Ain't Burned All the Bright

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses anti-Black racism and racist violence.

In Ain’t Burned All the Bright, the book appears handcrafted and as if it has been made using the limited materials available during lockdown, the edges are often frayed and imperfect, and it broadly feels as if it is an effort to piece together and make sense of the overwhelming but disparate events the narrator is experiencing, not unlike a quilt. However, it is how and when the literal quilt appears—first, as the narrator is working on it while worrying about his father, and later, with his father using it while in bed, and then finally, at numerous points during the narrator’s revelation about family in Breath Three—that gives it deeper symbolic importance.

Like many of the oxygen-giving signs of life he finds around the house, the quilt is an object that becomes imbued with meaning and significance because of the memories and experiences it represents. The narrator creates the quilt to comfort his father because he cannot physically be close to him, but, like the text itself, the act of creating it is also a way for the narrator to cope with his weariness and anxiety.