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Chapter 5
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Outcasts United, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Refugees, Discrimination, and Resilience
Community and Teamwork vs. Division
Leadership and Respect
Discipline, Dedication, and Success
Summary
Analysis
On September 26, 2005, Bienvenue Ntwari wakes up after his first night in the U.S. Two days before, he, his mother Generose, his older brother Alex, and his younger brother Ive, left a refugee camp in Mozambique. Driving home from the Atlanta airport, he was amazed by the smooth streets and strange advertisements.
Bien and his family’s story serves as another example of the brutal conditions that many of the Fugees have survived in order to make it to the United States and try to build a better life for themselves.
Themes
Bien’s family is from Burundi, one of the poorest countries in the world. For decades, a Tutsi minority ruled over a Hutu majority, but in 1993, Burundi held its first free elections and elected a Hutu leader. Four months after taking office, he was assassinated. The Hutus and Tutsis then spent the next decade at war with each other, killing three hundred thousand people and displacing countless more. In 2000, Generose fled with her sons to Mozambique. She applied for refugee status and resettlement; four years later, she learned that her application had been accepted for resettlement in Atlanta.
St. John’s retelling of the civil war in Burundi once again bears comparison with the divisions that Luma is finding among the Fugees. St. John repeatedly highlights how war and conflict are often born out of divisions that align people with one community or another, rather than finding a universal humanity among them. And in demonstrating how they are prevalent in the Fugees, St. John shows how these divisions are learned even at a young age.
Themes
Bien wakes up and goes outside to explore. He sees a boy his age in the parking lot of his building and tries a few words of English. The boy introduces himself as Grace Balegamire and says that he is from the Congo. Bien lights up, discovering that the boy speaks Swahili, like him. Grace tells Bien a little bit about life in America: boys wear their pants and hair differently, some have guns and fight with one another, and they make fun of people from Africa.
Bien’s first introduction to American life immediately highlights some of the divisions that exist in American society. Not so different from the conflict that St. John just described in Burundi, in America conflict is instigated over many of the same things: ethnicity, territory, and cultural differences.
Themes
Grace cuts the conversation short, noting he has to go to soccer practice for a team of refugee kids like them. Bien loves soccer, and Grace offers to ask the coach, Luma, whether he can join. Bien is excited; he can’t wait to tell his brothers about his discovery. Knowing that there are other kids who speak Swahili in America “quickly transform[s] his view of what his life in America might be like.”
St. John also shows the power of a sense of belonging: Bien feels much more comfortable in America knowing that there are other kids like him. In fact, this is what actually leads him to the Fugees. Thus, having a sense of community and belonging is not a bad thing, but when it creates competition and conflict, it can sometimes do more harm than good.
Themes
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At practice, Grace asks Luma if Bien can join the Fugees. Luma gets a lot of new kids and knows how helpful the Fugees is as a resource to them. The Fugees roster is full, but she agrees to let Bien practice with them, and to let Bien’s older brother Alex join Luma’s team for older boys.
Again, Luma shows that she understands that the Fugees is not simply a soccer team. Though their roster is full, she sees that it would help new refugees find something positive to which they can dedicate themselves.
Themes
New players bring fresh talent to the Fugees, but also changes the balance of the team, particularly in terms of shared languages and culture. Luma makes all of the boys speak English with each other, and when she divides the boys into groups for drills, she says, “I need a Liberian there, with a Congolese, an Afghan, and an Iraqi.”
Recognizing some of the divisions on her own team, Luma actively works to counteract the language and cultural barriers among her players so that they can work together in practice.
Themes
The Fugees also start to compete for Luma’s approval, as she is like a stand-in mother. Two of the most talented players on the oldest Fugees team, Jeremiah’s older brother Darlington and an Iraqi player named Peshawa Hamid, spend months fighting for Luma’s approval and refused to work together to score. Luma tries to get the boys to play together, making sure not to speak Arabic with Peshawa and including Peshawa in some of the dinners she attends at the Ziatys’ home.
Luma also tries to combat some of the divisiveness by changing her own behavior and again leading by example. She makes sure to be inclusive to all of her players in the language that she uses, and in the way she spends time with them. With these subtle cues, she fosters a sense of teamwork among her players.
Themes
One of the players, Yousph Woldeyesus, recounts that Luma said “we’re all foreigners, and this is a team where everybody unites,” threatening to kick them off the team if they didn’t play together. The next season, Darlington and Peshawa work together to score, and their team goes undefeated.
Luma continues to grow close to her players’ families, particularly as they all feel hostility from opposing teams of American kids who resent the refugees’ presence. Luma understands what it feels like to be an outsider and values the families’ friendships. They often invite her to dinner, and over time learn what she likes. The boys pick up her habits, too: Jeremiah insists to Beatrice that he will not eat pork, because Luma (as a Muslim) doesn’t eat it.
Luma particularly understands the value of community because often the Fugees feel like outsiders in a completely new culture. This feeling is reinforced by the “hostility” that St. John mentions but doesn’t fully describe from the American kids that the Fugees play in soccer, which serves as another example of the prejudice that the Fugees experience in America.
Themes
