60 pages • 2 hours read
Jesmyn WardLet Us Descend
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Families Destroyed by Enslavement
This theme represents one of the text’s most urgent and overtly represented concepts, for Ward calls the practice of breaking families apart during enslavement a “death before death.” That kind of traumatic fracture is one of the framing pieces of the narrative as a whole. Although the story begins with a portrait of Annis and her mother on the North Carolina plantation that they call home, the “descent” that follows the sale of these two women away from each other is the novel’s primary narrative arc, and that sale emerges as the action’s inciting incident.
The history of Annis’s ancestors begins with just such a rupture. Her grandmother, Mama Aza, was sold into enslavement as punishment for having an extra-marital affair while married to the Fon king in West Africa. Mama Aza is torn away from a man whom she dearly loves and who is the father to her unborn child. She will give birth to this baby, Sasha, on a ship carrying its “cargo” of enslaved men and women to the United States. The ship’s captain lays claim to her daughter immediately after her birth, and Mama Aza is struck by the horror of “this owning from birthing to grave” (16). Mama Aza herself describes the great difficulty of this passage when her spirit later visits Annis, although Sasha too speaks of the pain that her mother endured as a result of being sold away from the man with whom she had begun to start a family. Sasha tells Annis that Mama Aza was never able to adjust to the rhythms of life under enslavement and that “this place horrified her” (16).
The trauma of forced separation continues with Sasha and Annis. Sasha, who knows how precarious family bonds are in enslavement, teaches Annis everything that Mama Aza taught her when she was a girl. Her worst fears are realized when she is sold away from her daughter as a punishment for trying to protect Annis from the unwanted sexual advances of a man who is both Annis’s enslaver and her biological father. Sasha’s goodbye to her daughter is designed to evoke deeply painful emotions, but her final words to her daughter are that she will always be with Annis even though the two will likely never see each other again. This sentiment will reverberate through the rest of the narrative, because she does remain with Annis in the form of Annis’s memories of her mother’s lessons and stories.
The theme of destroyed families recurs again and again throughout Annis’s journey, for she hears myriad stories of familial rupture from the various other enslaved men and women she encounters after she is sold away from her first home. These stories are all too common, and they are traded among communities of enslaved men and women and are also passed down through each successive generation. For example, Mama Aza tells her daughter Sasha of her history of familial rupture, and Sasha shares this story with Annis. Sasha’s own separation from her daughter will eventually add to the layers of trauma within their family tree. Annis, too, will know the pain of being torn from a family member, and it will become part of the familial history that she will pass on to her child. This depiction of generational trauma is larger than the narrative itself, and it is one important way in which the text acknowledges the difficult history of Africans and African Americans in the United States. Ward is deeply interested in the continued impact of such generational trauma, and this theme runs through her various novels and other writings. In Let Us Descend, the very title of the book demands a philosophical “descent” into the roots of this trauma, and she demonstrates that the pain of being torn from one’s parents is one that never fully heals.
Sexual Assault as a Hazard of Enslavement
Enslaved women lived under the constant threat of sexual violence, and Ward engages with that history repeatedly during the text. Rape is much more an expression of power than of sexual desire, and enslavers created an atmosphere of disempowerment and dehumanization through their sexual predation of Black women. Sexual assault and forced impregnation rob women of their bodily autonomy, and there are numerous characters in Let Us Descend who encounter this form of heinous abuse. Yet, Ward is committed to developing complex characters and has expressed the belief that depicting an individual as a victim denies them any sense of three-dimensional personality, thereby robbing them of potentiality. The women in this text are certainly victimized by a variety of male enslavers, but they are more powerfully characterized as survivors, not as victims. Each instance of rape within the narrative evidences a process through which its survivor turns her trauma into resilience and emerges as a figure of agency rather than as one of pity.
Sasha is the first in the narrative to encounter sexual violence, and the series of rapes to she is subjected to by her enslaver ultimately produces her daughter, Annis. She does not shy away from this truth, and part of the web of protection that she weaves around her daughter is the full knowledge of who Annis’s biological father is and “the story of how” this man “violated” her (10). Living under the constant threat of rape was certainly traumatizing to Sasha, but she does not let that trauma impact her ability to care for her daughter, and she very successfully teaches Annis how to protect herself against similar forms of assault.
Indeed, although she is almost sexually assaulted twice during the course of the narrative, Annis fends off both of her would-be attackers. She is able to escape the clutches of her “sire,” and although her refusal to succumb to his predatory, incestuous advances is part of his reason for selling her to a trader bound for New Orleans, she leaves her sire’s home without having been sexually violated by him. She repeats this evasion with her second enslaver, about whom Esther warns her. Esther and Mary also demonstrate their own agency by chewing cotton seeds to stave off pregnancy, for their enslaver habitually assaults women all over his plantation. Annis is thus able to turn the threat of sexual violence into another source of strength. She maintains her own bodily autonomy, and in so doing, she reinforces the role that agency plays in her identity. Each time she fends off an unwanted sexual advance, she becomes stronger.
Safi, too, is both the “victim” of sexual assault and a survivor. She is raped by one of the enslavers who escort Safi, Annis, and the others on the way to New Orleans, and the experiences is excruciatingly traumatic. Although her screams are terrifying, Annis does not cover her ears as her friend is being assaulted because, as she notes, “the least I can do is bear witness” (46). She comforts Safi in the wake of this attack, and the humanity that these two women show to each other through devastation, violence, and loss is a profound tribute to the ability of enslaved men and women to retain an inner core of decency in the face of inhumane treatment. Despite the violence of the attack and the pain she feels in its aftermath, Safi bravely makes her escape, turning trauma into resilience.
Resilience and Agency Amidst Oppression
One of Jesmyn Ward’s stated goals in this text is to depict a character who, although she does not appear to have agency in the traditional sense of the word, still has access to other forms of agency and is thus able to tap into an inner resilience. Annis experiences a wide range of injustices, for she can be bought and sold, her labor is uncompensated, and she lives under the constant threat of sexual assault. However, she still has emotional agency, imaginative agency, spiritual agency, and the agency of memory. During the grueling cruelty of her journey to New Orleans, she is in control of her emotional responses to enslavement, withdrawing to an inner world filled with memories of her mother and Safi, and she taps into a deep well of support from generations of her ancestors. She is therefore ultimately much more than a victim or a survivor. She is complex. Even her relationship with Aza and the spirits is not characterized by passivity. She speaks back to them, questioning their motives and methods. Thus, their role in her life is to help her find her own sense of direction rather than to give her a ready-made roadmap to freedom.
One source of both resilience and agency for Annis and for Sasha is their warrior training. They are connected to Mama Aza and to their ancestral home in West Africa through the continuation of this legacy. Because they practice the same combat skills that Mama Aza herself learned so long ago, they are rooted into their familial history, in spite of being subject to a system of enslavement that sought, very deliberately, to sever Africans and African Americans from their ancestral heritage. On a more realistic, practical level, these skills also help Annis to fend off would-be attackers, and the tiny, elephant-tusk awl passed on to her by her mother and crafted by Mama Aza is the tool which she ultimately uses to secure her own freedom. The weapons associated with Mama Aza’s combat-oriented life symbolize strength and resilience in this narrative, and although it is Annis who frees herself, she does so with the aid of an object deeply rooted in her family’s culture and legacy.
These familial bonds are another key source of both resilience and agency for Annis. Her mother’s parting words to her, “I always be with you” (22), echo throughout the text, but it is Annis herself who keeps her mother’s memory alive and thus assures Sasha’s continued presence. Memories of her mother and her mother’s stories of Mama Aza become an inner world into which she retreats in order to bear the pain of enslavement. She taps into what Ward terms the agency of “memory,” and this tactic allows her to see herself not only through the framework of enslavement, but also as a strong, resilient woman in a line of strong, resilient women. She is therefore part of an unbreakably strong family tree.
The narrative also showcases the concept of intersubjective agency, or the ways in which individuals are strengthened by working together and forging close, emotional bonds. Intersubjective agency is often associated with matriarchy and with the ways that women often forge relationships in difficult circumstances. Ward showcases that kind of community and the resilience that it imparts on its members in myriad places during the course of Annis’s journey. Although Annis, Safi, and the other women whom she meets on the way to New Orleans showcase the ways in which individuals can find strength and support in numbers, it is the climate of acceptance that Esther and Mary create on the sugar plantation in which this source of strength is the most evident. Esther and Mary work together to accomplish their household tasks, to hunt and forage, and to keep each other safe from their enslaver’s would-be sexual assaults. They extend this camaraderie and protection to Annis, and she adds value to their community by working well with the women and gathering edible mushrooms for them. Their enslavers are particularly cruel individuals, and sugar plantations are notoriously brutal spaces. Harvesting cane is back-breaking work, and the process of extracting and boiling sugar is dangerous for the workers. This is evident in the character of Emil, who only has one good hand as the result of a work accident. Yet, in spite of their grim surroundings, the women remain strong if not happy. Esther, Mary, and Annis are all able to free themselves from enslavement and that accomplishment within the space of this narrative is the ultimate act of both resilience and agency.
Related Titles
By Jesmyn Ward
