Ain't Burned All the Bright

From the structure of the novel (it is divided into three long run-on sentences called Breaths, with each ending in a deep breath in through the nose and out through the mouth), to the crises that are going on around the world (COVID-19, police brutality, and climate change), to the fact the narrator is so overwhelmed and anxious with the state of the world that he feels he is suffocating, breathing is a motif that runs throughout Ain’t Burned All the Bright. It takes on both literal and figurative meaning in the text. Literally, the inability to breathe is a concern for the narrator and his family because the father has COVID-19, an infection that attacks the respiratory system and sends him into coughing fits that sound like "an out-of-tune instrument / that somehow / only plays thunder” (126-27). The breathing motif also applies to the fact that as a Black family living in America, they are constantly subjected to the dangers and oppression of systemic racism, and the threat of police violence is ever-present.

The words, “I can’t breathe” were also the last thing uttered by George Floyd as he was choked to death by a police officer, which subsequently became a slogan associated with the Black Lives Matter movement. In this case, the notion of breathing bridges the literal and figurative—while it is a literal instance of a Black man being choked to death that sparks the Black Lives Matter movement (which the narrator’s sister is eager to join), the notion of taking to the streets “to fight for the freedom to breathe” is also a broader, and figurative, stand-in for the right to live free of fear and by the same rules as everybody else (160). Breathing is as fundamental of a right as can be asked for, and by highlighting it as a central demand of the protests, Ain’t Burned All the Bright underscores the severity and absurdity of the injustice of systemic racism.

In a less literal sense, the narrator's inability to breathe, and his need for an oxygen mask, is a figurative reflection of how overwhelmed he feels because of everything going on around him. There is just too much to process and too much that he has no control over. A lot of the art that accompanies his prose poetry invokes the sense of suffocation he feels—the pages are filled with images of flooding, smoke, and smog, all implying his inability to breathe and a visual metaphor for his psychological state of being. The breathlessness is also evoked by the extremely long run-on sentences that compose each breath. Lastly, the invocation of mindful breathing that ends each section not only marks someone who is struggling with anxiety and learning to control their breathing as a means of coping with it but serves as a general reminder of the importance of slowing down to take care of oneself.