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Sarah Hopkinson Email: shopkin@bu.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Volume 31, Issue 1, Spring 2024, Pages 26–45, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isac044
Published:
22 July 2022
Article history
Received:
14 December 2021
Revision received:
14 May 2022
Editorial decision:
13 June 2022
Accepted:
24 June 2022
Published:
22 July 2022
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Sarah Hopkinson, Talking Trash: Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones and the Timescape of Disaster, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Volume 31, Issue 1, Spring 2024, Pages 26–45, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isac044
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Sorting through shattered detritus in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Esch Batiste—the protagonist of Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones (2011)—pockets “a piece of glass [ … ] another that is red and a pink brick stone” (254). Tucking the salvaged objects close to her body, Esch imagines telling her brother Skeetah “the story of what we found here”: “This was a liquor bottle, I will say. And this, this was a window. This, a building” (254). For Esch, such fragments contain a discursive potential signifying both the former totality of the thing lost—the window, the building, the home, the life, the family—and the event that destroyed it. The “pink brick stone” cannot replace or reinstate the building but it can retain the memory of what was lost through its continued material presence—bringing that past, and its losses, to bear upon the present. Esch plans to “tie the glass and stone with string, hang the shards above [her] bed, so that they will flash in the dark and tell the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered,” turning the foraged matter into a monument whose very ruination formulates a new, archival form of beauty (255). Esch’s salvage recognizes the illegible object as an actant1 facilitating the continued narration of Katrina’s story, while simultaneously crafting something new (a mobile, of sorts) from the disaster’s detritus. In doing so, Esch refuses to see the disastrous space as one of only waste and decay, and therefore death and impoverishment for its inhabitants. Salvaging objects by which to live, Esch and her family also salvage alternative forms of care and kinship to resist the conflation of their lives with the ongoing spatiotemporal conditions of disaster. In Salvage the Bones, the matter of Katrina, as well as the matter of centuries of oppression and impoverishment, is refashioned to create new kinds of livable spaces for human and non-human alike.
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