Music Of The Swamp Lewis Nordan Childhood Trauma

Throughout the past, present, and future, humans all seem to hide a form of trauma or emotional response by displacing it further away from themselves. Lewis Nordan, author of “Music of the Swamp,” provides an astute example of what childhood trauma can be portrayed as through the eyes and life of a young, southern boy. Sugar Mecklin, the main character of this novel, travels through the area of the swampy Mississippi Delta in adventures and difficult trials. However, Nordan depicts Sugar’s abusive and dysfunctional family in a whimsical and magical sense. How can an author do that? Well, Nordan uses his own real non-fictional story to create a fictional story. He uses a magical theme to hide mental and physical characters of abuse and poverty

11). The adage is a adage. In response to his dream of the mermaid the night before, Sugar could not believe he was seeing a real dead person. He thinks it is just possibly part of the dream, and he believes Sweet Austin has found the mermaid in real life. However, as this scene continues, Sugar handles the situation more maturely than Sweet Austin does. Once they return from the police, Sweet Austin cries to Mrs. Gilbert while Sugar listens and watches his drunk father. Another example is the execution of an African American man. The book reads, “I did not attend the execution, obviously. Even though I knew it was impossible. The man did die, though.I cried my guts out when I heard about it” (pg. 1). 81). The. These scenarios of death serve as pivotal points in time that contribute to Sugar’s depth of understanding. At the age of just eleven, Sugar saw more deaths and injuries than most adults. This statement relates to a quote from “Shocked into Maturity: Sex and Death as Initiation in the Fiction of Lewis Nordan” by Thomas Bjerre. It reads, “Nordan shows us childhood as a time of great wonder but also a time of great

Nordan inflicts Sugar’s narration with the immediacy that undercuts or ameliorates the irony and the pathos of his experience and lightens the potentially ponderous quality of Sugar’s emotional revelations” (Morris, Gregory). This statement depicts the overall ease Sugar’s character brings to readers in such a hard and brutal life. Sugar Mecklin’s mind is extremely active, but it also seems to bear the abuse, poverty, and death that follows him in the delta. The next example of Sugar’s mind avoiding dealing with the hurt his parents and the environment cause him, he buys a shovel that eventually digs up a casket. The book writes, “Beneath the glass was a dead woman, beautiful, with auburn hair and fair skin” (pg. 62). The aforesaid aforesaid aforesaid aforesaid aforesaid aforesaid aforesaid aforesaid aforesaid aforesaid aforesaid aforesaid afor Sadly, in reality, when a person is dead and buried, nature takes its course in deprivation and