Jesmyn Ward’s novel “Salvage the Bones” as an example of “hurricane alley narrative”

Abstract

The article deals with the work of the contemporary American writer Jesmyn Ward who represents the new generation of Black literature. The study is based on her second novel in the trilogy about the fictional southern state of Bois Sauvage “Salvage the Bones”, published in 2011. The novel has traditional features of the “hurricane alley narrative”, a corpus of natural disaster texts written after 2005. Among its main characteristics is the narrative, provided from the point of view of a teenager, telling the story of an African American family on the eve of a devastating hurricane and its consequences. The poverty and discrimination of the Batiste family is shown through the image of the house and a detailed description of their daily life. On the one hand, Esch Batiste embodies the image of a prophet, on the other - the image of a child who is forced to protect herself from the natural disaster and who suffers from sexual violence. Due to the early death of her mother and raised predominantly in a male environment, which also stands out as a fundamental feature of the “hurricane alley narrative”, the main character cannot form a correct idea of motherhood and sexuality. In the novel, one of the central images is Hurricane Katrina, which is endowed with feminine characteristics, and for Esch, serves as a possible role model for motherhood. In the novel, the hurricane is shown as a living creature, which has not so much a destructive, but a constructive origin.