The Limits of Comfort Food

Searching for safety through making art and being horrified

Danger is in the swipe and the wind. It’s so blended into modern life that capital punishment is defended more than an innocent man’s life. Marcellus Khalifah Williams was executed by the US government on Tuesday, the day after Israel launched an attack against Lebanon, killing at least 500 people.

Is it fear-mongering if I’m relaying facts? The prosecutor and the victim’s family asked for Williams to be spared. And yet he was killed. Since October 7, the world has seen the rhetoric Israel uses to condone genocide, and now a similar langauge is used to condone violence in Lebanon. There are folks I talk openly about all this with and those with whom I am tentative. Tactful and cowardly. Talking can be scary, even when the consequences I face are a pittance. Christina Sharpe quotes Palestinian American writer Fargo Nissim Tbakhi: “Craft is a machine for regulation, estrangement, sanitization.” Polite conversation can also be a machine.

Shirt by (sidewalk) chawk

Alexander Chee

wrote recently, "There is something that thinks it is trying to protect you by shutting you down. You have to give it a specific new job. You have to put it in charge of keeping you going. It believes that keeping on will bring danger. You have to explain that safety is actually in that direction. And then see if you can keep going." Something in me thinks it’s protecting me by keeping me quiet, small, palatable. But no, I’m learning that safety is in the direction of the fear – especially when it is a fear of talking about something difficult. Which, on the scale of fears, is not the worst.

Chee is a writer who has been a lighthouse (to borrow Christine Hyung-Oak Lee’s word) for me since I started focusing on literary writing in 2020. I’ve listened to his Tin House Live episode, From First Draft to Plot, at least ten times. My copies of his essay collection, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, and novel, Edinburgh, are both dogeared and underlined. He’s become a writer whose advice consistently crosses from writing into life, underscoring how they are intertwined. And always, his words tell me kindly, firmly that I must carry on with the work.

This newsletter started as a story of eating leftover bucatini late at night after finishing my zine. But weeks passed, Williams was not saved from the death penalty, the attacks on people in Lebanon began, war continued in Gaza, and you know the litany of horrors that you hold in your heart.

My friend

Jon Randell Smith

, who writes Eating the Island, shared a quote from my zine: “For every time a child learns of the awfulness of the world, it is new again.” One of my obsessions in the zine was that adults don't listen to children (or anyone who poses a challenge) and are tamed versions of their younger selves. I read somewhere that you are the most “you” you’ll ever be when you’re nine. Over the summer, I listened to music from when I was nine, and I thought about what I did then and what I liked or didn't like. Considering what parts of my nine-year-old self I've polished away.

While working on Desert Pookas, my body and mind sometimes told me that going forward was dangerous. The zine had snowballed in meaning; I was losing control and bewildered. I told myself, repeatedly, kindly, firmly, that through finishing, I'd find safety and release. But I didn't want it to end. Finishing would mean closing a project I'd shared with my friend who died unexpectedly in April.

With my one-year-old sleeping on the couch next to me, I submitted my zine for printing at 11:30 pm. But I kept working and sent a revised file at 12:15 am. Final. Deciding that the text was done was the end of a spell, a resignation to reality, a step forward. Writing is never done, in some sense, but I needed to move on. After spending hours whispering it to myself in the dark living room, I knew I'd reached a rhythm that pleased me even as my heart quaked.

I brought my baby to bed and wobbled to the kitchen. Staring into the fridge in my dark kitchen, I grabbed the dinner leftovers. Bucatini with a roasted tomato and eggplant sauce. I ate it cold and hunched over the glass bowl, trying to remember to chew and breathe at the same time. Eating had been incoherent the last few weeks, and we relied on takeout and convenience food more than usual. I worked every extra second I could get: Staying up late and getting up early. Working as soon as Michael got home from his 9-5. I didn't work during the day while I was with my kids, but even so, my brain was still turning over and over. The roasted tomatoes rested in the freezer after I got them in my box from Borderlands Produce Rescue, waiting for the night I couldn’t stomach one more frozen pizza. An eggplant, diced, and the last bit of the roasted garlic rounded out the sauce. Making the meal was a lurch toward normalcy.     

Not long after that night, I listened to Sofia Samatar on the LARB Radio Hour talking about her new book Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life. She said (to paraphrase) that every time she writes a book, she doesn't know how to write it. And then, when it's complete and in her hands, she goes, "Oh, this is the book." After a year of work, oh, this is the zine. Oh! 

I’m not in the same danger as many of my friends (because I’m not trans, disabled, queer, Black or brown.) But I am a woman living in a misogynist, patriarchal country, and I possess a uterus that could be forced to carry a pregnancy that kills me. I am also resistant to falling in line with ideas and behaviors that make white people upwardly mobile. I’m in danger of giving up, giving in, making my life more comfortable, focusing just on myself.

Chee's advice reminds me of another saying pertinent to writing, birth, and death, “The only way out is through.” I used to say I wasn't surprised by horrible things, a thread of cynicism or realism holding up my grown self. But I am endlessly surprised and horrified by the evils in this world. I'm embarrassed by my weakness, but I'm still here, and much work must be done. Safety doesn’t lie in believing in a death penalty or calculated rhetoric. Continuing to be appalled, picking up the pen, having the conversation, that seems to me the path toward safety for all.

I can't say eating the bucatini made me happy. My back was sore, my heart wrung out, my wrists ached. But it helped me stop feeling so dizzy, and the flavors of roasted eggplant, tomato, and garlic, with rosemary are a personal alchemy. I found nourishment and comfort in that tomato sauce in the early morning hour, and that's all I needed to keep going.

---

The Good Enough Weekly comes out on Fridays, alternating essays and shorter updates. I also take on freelance editing and writing projects. Reach out if you’re looking for help in those departments — I’ve worked on everything from zines to textbooks.