Our era is measured in breaths held, denied or sought. Breath as waiting, coping or hoping, as panic and distress. Breath commodified as safety, time or privilege. Breath as a fundamental right. These inhalations form the bones of “Ain’t Burned All the Bright,” the stunning new book by Jason Reynolds — the best-selling author of such books as “Ghost” and “Long Way Down” and the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature — and his longtime friend, artist Jason Griffin. “Ain’t Burned All the Bright” consists of only three sentences that unfold over the course of 300 illustrated pages. Their brevity speaks volumes.
A strength unique to visual storytelling is its ability to enrich and unpack the text, building on minor variations in observed details. Through art and words, “Ain’t Burned All the Bright” looks at how we measure time — the book’s stretched-out sentence echoes the reality of waiting indefinitely for justice, for progress, for a fulfillment of hollow promises. Insisting that possibility survives, even as every possibility now carries an asterisk.
Reynolds’s narrator details how crucial signs of life double as sources of frustration. These markers allow us to fall into a shallow snare, like quipping about a sibling 100 days into societal shutdown: “and my brother never lifts his head from the game/ while his hands jut around moving in a panic as he fights/ for an extra life.” Reynolds never preaches, but he offers a lens through which to view how we each compartmentalize multiple ongoing crises: global pandemic, protest movements against white supremacy, police brutality, and democracy at a crossroads — and our capacity to accept others’ coping methods without judgment.
This is a book about fatigue (“and she wipes weary from her eyes/ still glued to the no-good/ glued to the high-definition glare/ of low-definition life”), about holding indefinitely at the limits of anxiety, acknowledging that the people you know best often drive you to your wits’ end, followed by the catharsis of seeing and hearing them anew, relearning to see and hear yourself through them.
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The murder of George Floyd in May 2020 anchors the book in time, but the text-image interplay cautions us against limiting our context to a single protest, injustice or reckoning. Visual repetition drives home both the cumulative effect of those fits and starts that accompany decentralized mass protest movements and the dynamic tension between patience and urgency, between “smelling the flowers” and “blowing out the candles” — the exact calming exercise my wife and I have taught our kids to help cope during these past two years.
Griffin, who collaborated with Reynolds on the 2009 book “My Name Is Jason. Mine Too: Our Story. Our Way,” deftly allows the reader to receive visual information without subjugating it to the text. His sequential imagery truly carries the book by completing and expanding on patterns established by Reynolds’s prose. Griffin’s creative approach builds layers over fragile, accessible materials — the style suggests a found-journal quality, using the kinds of materials available to a household weathering months of pandemic isolation. We see cracks in the white paint, smudges and erasures, the gel pens, the glue stick, the textures underneath. His stark color palette offers red and blue as a pendulum of limited options: burning or drowning, blood and police, suffocation by tear gas or rising tides. But Griffin reminds us not to forget that clear summer sky or the flush under our skins when we yell, laugh and weep together.
Plain fabric conjures the sense memory of handmade blankets and weathered skin, always vulnerable to decay. Tape frays where it’s been cut but still holds the piece together, accepting new layers where needed. These plainly visible layers embody the cumulative effect of bearing witness to the same struggles, the same day with new variables, the same limited cross-sections of people. Text passages reemerge as a chorus with visual reprise. When our narrator identifies “the that in this and that/ is the feeling that this fight for freedom/ ain’t nothing but a fist with a face that looks like mine/ swinging at the wind,” allow yourself to be reminded of what the late, beloved John Lewis called “not the struggle of a few days, weeks, or months, but the struggle of many lifetimes,” of the Sisyphean nature of vigilance in the ongoing, expansive movement for the lives of Black Americans and the unfulfilled promise of multiracial democracy.
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Lined pages conjure memories of drawing on notebook paper, the medium of choice for our best adolescent art because we were freed from the possibility of presentable, “respectable” work. These sketchbook transmissions understand their own power as work-in-progress. Democracy and love are both actions and states, done and undone and done again, promises worth pursuing. “Ain’t Burned All the Bright” — billed as a book for ages 12 and up — is an essential read for all ages, an injection of humanity as we regroup at a threshold between possible futures.
Nate Powell is a graphic novelist whose work includes John Lewis’s National Book Award-winning “March” trilogy, the new graphic memoir/essay “Save It for Later,” the horror tale “Come Again,” and Rick Riordan’s “The Lost Hero.”
Ain’t Burned All the Bright
By Jason Reynolds and Jason Griffin.
Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy, 384 pp. $19.99
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