Jesmyn Ward appeared on Late Night With Seth Meyers to talk about her latest novel, Let Us Descend.
Ward’s novel, published Tuesday by Scribner, follows Annis, a young enslaved woman in pre-Civil War America who is sold to a Louisiana sugar plantation owner. The book was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and is the latest selection for Oprah Winfrey’s book club.
Meyers told Ward that many readers have said that her characters “stay with people” after they’ve finished reading her novels. “Is that a compliment that you enjoy hearing?” he asked.
Ward replied in the affirmative. “I think that literature and that stories act in a way that other mediums don’t,” she said. “I think they allow readers to sink into a world with a person and to feel like they’re living with that person. And I think that…the characters that I write about are worthy of that kind of regard.”
Meyers asked Ward to talk about “the hurdle of addressing the themes and the difficult histories that you’re addressing” in the novel.
“It was really difficult to write this book, in part because I’d never written about anyone who didn’t have a lot of physical agency,” she said. “Annis is…very constrained, because she’s an enslaved person. But in the writing of the book, I began to discover that she has other types of agency. She has emotional agency. She has imaginative agency. She has the agency of memory. She also has a type of spiritual agency. So I think that all of these agencies combined gave her a way to move through the world that was not…constrained by the system of slavery.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
