“Sing, Unburied, Sing” by Jesmyn Ward (post 6): Absentmindedness may be the memory gaps, and ghosts the alternate personalities, of multiple personality.

In Jesmyn Ward’s “Acknowledgements” for this novel, she thanks her editor’s assistant, “who compensates for my absentmindedness and keeps me in order” (1, p. 287), which reminds me of my first post about her memoir, and the question of whether her alcohol-associated blackouts were really due to alcohol, or reflected some other kind of absentmindedness. 

Presumably she is not thanking her editor’s assistant for helping compensate for drunkenness, but for sober absentmindedness. And to be mentioned in her acknowledgments, even jokingly, her absentmindedness must have been notorious, or at least felt to be so by the author.

A similar question arises in this novel regarding Leonie’s visions of her deceased brother, and whether they were drug-induced or not. At the end of the novel, it turns out that she experiences his presence even when she is sober. So it is concluded that Leonie has been seeing, not a drug-induced fantasy, but a real ghost.

But when I think of ghosts, my prime example is Hamlet’s father, who knows who killed him, how he was killed, and wants vengeance, which makes sense, since ghosts are continuously aware, both before and after death. And since real ghosts obviously don’t need to be told how they died, whatever the character Richie was, he was not a ghost, no matter how much the author insists that he was, and no matter how many book reviews believe it.

As discussed in many past posts, “absentmindedness” is sometimes a euphemism for the memory gaps seen in multiple personality, and “ghost” is a common literary euphemism for alternate personalities. Please search “ghost,” “absent-mindedness,” “absentminded,” and “memory gaps” in this blog.

1. Jesmyn Ward. Sing, Unburied, Sing. New York, Scribner, 2017.