Haunting Time in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing

Abstract

Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing is a story about the past as well as about the present. It is peopled not only by characters living in the present South but also by ghosts representing past racial injustice. These ghosts are the manifestation of past racial brutality, the sign of the past haunting the present. But Sing, Unburied, Sing presents a temporal aporia: the past is separate from the present, hence the presence of ghosts as a link between the two temporalities but they are also merged through the present remains of the past: the Parchman prison or the present racial discrimination Jojo and his family have to cope with. The story thus seems to have a temporal dimension of its own. Following French philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s theory presented in his Time and Narrative, I will try to show that the different narrators are telling their story, not only to try to make sense of this temporality they exist in, but also to try to achieve a form of narrative identity that reinforces the African American community.