Bathed in a golden light, she looks out from a photo resembling a fashion magazine spread with a commanding stare, surrounded by massive teddy bears. Instead of yellow curly hair, she wears thick, afro-textured, honey blonde locs.
This is the Goldilocks of CROWNED: Magical Folk and Fairy Tales from the Diaspora by husband and wife photographers Kahran and Regis Bethencourt. The two have reimagined familiar stories with photographs of Black children and, occasionally, new plot points, in an elaborate book of 141 photos.
But it wasn’t happening after two breaths, or four, or ten. Maybe because of my deteriorating state, I didn’t have the capacity to panic. My seven-year-old, Nick, was watching the cartoon Wild Kratts that Saturday morning, appropriately oblivious. My husband George was bringing my ten-year-old, Mia, home from her soccer game. I phoned him from the floor with a brief, passive-aggressive update along the lines of: “Don’t worry, but just so you know, I’m about to pass out.” Then I handed Nick my cell, instructing him to call 911 if I drifted out of consciousness. Nick had never been given responsibility over a phone, never mind a human being, but he had seen movies featuring kid heroes, and his rigid posture made clear that he was psyched.
The spinning started about ten minutes later—gentle at first, then increasingly turbulent. By the time George burst through the door, I felt like a stuffed animal tossed into violent ocean waves. The floor was folding and churning, and as he walked directly toward me, he seemed unflappably graceful, capable of performing ballet on a battleship.
My dad is a paradox. Growing up, he blubbered at videos of soldiers reuniting with their children enough times for me to know he had feelings. But to ask him what exactly those feelings were was useless— it would have been like asking a magician to reveal the secrets to his tricks. In the most difficult years of my life, his reluctance to unpack emotion became essential. I craved privacy throughout high school, but found total solitude daunting. My brain barked too loudly. I needed a companion. Someone willing to talk, but never insistent upon it.
I needed my dad.
I’ve cooked at least one recipe from each chapter and am hard-pressed to choose a favorite. Contenders include the showstopper roasted beets, citrus, labneh, zhoug; the smoky, chewy, lemony zucchini and freekeh salad with za’atar, halloumi; and the salade ‘gratinée’ with roasted fingerlings, red onions — another fast sheet-pan meal where crisp potatoes are topped with “robust” dressed greens and grated Gruyère, then quickly broiled until the cheese melts and the greens are just softened: Now this is a recipe truly greater than the sum of its parts.
“Vegetarian Salad for Dinner” contains about 80 well-tested recipes. Its range and complexity are wide, even a little awe-inspiring. But the directions are easy to follow, the techniques educational and enriching, and the results always well worth the time required to produce them … so long as you don’t let those chickpeas take over your life.
“We have a compulsion to tie food to place,” Anya von Bremzen writes in her new book, but that compulsion, it turns out, has more to do with myth and marketing than with historical fact. “National Dish” is the story of her quest to understand why certain foods, like pizza, ramen and tapas, are adopted as symbols of their places of origin.
Hayden White, who died in 2018, was perhaps the most important theorist of history since the 19th century. A 2022 anthology edited by Robert Doran, The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature and Theory, 1998–2007, showcases his critical output from the turn of the century. From “The Burden of History” (1966) to the most recent pieces collected in this volume, one can see that White was a consistently intelligent and engaging postmodern advocate for thinking about history as a form of imaginative reconstruction that could either constrain people or inspire their liberation. Like his late-in-life Stanford colleague Richard Rorty, White was an ironic anti-foundationalist—a thinker eager to undermine the ways that we moderns have found new gods to worship or essences to piously respect. The idea of an “arc of history bending toward justice” is such a god, and the notion of a core, permanent identity is such an essence. Both Rorty and White were iconoclastic. While the former tended to remind us that we didn’t need these new idols, the latter wanted us to smash them on the way to creating something radically new.