“Each Unbearable Day”: Narrative Ruthlessness and Environmental and Reproductive Injustice in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones

Abstract

Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 novel Salvage the Bones tells the story of Esch Batiste and her family in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina. Ward represents Esch’s unexpected pregnancy and the environmental degradation of her rural Mississippi Gulf Coast home as linked by the slow, quotidian forms of violence and risk exposure that characterize Jasbir K. Puar’s formulation of debility. Through scenes of reproductive and environmental injustice, Salvage the Bones elucidates the processes through which racially inflected political-economic systems unevenly produce debility in certain populations and environments while capacitating others. When put in conversation with critical race theory, critical disability theory, and environmental criticism, Salvage the Bones emphasizes the logics that underpin debility rather than sensationalizing or pathologizing its consequences. In its refusal to revert to ableist, racist literary codes and conventions, the novel theorizes and practices “narrative ruthlessness,” Ward's description of her literary strategy to respond to debility’s representational conundrums of inevitability and invisibility. In so doing, narrative ruthlessness exceeds liberal humanist impulses to propose restoration, cure, or uplift as desirable solutions, insisting instead on kinship, care, redress, and salvage as possibilities for radical survival and futurity.