Fire Song by Samina Najmi

2020 

The first fall of my empty nest, a white-hot aloneness. Covid-19 raging, and no vaccine against it. No café, no colleagues, no classes except on my laptop. 

And suddenly it’s raining ash. Stay inside, seal all windows and doors. But there’s no keeping out the smoke. It seeps in, settling toxic in my throat. 

Where to go when even your home’s not safe?

An hour away, they’re immolating: California black oak and white fir, ponderosa pine, sugar pine, and incense-cedar.  

The fire leaps across the highway, racing south toward Fresno. 

Route 168 shuts down, and thirty thousand individuals are now “evacuees.” People airlifted from hiking trails in the Sierra Nevada National Forest, from Mammoth Pools Reservoir where they’re besieged by flames. 

In my American Indian Literature class, we watch Chief Ron Goode, North Fork Mono, on PBS’s Tending the Wild. We watch him, our Valley neighbor, teach the world what his people have always known, about controlled fires and cultural burning. About stewardship of the land.

A student from that virtual class shelters in Clovis Rodeo Grounds, social distancing as best he can. But he ventures back, again and again, to get neighbors and livestock out. Others are refugeed in high schools. And in the Fresno Fairgrounds, where once Japanese Americans were herded—evicted from their homes, en route to internment camps. 

Four months the Creek Fire rages. 856 structures destroyed, $500 million in damage, they say. 379,895 acres scorched. 

Ancient trees gone, beyond renewal.

There’s no such thing as baptism by fire.

2021 

I land at Fresno airport on a Sunday night in September and switch my cell phone out of airplane mode. My screen is exploding. News of a homefire, and this time the home is mine. 

The fire breaks out next door, burns that unit to a crisp. The tenants, who have lived there for many years, flee, grateful for their lives.

We are neighbors who share little, but we do share a wall. The fugitive flames slip in through the attic, destroy my garage and kitchen before the firefighters can subdue them.

“You shouldn’t stay here,” they tell me. “There’s no power, no water, and the air is toxic.” 

But where else to go? I stay the night, find Winnie the Cat under my daughter’s bed. When we leave the next day, we don’t know it will be fifteen months before we return.

In that time, I learn what it is to have nowhere to go. On a small, safe scale, to be refugeed. No access to my clothes or books or the handwritten letters I’ve lugged across continents since I was twelve years old. 

In that time, I learn the edges of empathy. The conflagration of community. It’s a bonfire of the self as I knew it. 

2022

I’m spared radiation burns. But five days a week for three weeks, I lie supine on a cold surface in a dark and empty room, waiting for the linear accelerator to zap me. Monitored on a screen, like a character in a video game. My body has been mapped. The target: my left breast, marked by four pinpoint tattoos that train the machine’s rays on the cancer cells. It aims to kill. 

The blue speck closest to my sternum resembles an acute accent mark. Permanent record of the nanosecond when the radiographer’s etching hand tremored. 

2023

“The Year in Volcanic Activity,” announces The Atlantic. Sublime and spectacular swirls of color—the ethereal amber flashlight of the Villarrica in Chile; blue smoke lacing red-hot lava southwest of Reykjavik; fiery orange columns of the Klyuchevskoy in Russia; and tulle-white steam bubbling from the Bledug Kuwu mud volcano in Java, an overflow of foam in my latte cup.

I gather myself with a volcano’s grace. Until the rage erupts.

2024

Americans aflame. Self-immolating in the nation’s capital: in February, an active-duty airman protesting genocide. In October, a photojournalist, for the media’s bloodlust.  

Scorched earth, the literal. Grove upon grove of olive trees. 83 percent of all plant life, and counting.

Scorched earth, the military tactic, prohibited by the Geneva Conventions of 1977. We may not wipe out unarmed civilians by targeting infrastructure, food, and water. It’s international law.  

Yet, there he is, Sha’ban al-Dalou, a techie like my son. Who sits in classrooms as my students do, forging a life—for just two months, until his university is rubbled to oblivion. What is he to do as the eldest but forage for scraps and document his family’s multiple displacements on social media? The wounds we can see, and those we cannot. The eviscerating hunger. 

And there he is a year later, 19-year-old Sha’ban in his hospital tent in Deir al Balah. Out of the rubble, into the fire. Silhouetted in a lurid inferno, hand raised to stay the flames, intravenous drip dangling.

∞ ∞ ∞

A fireplace flickers, speaks of home. Of beauty and belonging.

That one time we took the children to Maine, parked the motor home in the campground, and their father roasted marshmallows for them. Fire as light, as song.

Fire as story.

Kindling, as of a love, a life. A beginning.

Embers, an ebbing. An ending.

Ash slips through my fingers like the memory of a face.

What to do with the weight of my own thoughts? 

Is it arson if I set them ablaze?

Samina Najmi teaches US literature at California State University, Fresno. Her personal essays have appeared in over thirty literary journals. Samina’s essay collection, Sing Me a Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time, won the 2024 Aurora Polaris Award in creative nonfiction and is forthcoming from Trio House Press. 

5 June 2025