Mourning the past demands struggle and effort to end cycles of violence – there is an ethical imperative to strive to make the present distinct from the past.

As such, the songs also figure as a form of remembering through mourning. In The Post-Racial Limits of Memorialization, Alfred Frankowski insists “that mourning cannot help but be a way of resisting the crises of our political lifeworld” (2015: 97). It needs to be politicized and become more than a mere attunement to wrongdoing and loss. Unlike memorialization, mourning does not relegate injustice to the past. Mourning acknowledges the continuities and antiblackness’ pervasive grasp in the present. The novel thus refutes what Frankowski terms “postracial memorialization” which serves the purpose of “social forgetting” and distancing in the present. Political mourning underscores the complicity of the present with the past and future. For Frankowski, a political sense of mourning “requires that our passivity be turned into an activity” (98). It acknowledges how current social relations are intricately linked with historical violence. These links need to be stressed not least in the ways in which past horrors are remembered, memorialized, and mourned. Sing develops such an outlook most visibly through Kayla who unites the important sources of possibility, posture, affection, and song. Thus, she embodies the virtue of hope as action more so than anybody else. In her, the past, present, and future merge. The possibility of a different tomorrow lies in her bond with Jojo and the way in which she engages with suffering. Together, through acts of mourning, they can break the cycle of threatening lovelessness and hopelessness in an antiblack world so accurately diagnosed by Cornel West (2001: 22). By no means is this the end to all problems but it is nonetheless indispensable. bell hooks notes: “Even when we cannot change ongoing exploitation and domination, love gives life meaning, purpose, and direction” (2001: xxiv). Survival and change have only been possible through unconditional commitment to one another. Unconditional commitment is present in the minute gestures of the grandparents and their loving relationship to one another but Kayla also extends it to others beyond her inner circle. Through Kayla, Richie and the other ghosts who are unable to go home fnd relief. Not only is she able to hear their song but she is also able to sing it. This plays a signifcant role in the novel’s solution. Kayla acknowledges their suffering and encourages them to “[g]o home.” Jojo focalizes what happens next: Kayla begins to sing, a song of mismatched, half-garbled words, nothing that I can understand. Only the melody, which is low but as loud as the swish and sway of the trees, that cuts their whispering but twines with it at the same time. And the ghosts open their mouths wider and their faces fold at the edges so they look like they’re crying, but they can’t. And Kayla sings louder. She waves her hand in the air as she sings, and I know it, know the movement, know it’s how Leonie rubbed my back, rubbed Kayla’s back, when we were frightened of the world. Kayla sings, and the multitude of ghosts lean forward, nodding. They smile with something like relief, something like remembrance, something like ease. Yes. (Ward 2017: 284) Kayla’s song voices their turmoil and yet also points towards temporary deliverance from it. Through mourning, she can continue to narrate their life stories, but she can also provide comfort. The dead and the atrocities committed against them will not be forgotten, and neither will the countless ways in which their suffering is tied to ongoing harm. The novel thus refutes post-racial memorialization and opts for mourning as a simultaneous call for action. What is striking here, moreover, is the combination of song and movement. Kayla’s hand gestures are the ones that Jojo recognizes as Leonie’s way of comforting them when they were younger. Mam already used it to comfort Leonie when she frst learns that she is pregnant: “[H]er hand rubbed circles on my back” (Ward 2017: 156). If both Jojo and Kayla embody the virtue of hope, then they have also inherited this virtue from their ancestors. This intergenerationally connects Kayla with Mam through Leonie. In this context, it is important to consider the way that Jojo describes Kayla: “Her eyes Michael’s, her nose Leonie’s, the set of her shoulders Pop’s, and the way she looks upward, like she is measuring the tree, all Mam. But something about the way she stands, the way she takes all the pieces of everybody and holds them together, is all her. Kayla” (284). She literally carries in her body those who came before her and has inherited their histories. Yet, because she is her very own person, she at least stands the chance of change. In her bodily posture just as in her ability to empathize with others, past and future merge. An end to the perpetual cycle of violence is possible, even if it has to be forged from serious struggle and effort without any certainty of success: the ghosts smile with something like remembrance and ease—but they do not disappear. The only certainty lies in the fact that any future success will be forever entwined with the losses of the past. Since antiblackness is politically, socially, and affectively entrenched, there is no way of knowing what will become of Jojo and Kayla. The circumstances of their existence might very well catch up with them and send them down an all too familiar path. Yet, against all odds, it might be their very generation that puts a small but meaningful dent into the antiblack project. Recalling Jeffrey Stout, hope “is not the same thing as thinking that what one ardently desires is likely to happen” but the conviction that “we have a chance of making a significant difference for the better” (2010: 283). Ultimately Kayla, cannot send the ghosts away, but walking home with Pop and Jojo, the young girl embodies potential change: “Kayla hums over my shoulder, says ‘Shhh’ like I am the baby and she is the big brother, says ‘Shhh’ like she remembers the sound of the water in Leonie’s womb, the sound of all water, and now she sings it. Home, they say. Home” (Ward 2017: 284–285). Social forgetting will not happen on their watch. What lingers in the fnal lines of the novel is a profound awareness of how they can make a difference in each other’s lives by positively affecting each other’s lived bodies. Their actions matter in shaping them and the world around them. In Kayla and Jojo’s efforts, the future already begins to take shape. As Lewis Gordon insists, the political is future-oriented and thus always also about someone other than oneself. It is a commitment “to the life and freedom of others” (2021: 70). Such a commitment must play out in the here and now. That is why Kayla, Jojo, and Pop turn away from the tree of ghosts to face the presence even as they continue to mourn their loss. This is not a lot, but it is also not nothing. The subjunctive undertone in the fnal pages roots them frmly in the present while voicing desire for change. Sing anticipates change—in the absence of certainty. When read alongside the other Black humanist novels studied here, Ward seems to confront readers with the bleakest outlook because hunger, fear, and violence are permanent constants for many who are exposed to structural disadvantages. But the novel’s backward glance also orients itself towards the future: Mam ruminates that “we don’t walk no straight lines. It’s all happening at once. All of it” (Ward 2017: 236). The question then is how humans can impact the present so that it is not the identical reiteration of the past. Even though their actions cannot fully undo or dismantle antiblackness, they can undertake action that does not further it. In an interview, Ward asserts that, though she is fearful for the future, hope remains essential for her: “I don’t think it is an intelligent hope, I think it is a necessary hope” (qtd. in Allardice 2018). With Sing, Ward highlights human accountability for the conditions of life by pointing to both individual and societal responsibility. The two continuously reinforce one another. Ward emphasizes subjectivity as embodied and stresses the lived body as a site of suffering and resistance. It is impossible to make sense of the novel outside of the context of BLM because of its concern with Black Americans living precarious lives at the intersections of white supremacy and poverty. While the novel does not detail a full-fedged ecocriticism but advances a soft anthropocentrism, it at least acknowledges that the relationship to the nonhuman world has meaningful consequences for human life. Ward exposes especially how precarity is historically grown and the result of interlocking systems of oppression. Her backward glance is committed to making these ties legible, but also embraces mourning as a potential way forward. Mourning as a political practice becomes especially important in a post-racial climate that seeks to eliminate the ties between current and past injustices even as premature Black death has become more visible in recent years. In mourning life that is considered ungrievable, writers and activists alike do deep epistemological work. They publicly perform resistance to the ordering ideas and embodied thoughts underlying white supremacy. Both structural and attitudinal work is needed to enable meaningful change. This dual emphasis resides at the very core of Sing as a Black humanist novel.