What Comes to the Surface: Storms, Bodies, and Community in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones

CHRISTOPHER W. CLARK University of East Anglia What Comes to the Surface: Storms, Bodies, and Community in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones AS THE NARRATOR OF JESMYN WARD’S NOVEL SALVAGE THE BONES (2011), Esch Batiste tells the reader, “Bodies tell stories” (83). This article will examine how embodiment figures in the novel, and how human and non-human bodies manifest regional stories, playing an important role alongside particular racialized histories of the South. In exploring how these bodies and histories interact, and often hybridize one another, this article will examine how Ward’s novel highlights the tensions and contradictions that surround Hurricane Katrina. By investigating the landscape, femininity, as well as natural and man-made environments, I will chart the ways in which Ward represents the South through a typically regional mode of address, whilst challenging pre-conceived notions of who is affected by the storm, and how. Examining the social and cultural effects of Katrina alongside Esch’s narrative will uncover how familial and community relationships function, and are imagined, and the potential violent repercussions of those conceptualizations. These southern myths work alongside Katrina discourse to erase individuals’ identities and histories. Through such erasure, the novel demonstratesapersecutionofsubjugatedbodiesalongsideareflectionon how violent ideologies become arbitrarily natural. Foregrounding Katrina Hurricane Katrina has often been cast as an inevitable event, intrinsically bound up within regional and national geographies and their social implications. In the storm’s aftermath, the disaster was cast as “the inevitable results of the actions (and inactions) of [New Orleans, and as such]. . . . the South as a whole,” which has been shaped by “a centuries-long American perception that New Orleans is destined for a tragic ending” (Bibler 7, 8). The consequences of Katrina were exacerbated by the preexisting discrimination, based primarily on race and class, that affected large swaths of the South. As Henry Giroux tells us, “Something more systematic and deep-rooted was revealed in the wake 342 Christopher W. Clark of Katrina—namely, that the state no longer provided a safety net for the poor, sick, elderly, and homeless” (“Reading Hurricane” 175). Therefore, the location of the South and the oppression of large amounts of its citizens meant that the potentially adverse effects of the storm were greatly increased and unavoidable. Ward’s novel engages with the inexorable nature of Katrina, framing the narrative across twelve days leading up to the storm. With each passing day, the knowledge of the approaching hurricane becomes more apparent, haunting the novel’s text and characters in advance: snatches of television chatter and hearsay filter through the locals. During the fifth day the storm becomes fully realized, through anthropomorphization : “The storm, it has a name now. Like the worst, she’s a woman. Katrina” (124). Esch’s father thus conveys the specter of the incoming storm as a figure with a name, making it more tangible to both the characters and the book’s reader. The switch is compounded by the sharp inflection of the father’s statement, comparing the severity of Katrina to the “worst” kind of person, a woman. The novel’s treatment of gender will be discussed below, but it is worth noting that the use of the female-gendered pronoun is a way of marking the storm’s dangerous and destructive power. As an inevitable disaster, Katrina was bound up in the preexisting sociopolitical state of Mississippi and the wider South. As Clyde Woods posits, the “tortured past of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi is reasserting itself.” (428) through the circumstances surrounding the storm, and Christopher Lloyd suggests that “as the floodwaters [of Katrina] receded, the old racial demarcations of the city were brought into stark relief.” (54). It is worth noting the breadth of criticism discussing Katrina that is centered on New Orleans: among others, Giroux’s Stormy Weather (2006), Karen O’Neill’s “Broken Levees, Broken Lives” (2008), and Ruth Salvaggio’s “Forgetting New Orleans” (2008). In discussing the disaster through the lens of this one city, it often becomes a stand-in for the South as a region and the US as a whole. By setting her novel in Mississippi, rather than New Orleans, Ward providesanalternativeperspectiveonKatrina, indicating that the effects of the storm are...