The Wilderness
56 pages • 1-hour read
Kathleen LevittThe Wilderness
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.
Food and Kitchens
The motif of food, kitchens, and restaurants serves as the primary medium through which the primary characters build community, express care, and pursue ambition. Kitchens are complex spaces in the novel, representing both the pressures of professional life and the intimacy of chosen family. Nakia Washington’s career as a chef is the most prominent example, as her restaurants become physical manifestations of her desire to create a space of belonging. Her first restaurant is even named Safe House Café, honoring an ancestor who escaped enslavement and symbolizing her goal to build a refuge for those in need. Throughout the novel, when Nakia feels frustrated with her inability to serve the community via her businesses, she either helps her friend Arielle distribute food to people who are unhoused or hosts dinner parties with her partner, Jay, and members of their community.
Beyond professional ambition, food functions as a language of love and connection in all four of the primary characters’ storylines. When Desiree Richard first moves to New York, for example, she opens a care package from Nakia’s mother filled with familiar foods from home, which she immediately recognizes as “love offerings from the other coast” (55). This moment highlights how food serves as an expression of heritage and affection, binding the characters together across distance. This motif powerfully illuminates the theme of chosen sisterhood, too. Preparing and sharing food is one of the most significant ways the women sustain their essential, life-affirming bond in a world that often fails them.
Photographs
Photographs function as a symbol for the fragmented and unreliable yet inescapable nature of the past. Recurring images of family photographs thus reify the novel’s theme of The Inescapable Weight of the Past. Throughout the novel, characters interact with photographs as contested artifacts that raise more questions than they answer. These captured moments highlight the immense gap between a preserved image and the complex, often painful, truth of lived experience. The most significant example is the old family picture of Desiree, Danielle Joyner, their mother, Sherelle, and their estranged father, Terry Joyner. For Danielle, this image is far from a happy memory; she reflects that “the photo is a lie, or if not an outright lie then certainly not the whole truth” (232). Her analysis reveals her understanding that the smiling image conceals the domestic turmoil that led to her family’s dissolution. The notion that the image is not an incontestable historical record but an illusion underscores her fraught relationship with her family history, showing how memory is an act of interpretation rather than simple recall. Similarly, when January Washington finds an old sepia portrait in an evicted neighbor’s apartment, she wonders about the forgotten story behind it; her curiosity about this other lost history mirrors her own search for grounding and connection. Photographs in the novel are ultimately emblems of loss, representing incomplete narratives that the characters must learn to carry.
Nakia’s Garden
Recurring images of or references to Nakia’s garden symbolize the novel’s theme of Navigating Precarity in the Search for a Livable Life. Although Nakia is a nurturing character who uses food and cooking to relate to others, she struggles to feel stable in her everyday life. She is often at odds with her living situations—moving between New York and Los Angeles—and feels frequent dissatisfaction in her intimate relationships. Growing a garden is Nakia’s way of creating literal and metaphorical grounding in her otherwise unpredictable reality. When she cooks for her friends from the garden, she is trying to give them some authentic aspect of herself while satisfying their essential needs.
In the wake of Nakia’s death, the garden resurfaces in a range of distorted images, including the catalog of rotting vegetables in her kitchen and the overgrown garden waiting for her friends’ arrival at the novel’s end. Her dying produce and weedy garden represent Nakia’s ultimate struggle to fight against adversity, while providing for herself and her loved ones. The closing image of the dying garden represents Nakia’s fate but also implies that new life will emerge from this decay. The narrator personifies the vegetables in this closing scene, saying they are “bid[ing] their time” (291), patiently waiting for Nakia’s surviving friends to come and resurrect them. Nakia has passed away, but life will grow from the proverbial ashes of her nurturing life.
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