Beyond Protecting “Life”: The Inverted Language of the Dead and Dying in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing

Abstract The state often calls for protecting life while ignoring the scenes of deaths it has sanctioned by its mechanisms of selecting lives and deselecting the always already dying. Pitting the white-supremacist images of “life” as white and unborn against the aural presence of those who were born yet died premature deaths due to racialization, Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) launches an indirect critique of the ways “pro-life” claims to protect life dismiss the reality of racialization. To explore the sounds and performances introduced in the novel, my essay draws on Fred Moten’s theory of the Black aesthetic/radical tradition, especially Moten’s conception of “cutting,” which helps recognize Black art’s radical refusal to suture wounds by calling for an ongoing mourning where there is an ongoing death. I argue that Ward’s novel brings forth an inverted language of “cutting”—a language that erupts from the dead and dying as if to vomit out the “indigestible” violence of racism. Ward’s characters join in this language to push against prevalent attempts to disavow Black deaths and the violence committed against Black people. My essay concludes that Ward’s novel, by frequently evoking the dead through this fleshy language—especially in moments when its characters try to protect one another where Black deaths keep happening—reimagines protecting lives as indistinguishable from recalling and mourning for the dead and dying.