The Fire This Time

The Fire This Time is a contemporary anthology responding to America’s turbulent racial climate. Jesmyn Ward, associate professor of English at Tulane University, edited the anthology. She has won numerous awards for her fiction writing, and in this book she seeks to present a collection of writing poetry from varied voices to illustrate the current moment and imagine a possible future. The book, which contains 14 essays and four poems, was published in 2016. 

In her introduction, Ward foregrounds the intention behind the anthology. After the death of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin, Ward found solace in the work of James Baldwin. Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, among other works, resounds with Ward and other writers in the anthology, many of whom quote Baldwin for his incisive, poetic wisdom about America’s racial landscape. Ward’s introduction also explains how she arranged this anthology, like Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, according to time. In The Fire This Time, Part 1 is “Legacy,” or thoughts on the past; Part 2 is “Reckoning,” grappling with current events; Part 3 is “Jubilee,” or visions of the future. 

Part 1 opens with Kima Jones’s hybrid poem “Homegoing, AD,” which combines elements of fiction and nonfiction and depicts a young woman traveling to the swamp of Charleston, South Carolina, for a family funeral. Part 1 then moves on to Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah’s essay, which describes her relationship to the work of James Baldwin and her visit to his expatriate retreat in France. Other works in this section concern America’s history of slavery, from Wendy S. Walters’s visiting the site of a mass African grave to Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s research on the famous poet Phillis Wheatley. Isabel Wilkerson’s “Where Do We Go From Here?” and Carol Anderson’s “White Rage” consider contemporary racially motivated violence from a historical perspective. Part 1 ends with Jesmyn Ward’s own essay “Cracking the Code,” which documents her discovery of her genetic background. 

Clint Smith’s poem “Queries of Unrest” begins Part 2 with a searching, personal tone. Kevin Young follows with his humorous lyrical essay about Rachel Dolezal, and Kiese Laymon’s essay weaves his love of his grandmother with his veneration of the hip-hop group OutKast. Garnette Cadogan’s “Black and Blue” is both a celebration of walking and personal testimony about racial profiling in America. Claudia Rankine’s essay continues on this theme by describing the constant fear of racial violence and calling the nation to grieve the dead. Emily Raboteau spent a summer documenting several New York City murals about one’s constitutional rights when detained by police. Finally, Mitchell S. Jackson considers the one father, or “Composite Pops,” he created from the many men who raised him. 

“Jubilee,” Part 3 of The Fire This Time, hopes for a better future. Natasha Trethewey’s poem “Theories of Time and Space” takes readers to the historic Mississippi coastline. In an essay crafted as a letter, Daniel José Older writes about the current revolution and how it might change the United States for the better. Edwidge Danticat also includes a “Message to My Daughters” in her essay that considers America from the perspective of a Haitian immigrant.