Once Upon A Fine

I recently read Elizabeth Acevedo’s newest novel With the Fire on High, and it turned out to be one of those novels that makes me remember why I love reading. I raced through the book, unable to stop turning the pages. I’d come to the end of one of its short chapters and think, “Oh I have time for just one more… and one more… and one more…”

With the Fire on High tells the story of Emoni Santiago, a seventeen-year-old Black-Latina, living in North Philadelphia. Emoni knows that for most people she would be a cautionary tale, a statistic, a girl who got pregnant when she was fourteen. Now, at the beginning of her senior year of high school, she has more than enough on her plate with raising Babygirl, working part-time at a fast-food restaurant to help her Buela pay the bills, and trying to pass all of her classes and graduate on time. Then, her high school offers a culinary arts class that culminates in a trip to Spain. Although Emoni knows it’s a lot to bite off, she also knows she has to take this opportunity. Because Emoni creates wonders in the kitchen: her cooking evokes memories in those who eat her food and she senses which flavors will meld together in interesting ways. It’s almost – but not quite– magical realism. Just a hint, like a spice you can’t quite name. And folded into all of this are relationships – friendships so close they’re almost sisterhoods, the complicated balance of being a parent and needing a parent, frenemies, and even a blossoming romance.

The writing is quick and straightforward, beautiful, and with occasional sparkles that burst like the cinnamon dust Emoni references in all of her emails to her Aunt Sarah. The characters' troubles are evident, but without ever sinking to despair. Maybe that's the real key. There is so much tough stuff going on, but the novel runs on a sense of hope.

I need that sense of hope more than I’ve realized.

Most importantly, With the Fire on High really made me reflect on some big issues: firstly, I'll be teaching this autumn, and this novel reminded me to always have compassion. It stripped away my rosy glasses and forced me to clearly remember my own struggles when I was a teenager and an undergraduate. It is easy to think of students as young and inexperienced, and to equate youth with frivolousness or lack of responsibility. But youth does not protect from one from grief or trauma. Youth doesn’t automatically make life easier; in fact, youth often makes life more difficult, as adults tend to discount the struggles of teenagers and young adults. Meanwhile, teenagers are still gaining the necessary life experience to deal with everything this world will throw their way. In the form of Emoni’s teachers, though, With the Fire on High also provided role models for holding students accountable and helping them to grow, while acknowledging their individual needs and acknowledging that they will have experiences that I will never know or understand.

Secondly, it made me really reflect on community. Emoni’s mostly-absent father is an activist and community organizer in Puerto Rico. Following his example, Emoni turns to her own community to fundraise for her trip to Spain, and learns that investing in her local community – her neighborhood, her school – means creating a network of support. Malachi talks about wanting to become a doctor to give back to his neighborhood in Newark. Instead of moving away and moving on, Emoni and Malachi reinvest and it brings out the best in them and in those around them.

Community and a sense of ‘home’ is something I’ve been struggling with for years. Is community a physical place or, increasingly, an online place? What community am I trying to build here in London? What happens when, inevitably, I leave London? What community am I trying to build and/or join through this blog and through my Instagram? What communities do I want to become a part of? How can I help grow the communities of which I am a part? What is the role of a ‘personal brand’ in all of this? On some level, I know a personal brand is necessary to have success with blogs/Instagram accounts and even careers, that a ‘personal brand’ can help attract the people I want to know – fellow PhD students, fairy tale and children’s/YA literature scholars, fashion historians, Disney lovers. But I don’t want a purely Disney blog, or a purely book review blog, or a purely scholarly blog, or a purely travel blog, or a purely fashion and fashion history blog. Is there a way to reconcile these facets of me? Do I need a million Instagram accounts? Do I need to focus on one community and build it, and it alone? Can I share pieces of myself across all of these borders? What is the line between career and community, both online and in academia? Similarly, what is the line between career and identity?

This question of personal brand has been one reason that I’ve not blogged very much here this year: I didn’t know whether this should be a London blog or a scholarly blog or some conglomeration. I want to build or find a community – or multiple communities – and I’m still figuring out how best to use my online tools. Blogging has changed so much in ten years. And if I’m honest, so have I.

These aren't easy questions to ask or to answer, or easy concepts to grasp, and I know I'll be working through these issues for a while to come. But I hope, like Emoni, I can face changes with a brave face, take chances, and know that the only direction to go is forward.

The past couple of weeks I’ve tried to fill my life with small, material things while I fill my mind with big, abstract literary theory. Reading theory has a way of making me feel unmoored and unlike myself. I can’t speed through theory like I can with most books. I spent three hours this morning reading fifty-two pages of Edward Said’s Beginnings. I spent a little over thirteen hours reading Gerard Genette’s Palimpsests; that averages to a rate of around thirty pages an hour. The first ten pages alone took me forty-five minutes. It’s exhausting and sometimes demoralizing. My brain has to work in new ways to comprehend it all, which is no bad thing, when the theory is good. When it clicks, it can feel like a revelation. But usually, I just end up feeling unqualified to argue with parts I disagree with, because it’s all couched in so much (pseudo?) intellectual verbiage I second-guess whether I actually understood it at all. Moreover, theorists who have made me see the world completely anew are few in number – notably, Roland Barthes, Terry Eagleton, and Judith Butler. They’ve enriched my understanding not only of literature, but of culture, of people, of how people use words to construct culture. I’m still processing everything from Palimpsests and I’ve barely started Beginnings (I’m still in the first hundred pages), so I’m not sure I have a grasp on it yet.

At its worst, though, reading theory (even theory that has changed my life) makes me second-guess not only my own understanding, but my own capabilities, and then – this sounds dramatic I know – the point of any of it at all. Of my work, of degrees, of literature, of any of it. So, to try to counterbalance the sense of nihilistic dread that my readings are currently producing in me, I’m grounding myself with material things that make me remember why I like being on earth and why I feel like things matter (which wasn’t meant to be a pun, but then I saw, matter/matter – oh god, I’ve been reading so much theory).

I’ve held countless cups of tea in my hands, marveling at the warmth, at the way a cup of tea really can make me feel like all is well in the world. The milky-sweet, earthy smell of breakfast tea in the morning. Peppermint tea to perk up an afternoon. The mildness of chamomile just before bed.

I’m learning to knit, and I wonder at how people learned these skills. Who first took thread and needles and made a scarf? Who learned to cast on and who thought to weave the threads in different ways to make different stitches? For that matter, who first thought to spin yarn from wool?

I have these same thoughts about bread. Who thought, “Ah yes, yeast! I shall take some of this, mix it with wheat I learned to grow then decided to ground down, and watch it become a big, bubbling mass, then put it in a hot oven and see what happens!”? I’m glad someone thought to do this, but really. I’m sure catching wild yeast the first time was a fluke, but I don’t think my first thought would have been to mix the stuff with other stuff and then eat it.

I bought a bouquet of flowers at the grocery store on Friday. They’re hothouse flowers, of course, but they smell like spring around the corner, and they add color and joy to my table. I notice each day how the sun sets later and later, how we gained ten minutes in just four days. How the air feels fresher somehow, but maybe that’s just my imagination. How soon the tree outside my window will begin to bud.

I took my pen — the same one I’ve used to take countless notes — and drew a little scene of a tent pitched by a river in front of a mountain, and another of a little cabin surrounded by trees. How good it felt to put pen to paper and to draw lines instead of letters, for the first time in a million years.

I curled up in bed with a hot water bottle and a book for fun on Sunday afternoon. I breathed in the scent of clean sheets; I listened to rain patter against the windows, to two rumbles of thunder – and felt absurdly happy to hear thunder in January, while curled up in bed. I lost myself in a book, really let myself be pulled under by the words, in a way that doesn’t happen nearly so often now as it did when I was a child.

And then I go back to work, grateful that this is my work. I pick up the book of theory, and I wrestle with the words, and I try to let myself see the world in new ways.

(Photos: Top: My flowers, my tea, and the book I read for fun and highly recommend, The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert. Lower: My ink sketch of a cozy little log cabin surrounded by trees.)