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Chapter Fourteen
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Children of Virtue and Vengeance, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Power and Systems of Oppression
Cycles of Violence
Tradition and History
Love vs. Duty
Summary
Analysis
Zélie groans as she wakes up. She sees Tzain and remembers what happened, and then she notices a young maji touching her and chanting in Yoruba. Two more maji yell to the Healer, Safiyah, to hurry. Zélie’s ribs knit together painfully and she remembers that Inan is still alive. She thanks Safiyah, who calls Zélie the Soldier of Death. The maji explain that Nehanda’s tîtáns are rounding up maji and imprisoning them in the fortress at Gusau. Safiyah and her companions leave. Tzain and Zélie make up, and then Zélie apologies to Amari. Amari says she still needs to kill Nehanda and Tzain tells Zélie that he’ll help her escape if she wants. Zélie realizes that with Inan alive, she can’t be free. She tells Amari that Inan is still alive, and that she needs to kill him.
Again, with Inan unexpectedly back in the mix—and in Zélie’s mind, responsible for Baba’s death—there’s no choice for Zélie but to make him go away by killing him, not just imprisoning him for life or banishing him to another country. This is reflective of Zélie’s understanding of how her world works, in which violence or cruelty undertaken by one person can only be answered by violence or cruelty by another. The novel eludes to the weight of this mindset when Zélie says she can’t be free while Inan is still alive: essentially, she can’t be happy or at peace without enacting violence.
Themes
