Question

My True South: Why I Decided to Return Home,” Jesmyn Ward uses narrative nonfiction and employs figurative language to strengthen her argument that while she is critical of the South, it is her home and is worth fighting for. Identify the reasons and evidence that Ward provides to support her claim. Then, analyze how her use of figurative language throughout the essay serves to strengthen her claim. Use textual evidence to support your response.

Answer 1

Answer:

In her essay, Jesmyn Ward describes racism in Mississippi telling real situations that she, her family and friends lived there. She is very critical of the systemic racism in the south of the country: "Sometimes the aggression is deeper, systemic. It is black children in my family enrolling in free preschool programs where their teachers barely tolerate them, ignore them, do a terrible job of leading them to learning."However, she also relates how the people she knows and love try to fight back the racism by staying alert when they see a situation where someone is in danger or is being discriminated:"I remember that Mississippi is not only its ugliness, its treachery, its willful ignorance (...). Here is one of my best friends from high school, a white woman with two toddlers, who stops her car when she sees black people pulled over by the police, pulling out her phone and filming in an attempt to belay disaster, to hold authority accountable."

Jesmyn Ward also uses figurative language throughout the essay to strengthen her claim, to give more meaning to the situations she is describing and to properly describe what she goes through when she is there, to emphasize and transmit the way she feels: "We stand at the edge of a gulf, looking out on a surging, endless expanse of time and violence, constant and immense, and like water, it wishes to swallow us. We resist.