American author Jesmyn Ward needs no introduction. A novelist, essayist, and poet, this two-time winner of the prestigious National Book Award has established herself as a major and essential voice in the American literary landscape. With four novels, a memoir, and two essay collections to her name, her work follows in the footsteps of James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, amplifying their explorations of race, mixed heritage, and social injustice. In her new novel, Let Us Descend, just published in French translation, Ward explores her country’s slave-holding past through the odyssey of a young enslaved girl across the American South. Let Us Descend is a powerful and realistic narrative, which also draws on Latin American magical realism to imagine a world of slavery, dealing with chains, grief, and dreamlike escapes.
In the afterword of your new novel, where you thank your editor, you write about how “hard” this book was to create. Why was it so difficult, after already writing five novels?
It was difficult to write for several reasons, the main one being that I was grieving the violent death of my partner, who was also the father of my children. After his death in January 2020, I almost gave up everything. I didn’t write anything for almost six or seven months. I felt so hopeless that I thought I might be done with writing. Without hope, how can you continue to tell stories? Then, I followed my intuition. I listened to the small