ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies and analyzes figurations of maternal power in Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 novel, Salvage the Bones, and explains how the central character’s struggle with personal loss intersects with racialized experiences of social abandonment in the contemporary United States. Salvage the Bones tells the story of the Batistes, a poor African American family living in rural Mississippi, who prepare for and ultimately survive Hurricane Katrina. In the lead-up to and aftermath of the hurricane, the Batistes are offered little to no protection from any sustaining social structure beyond their immediate kinship relations. The story is narrated by fifteen-year-old Esch, a motherless wild child on the verge of becoming a mother herself. The chapter argues that Esch’s world of destructive quasi-human and non-human mothers (the sorceress Medea, the hurricane named “Katrina,” the pitbull called “China”) encodes a melancholic response to the loss of Esch’s own mother while simultaneously figuring the catastrophe of social collapse—the violent return of and to a “state of nature.” The chapter draws on psychoanalytic and posthumanist theory as well as recent work on the politics of reproduction in order to explore the novel’s powerful articulation of a maternal ethics.
