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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Another Brooklyn, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Loss, Denial, and Grief
Friendship, Womanhood, and Support
Religion, Tradition, and Death
Racism and Classism
Summary
Analysis
Gigi starts attending a performing arts school in Manhattan. Around this time, Sylvia’s father looks more closely at August and the others and forbids Sylvia from seeing them. When they come to her house, he informs them that Sylvia will be attending a new private school. He then tells them to go home and become better people. When he says this, they feel embarrassed of themselves. Worse, they see themselves in one another, so they part ways, not wanting to confront their own identities.
Once again, Sylvia’s father’s harsh judgment of August and her friends negatively impacts the way they think of themselves. Even more tragically, his classist and racially-inflect views interfere with their otherwise unassailable bond, since facing one another suddenly means recognizing the very things that Sylvia’s father has deemed undesirable and bad.
Themes
Although Sylvia no longer goes to school with her friends, she manages to see them frequently, meeting them in the park and smoking marijuana that she brings with her. That winter, Gigi is cast in multiple lead roles at her performing arts school and Angela devotes herself to dancing. August, for her part, spends the winter going to mosque with her family and Sister Loretta, listening to other women ask about her mother. When August’s father explains that August’s mother is gone, August can’t help but think about the conversation she had with him about the contents of the jar he keeps in the apartment, although she now refers to it as an urn. Still, she refuses to admit that she knows what’s inside this urn. In bed at night, she speaks to her mother, promising her that someday her father will take them back to SweetGrove.
Despite Sylvia’s father’s best efforts to control her life, Sylvia not only continues to see August and the girls, but also rebels by smoking marijuana. This, in turn, suggests that her father’s strict approach to parenting has backfired, causing Sylvia to act out in ways she might not have if he’d simply let her make her own decisions. Meanwhile, August continues to keep the truth about her mother from herself. Even though it’s obvious that the urn is filled with her mother’s ashes, August maintains her belief that they will one day be reunited, doing whatever she can to deny what she already seems to know on a certain level, which is that her mother is dead.
Themes
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