“Something like praying” (p. 279): Syncretic Spirituality and Racial Justice in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017)

On the 5th November 2020, the University of Southern California hosted “Spiritual Protest: The Role of Faith in the Fight for Racial Justice”, an event exploring the role of spirituality within the Black Lives Matter movement. In her keynote speech for the event, Hebah Farrag recalled her experiences of that summer’s Black Lives Matter protests and described seeing “protestors clad all in white, burning sage across militarized police lines, chants and the pouring of vivations in front of court houses invoking the spirits of ancestors and those killed by police.” (Farrag 2020)The actions Farrag describes have their roots in syncretised African-American spiritual traditions including Hoodoo, and Haitian and Louisiana Vodou. It is these systems of belief and the practices associated with them, including root work and medicine, conjuration, and the invocation of loas and other deities, which structure the metaphysical landscape of Jesmyn Ward’s 2017 novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing.
In this chapter I map Ward’s deployment in her fiction of the practices, language and iconography of Hoodoo, and Haitian and Louisiana Vodou, a deployment that is neither a straightforward documentation, nor uninterested in historico-social specificity. I propose that this strategy constitutes an effort to produce a new ontology specifically capable both of identifying the ways violently oppressive racial ideologies impose ‘creaturely’ existences on marginalised subjects and of accommodating modes of knowing and being in the world (child-like modes, animal modes) potentially capable of dismantling such ideologies. In so doing, I place Ward’s literary strategy in conversation with wider contemporary trends in the intersections between political activism and African-American spirituality.