partner died, and I’m still in that phase. It’s the small things. Cooking is different, sleeping is different, laundry is different. You have to figure out how all of that will change and reconcile yourself to it. The longing doesn’t go away. You just learn how to live with it.

“The longing doesn’t go away. You just learn how to live with it.”

Your new essay collection, On Witness and Respair, contains an unusual word most of our readers would have never heard of—“respair,” meaning “fresh hope.” Where did you find that?

On Twitter, actually, in a poem by a Black poet. I looked it up and realized it meant the opposite of despair. I couldn’t use it yet when I found it because I was still in the first hot press of grief. But I wrote it down. When I wrote the Vanity Fair essay about the George Floyd protests and losing my partner, it felt like the right place. Like maybe using that word was the first step out.

The collection spans your entire writing life, including a 2008 piece about surviving Hurricane Katrina. What did it feel like to read it all at once?

Strange. I went back to the Katrina essay, which I wrote so long ago, and I was honestly surprised. I tell my students all the time that they’re always doing something right, but I don’t always apply that to myself. I struggle with confidence and self-doubt as a writer. Going back, I found these flashes of wisdom, moments of lyrical language that moved me. I was like, Oh, I was doing some stuff!

Nonfiction seems to demand something different of you than fiction. What is it?

It’s harder. With fiction, I have the whole world to work with, which is freeing. With nonfiction, the boundlessness of real life overwhelms me, so I outline obsessively. I have to know exactly where I’m going before I begin. But the rewards are unlike anything else. So many of these essays taught me something I didn’t expect—about myself, about the people I love—just because I committed to sitting inside a moment that was uncomfortable or dark. That’s where I feel most exposed. And most changed.

After years of living in other places for school and work, you’ve made a deliberate choice to settle in Mississippi, where you grew up. Why?

It keeps me honest. If I weren’t rooted here, it would be easy to navel-gaze, to become shallow. But I also wrestle with it. It’s hard to live as a Black progressive in a place where people may be cordial to your face but fundamentally don’t believe you’re fully human. That double consciousness is real. I have no illusions about Mississippi. But this place—the people, the community, the language—it’s what inspires me. The way I describe rain, because I’m from southern Mississippi, is completely different from how someone in California would. This place informs the way I use language.

“The way I describe rain, because I’m from southern Mississippi, is completely different from how someone in California would.”

You’ve talked about wanting to root your children in the way you were rooted. What does that mean to you?

My editor tells me most people don’t grow up where their family has lived for generations—where your people stretch back into the 1800s. That felt rare and important to me. I wanted my kids to have that, even knowing they’ll probably leave one day, the way I did. Maybe they return, maybe they don’t. But I wanted them to have something to leave from.

How has motherhood shaped how you think about legacy?

My oldest says she hates reading, which feels like a personal attack. My 9-year-old loves it. My 3-year-old—jury’s still out. They’re not flat, they’re not foils; they’re little complicated people. I’m not the perfect mother. I know I’m going to do harm, right? But I do think that because writing requires empathy and also fosters empathy, it goes hand in hand with the kind of parenting that I try to do. When I think about legacy, I hope that when my kids are grown—especially when I’m no longer here—they can look at the work and understand what was underneath it. That the storytelling, the empathy, all of it was an attempt to make the world a little easier for them to move through. Especially in the nonfiction and the writing that’s about them or around them, I hope they’re able to see beyond the surface and understand the intent behind the work.