In this unique collaboration between long time friends Jason Reynolds and Jason Griffin, a black teen explores a world that has become overwhelming and suffocating.
The young teen sits at home wondering why his mother won't change the television channel, "why the news won't change the story and why the story won't change into something new." Instead, he notes how they are told "we won't change the world, or the way we treat the world or the way we treat each other."
His sister talks to her homegirl on her phone about a protest and what they've heard about what's happening. The protest is about "freedom to live and freedom to laugh...and freedom to run and be out of breath... and freedom to play without worry about the rules being rearranged." To the teen, the fight for freedom looks like him. His sister and her friend are talking about masks and what to pack for the protest.
As he continues to wonder about this, he hears his father coughing from the other room. The cough sounds terrible so he takes a break from what's going on in the room to check on his father who is sick with covid. Through a crack in the door, his father smiles at him, because "the fever ain't burned all his bright up yet." His father tells him he will be "wonderful" in a few weeks and that they will do all those things they used to do like telling jokes and "squeeze-hugging" and rough housing. His father tells him not to worry, that he's a fighter but the boy knows his father is also a worrier like he is. His father returns to watching television - the same thing his mother is in the livingroom. His father smiles at him and holds up his arms, while suppressing the cough that wants to get out.
The boy feels like he is the only one in their family who recognizes, who realizes they are drowning, suffocating. And so he gets up to look for an "oxygen mask"since his mother and father keep everything. Although he looks all through the house, he cannot find what he needs. Until suddenly, this boy, realizes the the "oxygen mask" he is seeking is hiding in plain sight.
Discussion
Ain't Burned All The Bright is a creative mix of free verse and art by Jason Reynolds and Jason Griffin.
In the poetry, in the form of three sentences, written over many pages, a young black teen struggles to understand the events happening around him in 2020: the murder of black men by police, the covid pandemic and the terrible way we treat one another. With Covid-19, people were dying, unable to breathe as the virus destroyed their lungs. The boy in the story, worries about his father, as he struggles to breathe and recover from Covid.
In the spring of 2020, on May 25 a forty-six-year-old black man, George Perry Floyd Jr. was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer after he pinned George Floyd to the ground by kneeling on his neck. On the television he sees the coverage of this story and of others, that are similar. And he wonders why we can't change the story, change what is happening.
These events suck the oxygen out, making it difficult to live, to breathe. He asks how does one survive? Ultimately, the "oxygen mask:", what helps us survive, is our family, our parents, our brothers and sisters, our grandparents, the familiar things in our homes. But when his mother has the hint of a laugh at the corners of her mouth, he realizes "I'd been looking for breath in boxes and that maybe the oxygen mask was hidden on the hinges of my mother's mouth or in my brother's PEW PEW sound effects, or in my sister's loopy handwriting or in my father's relentless shoulders...or in the fridge stuffed in the leftover meatloaf or the cold greens....or in the smell of new sneakers or the feel of broken-in-denim or a T-shirt freshly washed..." Instead, breath and oxygen to help him get through these difficult times might be hiding "...in our arms touching our skin chatting our laughing and bickering and bothering and chewing and making an jamming and stepping and hearing and hollering..." He is wonders, "...yes maybe there's an oxygen mask here something keeping us alive something keeping us..."
To illustrate his words, Jason Reynolds turned to his friend, illustrator Jason Griffin. In the back note, "is anyone still here?" Griffin mentions the direction Reynolds gave him, "you said you were going to send me the first section, and told me i could do anything i wanted with the text in terms of how i chose to break it up, so if i wanted to have one word on one page, then a full line on the next, then three blank pages, you were with it." And that's exactly what Griffin did, creating illustrations rendered in paint markers, sharpies, spray paint, ball-point pen, pencil, gaffer tape, scotch tape, label stickers felt-tip pen, packing tape, masking tape, and acrylic paint in moleskine notebooks.
Ain't Burned All The Bright is a quick read that will evoke plenty of emotions. Readers are encouraged to re-read it several times, to think about the words, to ponder the artwork and to consider how they too have experienced 2020.
Book Details:
Ain't Burned All The Bright by Jason Reynolds
New York: Atheneum 2022
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