brush fire

Maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised that there are so many images of Earth on fire on vectorstock. I chose the one that centers the continent of Africa.

“Remember the character of fire.” M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing

New Jersey caught on fire, but all we saw was the sunrise. On the top floor of the hotel where Rutger’s puts their guests, the view of the sunrise was neon. The sky over the Raritan river knows something about this land that I want to remember.

This is the land where my sister Ariana was born, where my grandmother Lydia earned her college degree as a mother of four children, where my Uncle Duane fell in love with my Aunt Carol. And this is the place where a beautiful community of scholars convened as BlackLab and committed to “experiments in theoretical Black studies” invited me to join them for a moment in the rigorous work they are doing to honor a brave multitude of diverse and committed students. This was an invitation made even more joyous by the fact that my own dear graduate advisor and dissertation committee chair Maurice Wallace, a founding member of BlackLab (along with Evie Shockley, Imani Owens, Carter Mathes, Erica Edwards and more) invited me!

It means a lot to me to be at Rutgers anytime because of my family connections, but at this moment when the faculty and graduate students are on the verge of a strike unless the administration honors their three part vision of living wages for all instructors, including graduate student instructors, more job security for non-tenured faculty including adjunct faculty and recognition and renumeration for the unpaid labor of oppressed members of the campus community.

And it did feel like a neon sunrise to witness the clarity and solidarity across rank, to watch one professor explain the reasons for the impending strike to their students and for the students to spontaneously burst out in cheers.

This is an adobe stock photo of the sunrise over Rutgers that I did not take and did not buy.

Yes the work of the union could be an opportunity for Rutgers to rise to the occasion. But the email the university president sent out the lie that it is “unlawful” to strike in the state of New Jersey and then daring to use the term “beloved community” to act as if the very reasonable improvements 94% of faculty and graduate students are requesting, which require the re-allocation of only 1% of the university budget are somehow both impossible and unnecessary, makes me glad that Rutgers has some of the best literary scholars in the world on the case. That type of communication doesn’t feel like a sunrise. I would call it a dumpster fire.

And wouldn’t you know, on the very afternoon of my campus visit and actual dumpster fire on a routine garbage train exporting New York City trash around the country got out of hand and spread into brush fires all along the New Jersey transit line, shutting down all trains past Edison, through New Brunswick and beyond. You all know I don’t believe in mere coindicence. All I see is connection.

Inspired by the brave connections Evie Shockley’s graduate students made between their most vulnerable breakthroughs and my apocalyptic writing and the generous connections PhD students Ashley Codner and JP Sloan made between my body of work and my way of working and crucial intellectual and spiritual work of their own connections to their beloved family members and ancestors, I too will look for generative connections between a New Jersey brush fire and the lessons we and I need to learn.

M. Jacqui Alexander asks us to “remember the character of fire.” That fire is not only hot, it is strong. And the nature of fire is to transform. Everything. And more and more biologists are recognizing and emphasizing the influence of fire on life on earth itself. The conditions that make our lives and any oxygenated life on earth possible are the same conditions that beckon fire. Because, as biologist Stephen Pyne reminds us “fire is not a substance, it is a reaction that synthesizes its surroundings.” Fire is a writer with a thick black pen, a cloud of hair recognizable even from far away. Or you can call me what Pyne calls me: “an ecological shape-shifter.”

Fire is not a component of an environment, it is a crucial connection between the components of an existing environment with a persistent way of making itself known. Which is why we don’t name a fire by what ignites it, but by what sustains it. We name fires after whatever fuels them to grow. A forest fuels a forest fire, the brush feeds a brush fire, and our prodigious production of waste fuels the dumpster fires of the world. A fire, like a perfectly lawful strike, is a reaction to a set of pre-existing environmental factors, a synthesis illuminating those factors, transubstantiating the situation into a path of irrevocable change.

A reasonable response to a fire must shift the conditions the fire signals with its presence, for example the gathered dryness, the piling debris swept under the rug at many universities in the United States where local cost of living goes up, and tuition goes up, but wages don’t. Where racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist, transphobic, xenophobic practices fail to honor the actual population of students and workers the university purports to serve. The suppression of the small fires, leads to so much underbrush solidarity that the big trees fall. The university evasion of union demands, the suppression of the very existence of unions? Those are the perfect conditions for a fire, thus the nursery rhyme about the fate of the pants of the liar.

The demands of the union are water. And the river is literally right there. Why do our institutions continually chose to dump more trash excuses and toxic lies on the existing dumpster fire? Maybe it’s for the same reason I used to remember to charge my phone and check my email more frequently than I remembered to eat, or drink water. Or why I am so much more likely to deal with what I have than to risk asking for what I need. Because the bells, alarms, rewards and punishments of capitalism refuse to be ignored, and my ignorance of the wider system, the orbit, the planet in fire, makes me that much more available as fuel.

There is a science lesson about the different categories of fuel, from the perspective of a fire, because there is a difference between potential fuel, that which would ignite under the most extreme circumstances, and available fuel that which will ignite in THESE conditions, the conditions we find ourselves in NOW.

All that brush along the New Jersey transit tracks was available to fuel a fire, the moment the dumpster fire exceeded its metal. Kind of like the faculty and students who want to be available to each other, and recognize the need for that even more in the face of institutional lack of accountability. That’s fire too isn’t it? The way the members of this community want to change each other beyond their function to reproduce the institution they all inhabit? The fire in the dumpster changed the temperature of the train, which however could have continued on its destined track. The brush fire though? The brushfire shut down the whole Northeast Corridor, the brush fire changed the day itself.

And so I continue to study fire up close. I seek to learn the crucial difference between my potential and my availability. It feels hard to know what I should be available to and when, and what exact conditions ignite me, ignite us after all this time being fuel for a trash situation. From right here, cast aside from the deadening path. But that’s how ignitions works, because suddenly we know. And it’s like we never forgot. I love being brush alongside you, bursting into a shareable flame, scorched out our erstwhile randomness into a unified black char, more fertile ground than ever.

What if we embraced fire as the evolutionary message it is. The reason for thick bark on conifers, sturdy seedpods, long distance proliferations, a futuristic reaction to smoke by many species of trees, waxy leaves on bushes adaptation that not only help the rooted withstand but strengthen their lives and their intergenerational connections even after the fire is gone.

What if we let ourselves blacken and change? I already love you, bright shapeshifter, and how you always find me at the edge, call out my sweat as soon as you come near. And all I know for sure is you will never be the same and I will never finish knowing you and you swift rewrite my name. You wake me up.

P.S. I love you. I’m with you. I’m always here.