Reviews with content warning for Suicide - De mannen die wij oogstten

I finally read this book after putting it off for years because I knew it was sad. This was indeed sad. Jesmyn Ward really had me bawling with this one.

Content Warnings

carlytenille's review against another edition

Go to review page

emotional reflective sad slow-paced

3.75

Content Warnings

mirandaroo89's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging emotional reflective sad fast-paced

5.0

Content Warnings

anomiques's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark emotional informative sad fast-paced

5.0

Content Warnings

laurendenton's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad fast-paced

5.0

Content Warnings

just_one_more_paige's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

I read my first book by Ward, her novel Sing, Unburied, Sing, a few years ago. It was an affecting reading experience, emotional and expressive, lyrical and illuminative. But the story style, the slow-moving family saga and ghost story mix, is one that I have to be in the right mindspace for, because it can easily cause me to become disassociated from the characters and univested overall, which isn't really fair to the author. Knowing that, it took me a while to pick up this second work by Ward, but I'm glad I waited until the right time because this nonfiction was, if anything, even harder (emotionally) to read than her fiction.

Men We Reaped is a work of nonfiction that combines memoir and mini biographies. Ward chronicles the history of her family and her own youth/adolescence/early adulthood, alternated with chapters about the lives of five men close to her, including her own younger brother, who (over a short span of five years in the early 2000s) all died. Interspersed throughout the book are facts, statistics, questions and philosophies about why, about how being a Black man in America contributes to so many causes of death, from suicide to drugs to accidents to violence to "bad luck," in ways large and small, obvious and subtle.

First of all, reading this was a lot. It's not a very long book, and having the audiobook on hand as well means it's one that I would normally have sped right through, but that was not possible here. I purposefully took breaks throughout, reading other things (lighter things) to give my emotions a break. So trying to imagine how Ward must have felt living through these years, not just reading about it secondhand, and then opening up about it to share so publicly, is nigh on impossible. A note here: if you have a brother (especially a younger one), as I do, reading about Ward's relationship with her brother, how it changed as they got older and their lives took different trajectories, and the aftermath of his sudden death is...a struggle. It hits differently, especially hard, so just FYI. There is so much grief in these pages, as Ward revisits each of her relationships with the five men whose deaths she's recounting. And there is grief for herself and her family as well, as she details their history and day-to-day reality living in MIssissippi. The complex mix of reactions to the truths of their lives is so clearly communicated: Ward is able to conceptually understand the way that systemic racism and centuries of oppression/suppression have set up the failures and hardships she (they all) endured while also honestly telling how even knowing all that doesn't help mitigate completely the rejection and frustration and anger she felt with her parents (and especially her father) throughout her life. In addition to all the personal aspects of this book, the insights from Ward into her own life and the lives of her friends and family, she writes a compelling dual look at types of racism, focusing (though not exclusively, of course, because neither exists in a vacuum) on the more direct and interpersonal for herself (through experiences at school, etc.) and the societal/institutional for her brother and father (and the other men highlighted), and the different ways each affected them. The lines she draws from that to the circumstances of each man's death are clear, uncompromising and, with the "straight up, no flourishes" style of this book, Ward forces you to acknowledge them, face them down, and reckon with them.

As far as the writing and structure, this was set up in a really unique way. Ward told the story of her family and personal life in a regular "past to present" sort of way. But she wrote the stories of the five men who died in reverse chronology, starting with the most recent and moving backwards to finish with the first, her brother. This reverse parallel meant that the two timelines sort of met in the middle at the end of the book in a sort of crashing crescendo of the most intense emotions, that was deeply effective as a literary device. I found the writing to be a little bit jumpy, compared to the lyrical style of her fiction. It kind of moves from memory to memory in snippets that connect, but tangentially, or don't really connect in any way other than the random mental leaps that we all experience while reminiscing. It was jarring at times, but also, as this was a memoir, did fit stylistically (more or less). I loved the way that Jesmyn showed each of the five men's lives (as well as her own, her mother's her father's) in their full truths, not the perfected remembrances or "what they could have beens" that often come with memorializing someone, but the messy realities of who they actually were. Because that should have been more than enough to deserve a fuller chance to live. The authenticity of the way they were represented in these pages made them feel all the more real to me, which made the reading experience that much more difficult, in a good and necessary way. Related, Ward's speculations of each man’s last moments or other internal thoughts in moments of privacy was really impactful.

There is a pall of foreshadow over the whole book, knowing, as the reader does, what each chapter is leading to, and anticipating it with dread. Contrasted with the vividness of the stories Ward tells about her own and each man's life, the jumpiness of the text settles into the background and the intensity of the words and topics takes center focus. The grief is palpable and, at times, overwhelming, but the questions Ward uses that grief to raise and address are imperative. And her bravery in grappling with these memories and heartache in order to lead us into that interrogation is monumental.

“Homesickness had troubled me […] I knew there was much to hate about home, the racism and inequality and poverty, which is why I’d left, yet I loved it.”

“What I meant to say was this: You will always love him. He will always love you. Even though he is not here, he was here, and no one can change that. No one can take that away from you. If energy is neither created nor destroyed, and if your brother was here with his, his humor, his kindness, his hopes, doesn’t this mean that what he was still exists somewhere, even if it’s hot here? Doesn’t it? Because in order to get out of bed this morning, that is what I had to believe about my brother […] But I didn’t know how to say that.”

“…did that mean we were living the same story over and over again, down through the generations? That the young and Black has always been dying, until all that was left were children and the few old, as in war?”

“Maybe he looked at those who still lived and those who’d died, and didn’t see much difference between the two; pinioned beneath poverty and history and racism, we were all dying inside. Maybe in his low moments, when he was coming down off the coke, he saw no American dream, no fairy-tale ending, no hope. Maybe in his high moments, he didn’t either.”

“The burden of regret weighs heavily. It is relentless.”

“What I did not understand then was that the same pressures were weighing on us all. My entire community suffered from a lack of trust: we didn’t trust society to provide the basics of good education, safety, access to good jobs, fairness in the justice system. And even as we distrusted the society around us, the culture that cornered us and told us we’re perpetually less, we distrusted each other. We did not trust our fathers to raise us, to provide for us. Because we trusted nothing, we endeavored to protect ourselves, boys becoming misogynistic and violent, girls turning duplicitous, all of us hopeless. Some of us turned sour from the pressure, let it erode our sense of self until we hated what we saw, without and within. And to blunt it all, some of us turned to drugs.”

“We all think we could have done something to save them. Something to pull them from death’s maw, to have said: I love you. You are mine.”

“By the numbers, by all the official records, here at the confluence of history, of racism, of poverty, and economic power, this is what our lives are worth: nothing.”

Content Warnings

ooo's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

4.5

Content Warnings

More...