Bois Sauvage as Biotope in the Novels of Jesmyn Ward

This chapter focuses on the depiction of place in Ward’s first three novels, Where the Line Bleeds (2008), Salvage the Bones (2011), and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017). It reads her depiction of the landscape and environment of the three novels as a biotope – a place where people, animals, and the natural world exist together creating ‘life worlds’ (Kolen, 2015). Ward depicts Mississippi as a historical landscape where the natural world and human experience, past and present, are powerfully imbricated: rivers, bayous, storms, dirt, trees—the environment of Bois Sauvage—is more than just setting. Rather, the human inhabitants are part of the ecology of this place and there is no easy separation of nature and culture / history. The history of the place is written into the land; the land is written into the history and people of this place. As Ward herself has noted, ‘I believe place determines nearly everything about a writer and about a character’ (2014).