Introduction
Addiction, the notion that has such a variety of layers to it, is rather difficult to associate with a phenomenon that would not have a negative connotation to it. How frequently do people refer to addiction as an ugly illness that ruins someone’s life? Ugliness, according to one of main Hudes’s characters, “bore no promise of a happy ending” (Hudes1290). A 2011 play by Philadelphia native Quiara Alegría Hudes titled Water by the Spoonful is the author’s reflection on the struggles of regular people who discover their life purpose through the lens of connection. Water by the Spoonful is a modern narrative of drug addiction and loneliness, presented through the prism of family, human connection, and the peculiarities of an “American story.”
Themes
Substance Addiction
The history of substance addiction in society is a tale as old as time. Thus, with time, this notion has become stigmatized to such an extent that a person with a history of addiction loses all their qualities except for substance abuse. The stigma of an addict takes hold of one’s life, undermining everything the person did throughout their life. In her play, Hudes made a successful attempt to demonstrate how people struggling with addiction to crack cocaine seek support from each other in pursuit of reclaiming their image as human beings with pain, regrets, and feelings rather than living their lives under the label of an addict.
Odessa Ortiz, a 39-year-old Puerto Rican woman, also known under her username Haikumom, is a former crack cocaine addict who, during the six years of her sobriety, managed to create a virtual community of like-minded people from all over the world. The virtual community is everything these people are left with after their disease has taken everything from them, including material possessions and, more importantly, the trust of the people they loved. The website managed by Odessa, www.recover-together.com, draws together a group of once-successful entrepreneurs from Philadephia, an African American IRS employee, and a Japanese community college graduate (Mays). Seemingly having nothing in common, all of them share a complex journey of rediscovering their identity and fighting remorse.
During his opening message on the website, Fountainhead introduces himself as a learner with a set of pencils and a notebook who comes to a classroom and asks teachers to share their stories of getting back into a driver’s seat and driving further away from destructive addiction before it is too late. “It’s a psychological battle, and I’m armed with two weapons: willpower and the experts,” he says (Hudes1293). This battle, however, is rarely about the people’s willingness to do it for themselves, as they feel too guilty to seek salvation for their souls. What they ask is a second chance of making it right for the people they have already managed to wound: their families. Indeed, when creating a virtual community for people struggling with addiction, Odessa Ortiz tries to let others keep the ones she was unfortunate to lose. Hence, Water by the Spoonful seeks to render the feelings of substance abusers, who are often exposed as selfish. The play demonstrates how the guilt of letting someone down pressures these people to slowly kill themselves and ease the suffering of others.
Human and Virtual Connection
Water by the Spoonful is a story that entwines the peculiarities of human and virtual connection to shed light on how people struggling with substance abuse fail to settle within ordinary society. An example of such a striking difference is the life of Odessa Ortiz in real life and the life of her virtual alter ego, Haikumom. In the realm of the virtual world, Haikumom is a mentor that guides people throughout their journey of sobriety, as she is the administrator of the website and has been “clean” for nearly six years. In her welcome text to Fountainhead, she says:
When it comes to junkies, I dug lower than the dungeon. Once upon a time, I had a beautiful family, too. Now all I have is six years clean. Don’t lose what I lost. (Hudes1294)
Haikumom is an ironic nickname for Odessa, and she understands the bitter irony behind it. While pouring so much care, nourishing, and mentorship into people she has not seen in real life, Odessa proves her worth after being incapable of taking care of her two children that needed her the most. Being a moral compass for people on the forum, Odessa feels ashamed to dwell on the personal details of her motherhood. Unwilling to face the real world, Haikumom seeks salvation for her soul online by helping others heal.
In the real world, Odessa’s addiction led to the neglect of her two children. When telling others that she lost her family, Odessa never mentioned that she had let her younger daughter die of illness because her mother chose crack over the family. Her older son, Elliot, being raised by his aunt Mami Ginny, is unlikely to ever forgive his mother for what she did to her children. For this reason, seeing how eagerly she helps strangers online makes Elliot angry enough to shatter Odessa’s virtual life and write a message of truth to her friends. Having overdosed after that, Haikumom finds support from John, whereas Elliot and Yaz choose to take care of Mami Ginny’s ashes and move on with their lives. Odessa puts John as her emergency contact before she relapses (Hudes1322). Perhaps she feels that asking Elliot to care for her is too much to ask from a person she abandoned.
Family
With his cousin Yazmin by his side, Elliot contemplates his relationship with his mother and, naturally, feels lost. The time he finds Odessa overdosed on the floor in the living room, he is furious both at her and his feeling of anger toward his mother. When talking to Yaz, Elliot asks, “Can you let me be angry?” at Odessa for making him relieve this nightmare all over again (Hudes1320). At the end of the story, Elliot confesses that letting Odessa live while Mami Ginny, the person he considers his actual mother, is dead, is something he would never understand:
I wanted Mami Odessa to relapse, Yaz. I wanted her to pick up that needle. I knew precisely what to do, what buttons to push, I engineered that shit, I might as well have pushed the thing into her vein. Because I thought, Why would God take the good one? Yo, take the bad mom instead! I was like, Why wouldn’t you take the bad fucking mom? (Hudes1329)
Hence, in this play, Hudes attempts to place the issue of addiction in the context of family relationships, showing how a history of substance abuse has a domino effect on the whole generation.
Structure
The scenes of the play take place simultaneously in two different worlds: offline and online. However, the virtual communication on the forum is not depicted as someone typing on the keyboard. Instead, every interaction is spoken “out loud” to place the reader in the character’s inner world. In some cases, Hudes (1292) even shows what messages ended up depleted by a person. While in most cases, real and virtual scenes are shown separately, the moment when Odessa overdosed binds these realities together, as her online friends were the ones to rescue her. To demonstrate how these worlds interfere, Hudes combines the scene of Elliot and Yaz’s reaction and the online community’s response.
Language and Symbolism
One of the primary peculiarities of this play is that to render the daily experience of the Ortiz family, the author distances herself from the writing and uses colloquial language throughout the whole play. Thus, obscene lexis and peculiar grammar structures make the recipient identify with the characters and emphasize them. For example, Hudes even tries to render the dialogues phonetically: “So what’s it mean?” (Hudes 1287). In such a way, she underscores the characters’ Spanish heritage and the fact that English is not Elliot’s first language.
Although the language of the play is not overwhelmed with the literary language of metaphors, the overall story is quite symbolic. Thus, the Ghost who follows Elliot since Iraq is the symbol of his PTSD that disrupts his reality. To describe the feeling of flashbacks, Hudes (1286) uses the metaphor of a phrase in Arabic that plays in Elliot’s head “like a song.” This recurring symbol helps the reader acknowledge the moment when Elliot’s life has changed, as the final battle with Ghost happens before Elliot decides to run away to LA and never go back.
Conclusion
In many cases, when writers want to showcase the life of a minority, the narrative itself becomes an attempt to familiarize the audience with their struggle. However, for Quiara Alegría Hudes, the family history of Odessa Ortiz is a rather routine observation of her life in the Philadelphia neighborhood that needed to be told. Water by the Spoonful is a story that has an overwhelming number of layers to family life, including loss, distance, loneliness, and substance abuse. It is the real language of the story that makes it so appealing and emotionally valuable for the reader.
Work Cited
Hudes, Quiara Alegría. “Water by the Spoonful.” The Norton Introduction to Literature, 13th Edition, edited by Kelly J. Mays, W. W. Norton & Company, 2019, pp. 1283-1331.