82 pages • 2 hours read
Elizabeth AcevedoWith the Fire on High
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Heterogenous Identity, Prejudice, and Roots
After returning from Spain and picking up Emma from daycare, Emoni encounters an “older white woman” on the bus who comments positively on her child (361-362). She asks if she is Emoni’s sister, but when Emoni reveals it is her daughter her attitude suddenly changes. Emoni reflects that she has met this kind of woman before. That is, “The kind that gets that gets sour-faced at learning Babygirl is my daughter, but who would have sympathy if I was of a paler complexion” (362). In other words, the woman has a stereotype about young mothers, but one that applies differently depending on whether the mother is Black or White. Of course, as Emoni admits, she is herself making a lot of assumptions about the woman in question. Nonetheless, her thought process reflects an experience of being held to different standards and being made to feel different than younger White mothers.
Prejudicial attitudes are not restricted to White or middle-class individuals. Emoni, who is Black but of mixed Puerto Rican and American descent, explains that she has often faced prejudice from Black and Hispanic groups for not “properly” belonging to their specific community. Malachi, when he first meets her, says, “I didn’t think you were Black-black […] your last name is Santiago, you’re light-skinned, and your hair’s wild curly. I assumed you were Spanish” (65-66). Even though he meant no offence by this comment, it betrays a familiar misconception that because Emoni is part Puerto Rican she is not “fully” Black. This is despite the fact, as she constantly reminds people, that most of the slaves taken from Africa ended up in the Caribbean or Latin America. On the other hand, she faces criticism for not being Latina enough. ’Buela raised Emoni primarily speaking English. As such, the Latina Grandmothers at the shops, who ask her questions in Spanish, take offence when she is unable to answer in the same language. As she says, “some days it feels like not speaking Spanish automatically makes me a bad Boricua. One who’s forgotten her roots” (69).
Emoni is in fact very aware of her history and her roots, but these have multiple aspects, ones interwoven with her current reality in Philadelphia. Nowhere is this more evident than her relationship to food. In her email exchanges with her Aunt Sarah from Puerto Rico, she is continually gaining inspiration for her own cooking, from Puerto Rican ingredients she utilizes and tries to find in America, such as green tomatoes. to recipes and style. Emoni’s cooking also seems to possess an intuitive and magical connection to her father’s homeland. Her very first attempt at cooking for ’Buela conjured up in her “a memory of Puerto Rico she hadn’t thought about in years” (16). Food has an important connection to identity in With the Fire on High. It is a way in which one discovers a connection to one’s culture through shared culinary traditions. It is also a way in which one reimagines and lives that culture by the recreation and interpretation of its food.
Rules, Recipes, and Self-Creation
Each of the three parts of With the Fire on High starts with a recipe written by Emoni. These recipes include ingredients, some limited instructions, and a note of what emotional state the dish is meant to be eaten in. For example, the first of these, her “Lemon Verbena Templeque” (3), should be made “when you are missing someone you love” (3). As such, recipes, and the metaphor of the recipe, play a central role in the novel.
However, seemingly at odds with the fact that the protagonist wrote three of them, the concept of the recipe at first appears to be something that the author criticizes. In Emoni’s initial descriptions of her cooking process, she cooks through imagination and instinct using “no actual measurements” (55), relying upon what feels or tastes right at the time. She cooks with an emotional connection to her food and to the people for whom she is cooking. In contrast, a recipe is prescriptive and detached, an idea given expression by Chef Ayden’s claim, “Cooking is a science” (90). Such a notion seems to be the antithesis of Emoni’s approach, for if cooking is science, the recipe exists to ensure uniform results using exact, objectively measurable quantities of ingredients and procedures.
Such a textbook approach takes the individuality and joy out of the cooking process. It thus leads Emoni to become disillusioned with Chef Ayden for insisting upon fidelity to recipes. Further, recipes can seem to have a broader, negative metaphorical significance. If recipes are rules or prescriptions for how to do certain things in life, then they are often oppressive and homogenizing. A “recipe” for a happy life might involve having sex, getting married, and having children at certain appropriate times. Likewise, the “recipe” for successfully bringing up a child might involve two heterosexual parents who have established themselves in economically secure careers and live together. Such prescriptions clearly run against the grain of many of the best relationships in the novel. Emoni and Emma, ’Buela and Emoni, and Angelica and Laura by no means follow the recipe for successful or normal relationships. Likewise, Malachi and Emoni’s relationship does not fall into any obvious socially recognized category.
However, recipes also come to have a more positive significance in With the Fire on High. For example, when Chef Amadi gives Emoni a tea bag full of herbs with one that Emoni cannot identify, she tells Emoni, “Not all recipes in life are easily understood or followed or deconstructed” (343). Following this more subtle interpretation, a recipe is not an exact prescription that anyone could or should follow. Rather, it is a guideline and a source of inspiration. It encourages and necessitates that the individual reinterpret it for themselves, and thus deliberately holds back from giving too easy or precise directions. It is like the text itself: It cannot provide any standardized, objective template for what self-realization and maturity look like—but it can give a sense or clue as to how one might begin to find out for oneself.
Colonialism, Coexistence, and Integration
When Emoni visits the Catedral de Sevilla, she is in awe of its beauty and majesty. Her attitude changes when she sees a statue of Christopher Columbus crafted in gold. She also hears the tour guide explain how different countries claim to have pieces of his body and compete for the “honor” of being his final resting place. The reason this angers Emoni is that it represents a deification of Columbus and a forgetting of the people, especially the indigenous Puerto Ricans, who suffered because of him. As she says, “all this gold they use to honor him, gold they got from our island in the first place, and hardly anyone remembers the enslaved people who dug through the rivers for that gold” (307).
In this context, Columbus and the gold used for his statue serve as a metaphor for colonialism. They represent the domination of one culture over another. Relatedly, they signify an amnesia with regard to the original cultures that preceded European colonization. One of the positive aspects of Julio’s relationship to Emoni then is that he has tried to teach her about all this. He taught her to remember that pre-Columbus Puerto Rico was named “Borinken” by the original Taino people who lived there. This means, as he told her as a child, “Land of the brave and noble lords” (306).
Julio has sought to instill a sense of pride in his daughter regarding his homeland. He has also taught her about the exploitation of the indigenous people, which is often forgotten, and he tries to connect this to contemporary political reality. As Emoni explains, Julio believes Europe and the United States “are the sole reason why so many of these countries are struggling now” (120). Moreover, there are other, more subtle forms of contemporary colonialism at work in the novel. For instance, there is the behavior of some of Emoni’s classmates in Sevilla: Showing no regard for local customs or ambience, they proceed to get drunk in a bar and cause a scene.
At the same time, interactions between cultures do not always have to be violent. Even between Puerto Rico and Spain, as Emoni suggests, “there has been an exchange of cuisine back and forth, especially with spices” (120). There is also the example of the Alcazar, which shows how Islamic and European architecture and art coexisted as a result of the Islamic conquest of parts of southern Spain in the eight century AD. In more contemporary terms, this kind of interaction is represented by the food of Chef Amadi. It is modern Spanish cuisine mixed with North African influences. The hope for Emoni is that cooking will likewise serve as the medium through which she can fuse and integrate the disparate elements of her experience and identity.
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