YANIYA LEE AND ROSA AIELLO

ON FIRE
Notes on the Spread of a Non-deterministic Schema

Earth is an intrinsically flammable planet owing to its cover of carbon-rich

vegetation, seasonally dry climates, atmospheric oxygen, and widespread
lightning and volcanic ignitions.1

OUR INTEREST IN FIRE comes from a desire to reveal those structures of geography that are not
intrinsic to earth, but which use the idea of the intrinsic to secure and maintain power over territories.
This “cartographic impulse”—the inclination to map, to rationalize, to appropriate, to own, and
thereby to control space—treats colonial, exploitative construction as essential, natural, and certain.2
We are attracted to fire because it has the capacity to lend lie to human certainties, that of the map,
of the measurement, of the document, of the deed, of the border, because fire respatializes our built
environment; because fire is demonic.3

1.
Start running. Run faster. Go downhill. Fire travels faster uphill. The state is on fire. Stories of awe,
tragedy. We’re in serious trouble. A crime against humanity. A minister resigns. Concern is growing
over massive wildfires. Three of the Biggest Fires Ever Are Burning Right Now. Air quality warning
issued after raging fire. Wildfire smoke: experts warn of “serious health effects.” New fires prompt
evacuation orders, alerts as weather shifts. PARK CLOSED RIGHT NOW. “Get out! Get out!”
Evacuation alerts expanded as crews battle new fires. Evacuees tell of terror as blaze grows. The West
is on fire … again. Why wildfires are breaking out in the “wrong” countries. Fires MAPPED FROM
SPACE: NASA reveals towering smoke plumes. These wildfires are hardly “natural”—humans made
them worse at every step. The largest total area burnt in recorded history. Wildfires Are Getting
BIGGER. The place STILL burns despite dropping temperatures: is it safe for travel? Forest fire
spreads across border. Smoke blows halfway across the earth and is seen by a satellite nearly a million
miles from Earth. Wildfires and deadly heat waves around the world. Huge blazes on course to
merge. Fire, Fire Everywhere: The 2018 Global Wildfire Season Is Already Disastrous. 462 fires
burning across the province. 42 forest fires burning, with 19 of them out of control. 39 new fires
recorded. 49 Dead Following Fires. Judge orders boy to pay 36 million. Officials: 21 of 55 forest fires
remain out of control. “A fire tornado”: death toll in massive blaze rises to five. “Left at God’s mercy.”
We seek answers, as fire’s toll mounts.

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2.
It was so hot we could hardly move or speak. We lay four in two single beds and watched long-
distance motocross racing. The closest house was five kilometers away. The land that separated the
two houses—fields, seemingly generous—produced only inedible corn. The corn was hard and
released a foul water between chewy bites. There was no use to wait for the corn to ripen. Overnight,
without warning, it went from hard to dry.

3.
Spark becomes ember, ember becomes flame, flame becomes smoke. Fire is the result of just the
right combination of oxygen and heat and fuel. Take away any one of these three elements, and it
stops a fire; add more of any one of these three elements, and it amplifies a fire’s intensity. Fuel
includes materials such as grass, leaves, needles, wood, corn, methane, propane, hexane, benzene,
wax, and many other carbon-based materials. Small dry twigs burn faster than large logs; dry grass
burns faster than grass that is wet.

4.
“In mathematics, physics, and computer science, the demonic connotes a working system that cannot
have a determined, or knowable, outcome. The demonic, then, is a non-deterministic schema; it is a
process that is hinged on uncertainty and nonlinearity because the organizing principle cannot
predict the future. This schema, this way of producing or desiring an outcome, calls into question
‘the always non-arbitrary pre-prescribed’ parameters of sequential and classificatory linearity. With
this in mind, the demonic invites a slightly different conceptual pathway—while retaining its super-
natural etymology—and acts to identify a system (social, geographic, technological) that can only
unfold and produce an outcome if uncertainty, or (dis)organization, or something supernaturally
demonic, is integral to the methodology.”4

5.
Rather than us follow a map or a story, we wanted words to spark and spread, to lead us through
material. In search of the demonic, we blaze a path through headlines, stories, memories, facts,
science, phenomenon, lore, rumour, myth, history and theory. Like a fire that has met an abundance
of fuel, we are spreading, and we let the spread occur.

6.
The force of fire is destructive. It consumes with a spatial craving that follows the laws of physics
across geography, indifferent to whatever person, place, or construction of human value is in its
path. It is heedless of Man’s design or will.

7.
“Colonial Montreal had what has been called ‘an orderly spatial disposition’: agricultural land was
divided into long and narrow lots, perpendicular to the St. Lawrence River, with several distinct strip
developments, together, compriseing côtes of ‘colonial districts.’ … most colonial homes, up to and
into the mid-1700s, were constructed with wood.”5

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8.
A cord of wood would be left by the barn every fall (one cord would keep one home warm for one
winter). They taught me how to hold the axe, to split a log into pieces, to split those pieces into
kindling. My small muscles would ache with the effort of swinging the heavy tool. Inside the house,
we rolled newspaper around the kindling and made fires in the wood stove, the wide cast iron oven.

9.
The aluminum composite cladding used to wrap exteriors of high rise buildings, like Grenfell Tower,
is a go-to material for contractors looking to improve the look of cheap construction. The material is
highly combustible, however. The firefighters, who had been called to put out a kitchen fire in one of
the units of the Grenfell tower, thought they had the fire contained. They didn’t notice, as they left,
that the fire had already escaped out an open window to lick across the flammable cladding. The fire
tore through the insulating material, and (hungrily) consumed the tower in a matter of hours.6

10.
“Ignorants,” my cousins, farmers themselves, say of the farmers that light fires on dry brush in
summer months to clear fields and dispose of trimmings. “Lazy, selfish people,” they say. These
brush fires lit by farmers inevitably spread and engulf neighbouring plots of land.

11.
Smoke and fire are directional: they spread with the wind. Fast shifts—cold front, warm front, thun-
derstorm, sea breeze, slope winds—cause sudden changes in a fire’s direction and behaviour. Fire
spread is affected by topography, including orientation toward the sun and the slope of the incline
where it burns (fire, being also vertical, spreads faster uphill). Fire accelerates in narrow canyons and
is slowed by barriers such as creeks or roads.

12.
Brush fire, bush fire, desert fire, forest fire, grass fire, hill fire, peat fire, veld fire—whatever the name,
they sweep bare swaths of land and take lives. We give each fire a name to conceive of and identify it
as an event. Our dedication to a singular, spatial logic eggs on a compulsive will to name and control.
We give each fire a name according to the place it first broke out, in order to count and list and track
and map it. No matter—fire, in all its demonic aspects, exceeds this nominal fallacy.

13.
Algarve. Attica. Carr. Mendocino Complex. British Columbia. Sweden. Borneo and Western Sumatra.
Brandon. Thomas in Ventura. Saddleworth Moor. Galicia. British Columbia. Port Hill. Santa Olga.
Cloosh Valley. Fort McMurray. Anderson Creek. Haifa, Madeira archipelago. Checto Bar. Eagle
Creek. Pedrógão Grande. Nodeirinho. Sampson Flat, Okanogan Complex, Mount Lofty Ranges.
Pinery. Carton Complex. Valparaíso. Gyeongsangbukdo Pohang, Rim. Yarnell Hill, Black Forest,
Rush, Mustang Complex, Long Draw, Ash Creek, Waldo Canyon, High Mark, Little Bear, Slave Lake,
Las Conchas, Chios, Wallow, Torres del Paine, Swinkley Forest, Mount Carmel, Sahka Republic,
Binta Lake, Grammatiko, Parnitha, Torres del Paine.

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The view of things needs continually to be amended: the list goes out of date, the place names no
longer applies to the location of the fire, an ember leaps, and a new fire breaks out in a new place.

14.
Fire challenges (Human) time itself.

Without a traceable beginning or end, a fire cannot be an event. In Canada’s Northwest Territories,
on a bluff overlooking the Arctic ocean, the Smoke Hills have burned for centuries. The oil shales
inside the coastal formation stoke the ancient fire and its continuous rolling clouds of smoke. Where
elsewhere fire is a spectacular, dangerous, useful, and sometimes worrisome event, near the Smoke
Hills fire becomes a non-event through its endurance.

15.
“Two women climbed up the path towards the church. The torches flared in the morning breeze.
They reminded Aunt Kate of the first night she had spent in Hebron. Moses had made a bonfire of
many of the belongings that they had laboured to bring up with them, of everything that he judged
unnecessary for their new beginning. And their past had vanished, like Elijah, riding his chariot of
fire, a conqueror in an empty sky.”7

16.
There is a wind called the Scirocco, which arrives in Southern Italy from the Sahara desert. This
wind brings with it a coating of fine yellow grains of sand. It doesn’t blow in gusts but pushes
obstinately in a single direction and spreads the fires that farmers set, because it is warm and because
it is constant.

17.
Eagle Creek: Judge orders boy to pay $36 million for arson.8 It started with an intentional small fire,
but then the fire raged out of control. The boy did not set out to produce $36 million in damages, he
simply didn’t foresee the spread that would follow his (initially) minor act of rebellion.

18.
Sometimes the difference between accidental fire and intentional fire is equal to a profit margin. The
particular cladding that was used in the botched refurbishment of the Grenfell Tower saved the
council a few hundred thousand pounds, over another flame retardant material.

Fire protocols for many apartment buildings do not account for flammable cladding, and assume
most fires will be contained to a single unit or a single floor. Residents are discouraged from
evacuating, told to “stay put,” the idea being that panic will cause more deaths in the hallways and
stairwells, as people stampede towards exits, than would the fire itself.

The fire could not be contained. 71 people perished.

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19.
“Controlled burns” or “prescribed burns” is the regulatory practice of intentionally lighting fires in
forested areas to decrease the density of living or dead fuels in any given area and so reduce the harm
that natural forest fires can cause: “to diminish the likelihood of a fire starting, and to lessen the
potential rate of spread and resistance to control.”9

20.
Fire amplifies a person’s power to destroy. We, two single women with a flint, could burn down
hectares in a matter of hours. So could either of us, with a flint, alone.

21.
The Code Noir, written by King Louis XIV of France in 1685 and later implemented in the European
colonies, regulated laws around the rights of enslaved persons and the obligations of those who
owned them. The code roots an enslaved body to a landscape, to architecture, and claims the body to
be “immovable property” except by forces of capitalism (i.e. sale). One of the primary concerns of
the code was to institute structures to limit the possibility of revolt.10

In 1734, a massive fire decimated the port of Montreal, which included 46 buildings and a hospital.
It’s impossible to know whether Marie-Joseph Angelique started the fire, though she was the one
who was hanged and then burned for it. Whether the conflagration was intentionally set (or did the
highly flammable wooden settlement catch fire, perhaps, by accident?), the night before Angelique
was to be sold by the recently widowed wife of her owner, and it was under the cover of the fire, the
smoke, and the chaos the event caused that she attempted to escape with her lover.

22.
12 February 1816: “Following a religious celebration, slaves in the Reconcavo districts of Santo
Amaro and São Francisco do Conde burned down several engenhos, attacked the village of Santo
Amaro and killed a number of whites. The uprising lasted four days and terrorized the plantation
zone.”11

23.
“Day of revolt at South Coast Correctional: inmates created weapons, threw faeces at staff, started
fires.”12

“According to state police, detainees in the makeshift jail revolted early on March 28, forcing police
to enter the detention area and put down the riot. Prisoners then set their mattresses on fire, officials
say, hoping to escape from the violence.”13

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24.
In New France, most enslaved persons were isolated in domestic households—a separation that pre-
vented conspiracy and congregation and thereby spatialized the ideas entrenched in The Code Noir.
Domestic workers were isolated architecturally. The burning down of the apparatus of immovability
(the homes of New France) made spread undeniable and revealed the constructedness of the conditions
of separation.14

25.
Crann-tara is the Scottish practice of using small handheld fires as a mode of communication to
rally defense among neighbouring highland communities. “Crann-tara, gathering tree; a branch on
fire, waved in the air. The bearer ran from hill-top to hill-top; then another took it; then a third; thus
continuing through the breadth of the land. The call was answered; all being armed hasted hither till
they reached the place where the fiery cross was raised, having reversed the course.”15

26.
My cousins drove me to see the black, melted shell-mess that had been a tire shop until it was burnt
down by the mafia—to send a message. My thighs were stuck to the car seat, so stuck that they made
a sound and stung when I peeled them off.

27.
On the American continent, after the release of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (originally titled The
Clansmen), in the small towns and cities of the United States, members of the Ku Klux Klan adopted
the movie’s symbols of fire and rallied in white outfits on horses, carrying torches. They erected
burning crosses as a form of intimidation and as a prelude to murder.

28.
After the fire there was no longer tourism. After the fire, corn never again was planted in that region.
The fire itself changes winds, terrain, and perspective: after the neolithic revolution, fire was used by
humans to acquire a different perspective of the land. After a fire, they could see for miles in all
directions. From a great distance, the already elevated two-legged creature could say, “there come
game. There come predators. There come rivals.”

29.
We sat at various vantage points and watched the empty land around the house. We considered how
long it would take to notice something approaching from far off—a spark, a flame, a plume of
smoke—and tried to memorize the blind spots.

30.
“Thinking with heat, I find, displaces Universal time (the time of the Human) toward a non-anthro-
pocentric account of what exists or what happens. With heat, it is possible to figure change not as
progression but as material transformation.”16

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31.
There are plants and fungi that grow only, or more abundantly, following fire. Out of decaying car-
bonized trunks, scaly hedgehog, yellow coral, panther cap, and morels fruit. In the sun-soaked spaces
between, globe mallow, asphodel, blazing star, lupine, and gerardia bloom. Blueberries spread, black
bears feed in their wake.

32.
“For looking back now, she could see that when Moses made the bonfire that night, claiming that he
wanted to destroy the symbols of their past sufferings, what he had really planned to do was to leave
them all like the naked clay to be shaped into an image of his making.”17

33.
Among the many uses of ash are repellent, remover, and component of lye. This quality of cleansing,
regeneration, and change are inherent in all the forms of fire. Ash, the remnant of fire, is a prelude to
the unknown, otherwise known as demonic.

34.
The fire allegedly set by Marie-Joseph Angelique in the old port of Montreal enacted a respatialization.
Much of Canadian scholarship has erased the presence of blackness in Canadian history prior to the
underground railroad, but Angelique’s coerced confession, whether or not it was “true,” documents
the presence of black slaves in sixteenth century New France, and the integral part they played in the
construction of Canada as a nation: “the fire and the threat to space create a believable black story
and the kind of black geography that can only partially be erased.”18

35.
Fire is a destruction, a hollowing out that inscribes and makes present, thereby calling into question
“the always non-arbitrary pre-prescribed.”19

36.
“I don’t know why it’s doing what it’s doing. It’s burning differently, it’s burning more aggressive than
it has in years passed. And, I know we say that every year but it’s unprecedented. It’s burning in every
direction all at the same time … uphill, downhill, even if it doesn’t have a strong wind on it.”20

37.
“Isn’t it hot?”

“It’s so hot.”

“Today it’s hot,” but tomorrow will be hot too, and every other day, will it be hot? It feels it has
become impossible to know when it will stop being hot.

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Sometimes despair comes from a point of view too rooted in a present with the mistaken assumption
of linearity in all of the present’s conditions. Seen with greater distance, it is clear that most things
that are so do not simply become more so over time.

She thought the fire would never end, and then it just did.

38.
“‘We have to go to the flaming edge of that imploding sun. The whole continuum in the area of a
nova is space that has been twisted away. We have to go to the rim of chaos and bring back a handful
of fire, with as few stops as possible on the way. Where we’re going all law has broken down.’

‘Which law do you mean?’ Katin asked. ‘Man’s, or the natural laws of physics, psychics, and chemistry?’

Von Ray paused, ‘All of them.’”21

NOTES
1 “Wildfire,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Wildfire (accessed 10 June 2018).
2 For guiding us in the direction and tenor of our think-
ing, we are indebted to Katherine McKittrick and her
work in Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the
Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2006).
3 See: Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond Miranda's Meanings:
Un/silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s
‘Woman’,” in Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and
Literature, eds. Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory
Fido (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990).355-372.
4 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, xxiv.
5 Ibid., 107-108.
6 Andrew O’Hagan, “The Tower,” London Review of
Books, 7 June 2018, https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n11/
andrew-ohagan/the-tower.
7 Sylvia Wynter, Hills of Hebron (Kingston: Ian Randle
Publishers, 2010), 5.
8 Laurel Wamsley, “Judge Orders Boy Who Started
Oregon Wildfire To Pay $36 Million In Restitution,”
NPR, 22 May 2018. https://www.npr.org/sections/
thetwo-way/2018/05/22/613374984/judge-orders-boy
-who-started-oregon-wildfire-to-pay-36-million-in
-restitution.
9 M. G. Weber and S. W. Taylor, “The use of prescribed
fire in the management of Canada’s forested lands,”
The Forestry Chronicle, 68.3 (June 1992). http://pubs.cif
-ifc.org/doi/pdf/10.5558/tfc68324-3.
10 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 112.
11 João José Reis, “Slave Resistance in Brazil: Bahia,
1807-1835,” Luso-Brazilian Review 25.1: (Summer
1988), 121.
12 Madeline Crittenden, “Day of revolt at South Coast
Correctional: inmates created weapons, threw faeces at
staff, started fires,” Ulladulla Times, 28 May 2018.
https://www.ulladullatimes.com.au/story/5433850/day
-of-revolt-at-south-coast-correctional-inmates-created
-weapons-threw-faeces-at-staff-started-fires/
13 Rebecca Hanson and Leonard Gómez Núñez, “Behind
the scenes of Venezuela’s deadly prison fire,” The
Conversation, 4 April 2018.https://theconversation
.com/behind-the-scenes-of-venezuelas-deadly-prison
-fire-94276.
14 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 110-114.
15 Duncan McCallum, The History of the Ancient Scots
(London: Houlston and Stoneman, 1858), 132.
16 Denise Ferreira da Silva, “On Heat,” Canadian Art,
September 2018.
17 Wynter, Hills of Hebron, 87.
18 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 116.
19 Ibid., xxiv.
20 Steve Crawford, “Climate Scientist: California Wildfires
Are Faster, Stronger, Deadlier & Will Continue to
Intensify,” Democracy Now, 2 August 2018.
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/8/2/climate
_scientist_california_wildfires_are_faster.
21 Samuel Delany, Nova (Toronto: Bantam Books,
1983), 21.

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Stills from video. Black Celebration (Tony Cokes, 1988). Image: Stephen Crocker. Courtesy of the Artist,
Electronic Arts Intermix, and Greene Naftali Gallery, New York.

177