The name of the young protagonist in this true-life story is heavy with symbolic weight that the author is far too wise to overlook. References abound to the brand that by virtue of being put into a bottle transforms water from something easily obtained for free into something that is expensively out of reach for the very girl that shares the name.
“Who paid for water in a bottle? Just the sound of it— Dasani —conjured another life. It signaled the presence of a new people, at the turn of a new century, whose discovery of Brooklyn had just begun.”
The names of Dasani, her mother Chanel, and her sister Avianna are all ironic within the context of a story about people struggling to keep from living on the streets. But though Chanel and Avianna (a name which was inspired by Evian bottle water) are essential and central to the story, it is really Dasani’s show and so the connection between people in Brooklyn paying for water in a bottle and the changes experienced by that New York City borough since the first arrival there by members of Dasani’s family is made substantive clear with her name making the move from symbol to metaphor. Dasani becomes a metaphor for the potential for Brooklyn to continue making changes, but this time for the betterment of people of ever economic status.
That is the hope, anyway, and it is embodied in one of the final images int the book: the graduation ceremony at which Dasani becomes the very first member of her family ever to complete high school. And not just complete high school, but to hold fast to very real hopes and plans of attending college. At that moment, in that freeze-frame, the name is wonderfully apt and almost heartbreakingly appropriate. To the enthusiastic screams of Chanel and Avianna in the audience enthusiastically supporting daughter and sister in her magnificent moment of accomplishment, Dasani comes to symbolize the unlikeliness of people ever actually paying a premium price for water in a bottle as well as a symbol of the changes which have come to Brooklyn in the decades—almost a century now—since the end of World War II.
But the bottled water which shares her name also carries a darker connotation. Bottled water seems like a crazy idea that only people with too much money would ever actually desire. Take a moment to throw yourself back to the days when Dasani’s family first settled in Brooklyn in the wake of the end of the World War II. The Civil Rights Movement was still more than a decade away from catching fire and two decades away from enacting actual radical change. The concept of water available in a bottle to anyone with the money to walk into a store and buy it seems like an unnecessary luxury today, but what if it had been available throughout the 1950’s? And the 1940’s. And the 1930’s and every other decade in which it was either illegal or downright dangerous for person who looked Dasani to just walk up to a water fountain and partake of the free supply being pumped directly to it. Dasani’s name is more than just a symbol for the gentrification of Brooklyn. The bottled water that she shares a name with is also a symbol, by the end of her story—as portrayed in another final image found at the book’s closing—of how things have not changed. Not just in Brooklyn, but America.
Immediately following the snapshot of Dasani’s graduation ceremony is a reference to the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police officers. The juxtaposition is exceedingly apt. On the one hand, Dasani’s unlikely road to being the first in her family to graduate connects to the symbol of the unlikely success of bottled water. On the other hand, the murder of George Floyd connects to Dasani bottled water as a dream product which could potential saved countless millions from the consequences of daring to slake their thirst at a public water fountain reserved For Whites Only. Bottled water can be seen as both unnecessary extravagance made available to whites who don’t need it as well as literally being a life-saving necessity that no one even bothered to consider selling to blacks in America who at one time desperately needed it. In retrospect, it seems almost impossible to imagine the author of this book stumbling across a protagonist with a more perfectly modulated metaphorical name.
