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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
August attends Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. During her first class, she introduces herself as “Auggie.” When asked why she has enrolled in this course, she says, “I’m here because even when I was a kid, I wanted a deeper understanding of death and dying.” Hearing this, a white student turns around and says with a smile that this is the same exact reason he signed up for the class. This young man, August notes, is the “white devil of a boy” who eventually becomes her first lover. Throughout college and her post-graduate years, August listens to jazz and sleeps with a number of white men, wishing that she, Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi had discovered avant-garde jazz when they were together, since she finds the music so moving and liberating.
In this section, the narrative jumps ahead in time, giving readers a glimpse of August’s life after she moves away from Brooklyn. As August focuses on the details of her new life, it becomes clear that she hasn’t let go of her past, since she thinks about Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi while listening to jazz. This, in turn, suggests that she misses the support they used to give one another, especially now that she’s navigating adulthood on her own. Furthermore, one could argue that August is now mourning the loss not only of her mother, but of her beautiful friendship with these three girls.
Themes
Throughout her twenties, August listens to jazz and enjoys an active sex life. In her adulthood, she travels the world and has sex with people in many different places. In the Philippines she has sex with a man who kisses her feet. In Wisconsin she lives with a woman for months and becomes her lover, promising to stay with her forever but eventually leaving in the middle of the night. In Bali she has sex with a black man from Detroit who begs her to tell him that she loves him. In Korea she weeps because she thinks she’s pregnant, then weeps when she finds out she isn’t. Back in the United States, August’s former lover from Wisconsin asks her why she sleeps with closed fists, and she almost says, “For a long time, my mother wasn’t dead yet.”
Woodson presents a kaleidoscopic overview of August’s adulthood, emphasizing the important roles that sex and intimacy play in her overall life. Now that August has fully come of age, she values the kind of connection that comes from sexual affection, though she avoids settling down with just one person. Woodson implies that August’s unwillingness to fully relax into a relationship with somebody else is related to her fraught relationship with her mother (and with the idea of her mother’s death). This is made evident by the fact that her lover notices that she sleeps with clenched fists, something August herself privately attributes to her longstanding inability to accept her mother’s death. In turn, her clenched hands suggest that she’s wary of relaxing into a close relationship, afraid that letting her guard down and becoming attached to another person might lead to more heartbreak and loss.
Themes
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