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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Akata Witch, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Identity and Belonging
The Individual vs. the Collective
Friendship and Teamwork
Education, Power, and Corruption
Summary
Analysis
Sunny has always loved candles. In Chicago, the National Grid meant that there was always electricity and never a need for candles. But in Nigeria, the PHC—the Power Holding Company of Nigeria—takes the power every night. One night, she lights a thick candle after the power goes out and stares at the flame. The flickering flame is soothing until Sunny sees something “serious and big and scary.” She gets closer and closer to the flame until suddenly, the candle lights her hair on fire. Sunny’s mother rushes in to put the fire out with her rapa just as the lights come back on. Sunny’s mother cuts Sunny’s hair short, but the worst part of the ordeal is what Sunny saw in the candle: the end of the world. It’s coming.
The novel’s opening creates tension, as readers know from the very beginning that something bad is going to happen. That Sunny sees the end of the world in a candle—something that usually soothes her and makes her feel content—suggests that whatever’s coming is going to totally upend her life. Additionally, having to cut her hair off after it catches fire suggests that Sunny is beginning to undergo a change, potentially related to what she sees in the candle.
Themes
Sunny Nwazue confuses people. Her parents and brothers were born in Nigeria, but her family moved to New York City and so Sunny was born there. The family returned to Nigeria when Sunny was nine. So Sunny confuses people because she’s ethnically Nigerian, was born in America, and is now Nigerian because of where she lives. Additionally, though Sunny has West African features, she’s albino. She gets sunburnt so badly that she can’t play soccer, even though she’s really good at it. She plays with her brothers after dark when they feel like it—and even if she could play in the sun, other boys who play probably wouldn’t let her anyway. But all of this changed after Sunny met Chichi and Orlu.
Sunny sees herself as a person who’s full of contradictions. The way she describes her Nigerian and American roots suggests that she doesn’t really see herself as being from either place; she’s both Nigerian and American. At this point, she sees her albinism as something that holds her back from the thing she loves most: soccer. Her fair skin also seems to keep her constrained, as the sun—and along with it, the outside world in general—is out to burn her. But she makes it clear that things will change once Chichi and Orlu enter the story.
Themes
Sunny visited Nigeria when she was two and contracted a bad case of malaria. Despite being so young, she remembers being hot and ill for days—until a light like a tiny sun came to her. It floated above Sunny and zapped mosquitos, and Sunny recovered just after it left. That was the first strange thing that happened to Sunny. Then, as a kid, she was good at being quiet like a ghost. She’d sneak up on her father and wait for him to notice her, scaring him to death. She knew he wanted to hurt her in those moments, and so sometimes she hates him. Sunny can’t help that she’s not a boy or a pretty girl like her father wanted, and she can’t help what she saw in the candle—or what she eventually became.
This passage takes a turn in a different direction—one that seems somewhat supernatural. It’s impossible to tell, at this point, if Sunny’s fever caused her to hallucinate and see the light that protected her—but the novel has already suggested that the supernatural is part of Sunny’s world, given what she saw in the candle. Sunny also establishes that she and her father have a fraught relationship, and that she doesn’t fit in in her family. But noting that she can’t help what she “eventually became” again makes it clear that Sunny’s identity is soon going to begin changing.
Themes
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