Reviews with content warning for Mental illness - Men We Reaped

"...I found the adage about time healing all wounds to be false: grief doesn't fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief. We are nervous free from the feeling that we have failed. We are never free from self-loathing. We are never free from the feeling that made this mess."

Men We Reaped rocked me to the core. Jesmyn Ward poured her entire heart onto these pages. I related to this book on a personal level and it validated fears I thought I had buried deep inside. Ward's writing cuts like a knife but allows for cathartic relief.

I've never thought about grief the way Ward describes it: " WE INHERIT THESE things that breed despair and self-hatred, and tragedy multiplies." It is sinister and waiting to finally catch up to us. "DEATH SPREADS, EATING away at the root or our community like a fungus". Because of the generational traumas and circumstances that are passed down in marginalized communities death is always lurking and waiting to destroy what we love the most.

Ward ultimately explores:
🖤 how we define and create community and family
🖤 how grief is carried across generations
🖤 why we are always to drawn to home despite tragedy
🖤 how communities heal and practice resiliency
🖤 the daily anxieties and fears of marginalized communities
🖤 how communities cope with grief
🖤 the effects of unresolved mental health issues in families of color
🖤 gender differences in communities
🖤 what it means to be BIPOC and poor in the South
🖤 the strength of Black women
🖤 what survival looks like as a Black person

What sticks with me the most is the idea that grief is the validation that someone's life mattered. Grief is what is left behind to remind us of how much our loved ones meant to us even if the world says otherwise. Grief never fully goes away because it is what keeps us connected to those that left us too soon. This book was powerful, heartbreaking and beautiful at the same time.

Content Warnings