‘I need the story to go’: Sing, Unburied, Sing , Afropessimism and Black Narratives of Redemption

Situated at the convergence of narratology and hauntology, this chapter argues that Sing, Unburied, Sing disrupts the paradigmatic conundrums that Afropessimism attributes to Black narratives. Frank B. Wilderson III considers Black emplotment as a ‘catastrophe’ for narrative. Defining Blackness as a non-human paradigmatic condition coterminous with social death, Wilderson concludes that narrative and redemption are inaccessible to Black people because the history of totalizing violence that came to define them lacks both a proper diegesis and an actual denouement. The theoretical issues Wilderson ascribes to Black storytelling are echoed by Richie, the ghost narrator in Ward’s novel. In Richie’s chapters narrative sometimes fails the spectre’s expressive needs, especially when he tries to describe his posthumous perception of time and space. Through Richie, the novel addresses the possibilities of Black narrative and the challenges forced upon it by racialized Western paradigms. Although Sing’s depiction of contemporary Black life is often in line with Afropessimistic speculation, the song that stands as the novel’s denouement seems to possess the redemptive powers Wilderson’s analysis confutes. Social death as embodied by Richie might be ‘aporetic with respect to narrative writ large’, but Ward refuses to separate Black storytelling from the possibility of salvation.