"When I open my eyes to this morning, I know with a sinking of my stomach that part of me will always be here, in this endless place, mired to the neck: held tight in the grip of these bristling green fields, this black earth, this perpetual burning of my body, the open petals of my hands, the bruised stems of my feet, this hunger that hollows me from the inside as the land hollows me without."
Immediately heartbreaking and endlessly challenging, "Let Us Descend" follows Annis is she traverses the horrors and loneliness of slavery. Jesmyn Ward's trademark lyrical prose deftly honors themes of ancestry, homosexuality, and prescience, with an undercurrent of spirituality carried by references to Dante's "Inferno."
"'Ain't no gods here,' she says, her words a hatchet buried in the tree trunk of her wound."
Despite the difficulty of numerous scenes, a close read is necessary, as there can be some circumstances that are confusing without careful attention. The intensity ramps up dramatically as Annis -- buoyed by relatives and spirits that are either protective or selfish -- seeks her own path and idea of home.
Early in the book, the tender, illicit affair with Safi is rendered beautifully and bittersweet, but Annis's failure to ask Aza about Safi or her fate later on feels like an oversight. With the novel's emphasis on the importance of seeing and vision, Aza's ability to potentially ease Annis's heart with these skills feels like it would have been primary in Annis's mind.
"'I can keep her safe,' Bastian says, but his voice rises at the end of it, and I wonder if he doubts it even as he says it, if he knows there is pine in the column of his spine, that the center of him will only bend so far before he snaps. That he is a sapling and this world a hurricane."
Ward's indelible tale is emotional and fraught, though her careful presentation of hope and a promise of the beyond buttress the story in meaningful ways. "Let Us Descend" is just the latest evidence of Ward's stature as one of our most important and essential novelists.
"How the whitewash of starlight would buoy them along. How they dance with the rocking deck. How them sing."
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