'I need the story to go': Sing, Unburied, Sing, Afropessimism and Black Narratives of Redemption

In Afropessimism, Frank Wilderson III defines Blackness as a condition opposed to humanity and coterminous with slavery, also declaring that “Black emplotment is a catastrophe for narrative.” Narrative is inaccessible to Blacks because of the absence of an actual diegesis in the history of totalizing violence directed against them. “The narrative arc of the slave who is Black […] is not a narrative arc at all, but a flat line of historical stillness,” he writes. This understanding of Black storytelling finds some echo in the way Jesmyn Ward deploys Richie, a ghost narrator, in Sing, Unburied, Sing. The text gives the impression that narrative sometimes fails Richie, especially in the way in which the boy tries to explain his perception of time and space, the fundamental dimensions of storytelling. Ward’s novel is in itself an example of, and a reflection on, the power and the necessity of narration, and although her depiction of the Black condition in the novel is characterized by a deep-seated pessimism, the spectral song that stands as the story’s climax and denouement seems to possess the redemptive powers that Wilderson denies Black narrative. If social death as embodied by Richie is “aporetic with respect to narrative writ large,” as the scholar declares, Situated at the convergence of spectral studies, narratology and Afropessimism, this contribution aims at describing the way in which Sing, Unburied, Sing approaches existential and paradigmatic issues connected with Black identity and Black history in the Southern United States.