Nuts to all that
PECAN, n. I’ve been reading, very slowly, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. The author is a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and the book is a beautiful collection of essays about gratitude and reciprocity and what we can learn from nature. And it has language in it! There is a great essay about learning Potawatomi, and in other chapters, she often provides the names of plants. Some of the words are familiar, even if their etymologies are not:
The word pecan—the fruit of the tree known as the pecan hickory (Carya illinoensis)—comes to English from indigenous languages. Pigan is a nut, any nut. The hickories, black walnuts, and butternuts of our northern homelands have their own specific names. But those trees, like the homelands, were lost to my people. Our lands around Lake Michigan were wanted by settlers, so in long lines, surrounded by soldiers, we were marched at gunpoint along what became known as the Trail of Death. They took us to a new place, far from our lakes and forests. But someone wanted that land too, so the bedrolls were packed again, thinner this time. In the span of a single generation, my ancestors were “removed” three times—Wisconsin to Kansas, points in between, and then to Oklahoma. I wonder if they looked back for a last glimpse of the lakes, glimmering like a mirage. Did they touch the trees in remembrance as they became fewer and fewer, until there was only grass?
So much was scattered and left along that trail. Graves of half the people. Language. Knowledge. Names. My great-grandmother, Sha-note, “wind blowing through,” was renamed Charlotte. Names the soldiers or the missionaries could not pronounce were not permitted.
When they got to Kansas they must have been relieved to find groves of nut trees along the rivers—a type unknown to them, but delicious and plentiful. Without a name for this new food they just called them nuts—pigan—which became pecan in English.
We should tell that story more often. Many of the indigenous languages that provided us with words like “pecan” are threatened—elsewhere in the book, Wall Kimmerer mentions that Potawatomi has only nine fluent speakers left living, the youngest of whom is 75 years old—which is the result of a deliberate campaign of eradication by the United States government. The very least we can do is remember.
Anyway, the book is also hopeful and inspiring, even though it includes a lot of painful history. There is so much I don’t know about history, and nature, and how the world works, and how to live a better, more careful, more grateful life, and this book feels like part of the answer. I still have a couple hundred pages left, too.
Switching from the natural world to the unnatural world, this week in small-r romance, I read two books where the internet plays a huge role in the plot.
Girl Gone Viral (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary) by Alisha Rai and
Take a Hint, Dani Brown (bi f/het m, both cis, contemporary) by Talia Hibbert
Here’s Take a Hint, Dani Brown matching my day lilies.
These books are both wonderful and I think readers of one are likely to enjoy the other, because they overlap in how smart, sexy, and readable they are, but interestingly, they have a very different take on what it means to go viral.
In Girl Gone Viral, the internet exposure is a threat: Katrina King, a wealthy investor who has become a recluse due to her panic disorder, finally works up the nerve to go to a coffeeshop and subsequently has her photo posted without her consent in one of those “I’m overhearing someone else’s date” twitter threads. The heavily fictionalized, voyeuristic thread blows up—the strangers responsible for it want to profit from the viral moment as much as possible. The unwanted publicity means Katrina’s emotionally abusive father might now be able to find her, so she goes into hiding with the help of her very handsome and loyal bodyguard. Hell yeah.
In Take a Hint, Dani Brown, the internet is a little kinder: PhD student Danika Brown gets carried out of a building by security guard (and former rugby player) Zafir Ansari, and somebody on campus films them, and everyone on social media starts shipping #DrRugBae. Dani and Zaf aren’t actually in a relationship, but he is trying to get more attention for his charity, so naturally (naturally) she agrees to pretend to be his girlfriend. The book doesn’t gloss over the fact that any viral tweet necessarily has nasty comments in its replies (especially if said viral tweet is about two people of color), but most of the publicity is pretty sweet. People idealize and idolize Zaf and Dani and their relationship, and because of that, they’re willing to donate money to charity. Crowdfunding charities is one of the internet’s better qualities.
Hibbert and Rai both write families really well. Something I love about Rai’s books is that they really often have big, complicated, dynastic family drama—something from the grandparents’ generation that still has repercussions in the present—and Girl Gone Viral is a little gentler in this regard than Hate to Want You, but it does have a multi-generational family on the page, with intergenerational disagreements and misunderstandings. Rai also delves into US history to write about a Punjabi-Mexican community in northern California—many young Punjabi men immigrated to the US before a 1917 law excluded them, but they were not allowed to marry white women, so they often married women of Mexican descent, and these farming communities still exist today. It’s so cool to see that heritage explored. Jasvinder, the male protagonist of Girl Gone Viral, has all this family history, while Katrina, the female protagonist, feels cut off from her own, since her Thai mother passed when she was a child and her white father was emotionally abusive. But in the interim, she’s assembled a family of her own, and of course, it comes to include Jas.
The male protagonist of Take a Hint, Dani Brown is also of Punjabi descent, but Muslim (not practicing) and British. I love how both these books incorporate their main characters’ families and cultures—Dani, in honor of her late grandmother, worships an orisha called Oshun—and in a way, those things are the antidote to fleeting internet fame, whether it’s a blessing or a curse. No matter how the internet at large treats you, your real family will still be there.
Content warnings for Girl Gone Viral: emotional abuse from a parent, panic disorder, PTSD from war, sex.
Content warnings for Take a Hint, Dani Brown: anxiety, grief, death of a parent and a sibling in a car accident, past infidelity, sex.
And in things that are neither Romance nor romance, in addition to Braiding Sweetgrass, I also read Here For It, Or How to Save Your Soul in America by R. Eric Thomas, which is a funny and touching memoir about growing up Black and gay and Christian and figuring out how to be all of those things at once. It’s also, like the romance novels above, very much about the internet. There is a brilliant essay in this book called “Unsubscribe from All That,” playing on Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” essay on leaving New York, about living online. Written pre-pandemic, some parts have a prescient quality:
The internet is a mouth, gaping, always hungry, teeth gnashing, broadcasting hot takes, spittle-flecked with outrage, drooling prejudice. It’s always on, it’s always changing, it’s always producing. Despite the success I’d found, I was becoming exhausted by the internet. I wondered how long I could keep this thing up—sitting online all day, finding humor in darkness, navigating social media response—all from the isolation of my home.
I think we’re all wondering that now. Thomas points out that just as everyone who leaves New York writes an essay about leaving New York, we of the internet are constantly posting about our desire to leave. We tweet reminders to ourselves and others to log off on occasion, to practice self-care, and lately, to stop “doomscrolling.” So his essay, in contrast to that—and in contrast to all the terrible, soul-shriveling parts of the internet—is about staying online. The internet, for all its flaws, is a place he feels at home. Me too. And it strikes me that the internet is not just like New York City, crowded and loud, but also like the whole United States: violent, untrustworthy, full of people I vehemently disagree with. But it’s where I live. And really, at this point, where else can we go?
This is getting depressing, so here’s a cute and funny part of Here For It as a palate cleanser, and as a bonus, it’s about a cute and funny way to use the internet:
The night I met my husband, David, a Presbyterian pastor, I went back to my apartment in a South Philly brownstone, sat on the front steps, and decided that the minute we got engaged I would announce it on Facebook by changing my profile picture to Whitney Houston in The Preacher’s Wife. I saw the future clearly and, apparently, that future was on Facebook. You’ve got to be always thinking of how you’ll turn life events into #content, and it’s a known fact that engagements, the first baby, some new jobs, winning Big Brother, and photos with celebrities are the gold standards of social media reaction-getters. Squandering such gifts is a scandal and a sin. And I wasn’t trying to sin, because, honey, I was about to marry a preacher. I was about to be Mrs. God or whatever. Mary Man-delene? Possible. I was a little unclear on some of the details, like (a) how to contact David, (b) what male wives of preachers were called, (c) what a Presbyterian was per se, and (d) if enough of my friends were familiar with the complete Whitney Houston film collection for my reference to land. It was a stressful time; prayers were requested.
It’s a good book.
Also, on one last note, lest you think I have been reprogrammed or replaced by an imposter who would let Le 14 Juillet pass by without remark, let me assure you that I remain obsessed with the French Revolution, so this week I also revisited this excellent 1989 Robert Darnton essay. Darnton is a great writer, and I think of him as a sort of counterbalance to all the historical romance novels I love. Historical romance operates on the principle that people have always been people, and people in the past might have had different knowledge or material living conditions, but they were essentially the same as us. Darnton, as a historian, emphasizes the irreducibly strange parts of the past. He is drawn to the outlandish and the inexplicable, the moments that make us ask “but how could/why would anyone do that?”, and I love him for it.
I think it is this tension—“they were just like us” versus “they were incomprehensibly Other”—that drives not only my interest in history and literature, but also my interest in the present. The internet is fucking full of weirdos, and some of them are just like me.
