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Chapter 4
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The City We Became, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Cities and Gentrification
Community, Diversity, and Prejudice
Ethics and Nature
Beliefs, Concepts, and Stereotypes
Art
Abuse
Summary
Analysis
While Manny and Brooklyn wait for the bus to Queens, Brooklyn calls someone to help them figure out who has embodied the Bronx. Then she explains how, when she was searching for whoever was embodying Manhattan, she saw a TV playing phone footage of Manny atop the Checker cab. Immediately she knew who and what he was and had a better sense of where he was. Ergo, to find the other embodied boroughs, Brooklyn and Manny need some hint or concept of who they would be.
That Manny and Brooklyn can use concepts or stereotypes of the other boroughs to find their fellow avatars emphasizes once again the power of concepts and stereotypes in the novel’s science-fictional world.
Themes
Manny and Brooklyn discuss how they both feared they were going crazy when they first began to embody boroughs. Brooklyn says that after her intuition that she could use music to fight the tendrils, she decided it was “too goddamn weird” to be a delusion. Then she mentions Bel is the first non-borough she’s met who can see the tendrils. After wondering why Bel and Madison saw the tendrils, Manny concludes the city made it happen so Manny could “use them as tools,” just as it took Manny’s memories to make him a better Manhattan. He realizes neither he nor the city may be “good guys.”
Brooklyn believes that the ability of concepts or stereotypes associated with New York City to destroy the tendrils is “too goddamn weird” to be a delusion—in other words, concepts and stereotypes built up by ordinary communities like cities are stranger than what a mentally unstable person would invent. In turn, Manny realizes that the city “use[s] its citizens as tools” and that he may make a good avatar for Manhattan precisely because he isn’t one of the “good guys.” Both these insights casts doubt on the rationality and ethical status of communities in general and of the city Manny and Brooklyn want to defend in particular.
Themes
Brooklyn asks Manny whether he still wants her to teach him how to be a New Yorker. When he asks whether he has a choice, she says yes—he could leave the city. Manny realizes that if he leaves, he may regain his memory and another city resident will become Manhattan. He wonders, uncertain, whether he wants to stay and fight for the city.
When Manny destroyed the tendril growth on FDR Drive, he seemed elated to defend the city and represent Manhattan. Now that he’s had to wrestle with his borough’s evil history and the city’s dubious ethics, however, he’s less sure of his commitment to join the New York City community.
Themes
The bus arrives. After Manny and Brooklyn board, he asks her to explain New York to him as if he has no memories of it—since he doesn’t. Then he explains his amnesia. Brooklyn replies that she’s started to perceive music in the city’s noise, resurrecting her musician identity—which she gave up to spend her energy on a different life with her daughter (Jojo). She resents what the city is doing to her: “I’m not Free anymore.” At first Manny misinterprets “Free” as “free”; realizing his mistake, he asks whether the city is changing them for its own purposes. Brooklyn says that she believes so: becoming embodied boroughs means they can’t be “ordinary people anymore.”
That New York City wants Brooklyn to become a musician again demonstrates the importance of art to a city’s greatness—but it also shows how the needs of a community, whether a family or a city, may not align with the desires or priorities of an individual person within that community. When Manny misinterprets Brooklyn as saying “I’m not free anymore,” his misinterpretation is telling. On the one hand, Brooklyn isn’t free to pursue her musical ambitions without considering others because she has a family now. On the other hand, Brooklyn isn’t free to be one of New York’s “ordinary people” anymore because Brooklyn (the borough) has chosen her as its avatar.
Themes
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Brooklyn shows Manny a subway map and tells him it’s “bullshit”—it shows Manhattan as the city’s “center,” though in terms of population it isn’t, and Staten Island as small, though it’s larger in size than the Bronx. Then she shares her concept of Queens (working-class, immigrant, in danger of gentrification by tech workers) and the Bronx (tough but artistic). Manny suggests Queens will be a “hard-working non-techie” and the Bronx “creative but with an attitude.” When he asks about Staten Island, Brooklyn says its embodiment will probably be a “small-town thinker” who dislikes the rest of the city and votes Republican.
Brooklyn’s tutorial for Manny distinguishes between stereotypes about the city that are “bullshit” (Manhattan is the center of everything; Staten Island is small and insignificant) and concepts about the city that are true (Queens is working-class but gentrifying; the Bronx is artistic and belligerent). This passage seems to imply that while stereotypes and concepts shape people’s perception of reality, there is an objective reality beyond people’s perceptions. Further, it implies that concepts are “bullshit” if they make it harder for people to see that objective reality, and good if they help people perceive it more clearly.
Themes
Brooklyn and Manny get off the bus and enter the subway. Brooklyn explains to Manny New York’s slang terms for taxis and laments that they’re “getting eaten up by Uber and Lyft.” Feeling a strange pull, Manny and Brooklyn disembark in Jackson Heights. On the street, Manny searches online for strange events in Queens and finds photographs on social media of an odd pool with two children in it and a woman with black hair beside it. Manny and Brooklyn feel an instant connection to the woman in the photo (Padmini).
Brooklyn’s digression about global companies Uber and Lyft “eat[ing]” quintessentially New York taxis and making New York taxi slang obsolete illustrates how global companies homogenize cities—and casts that homogenization as predatory. Manny and Brooklyn’s instant recognition of the woman embodying Queens, meanwhile, shows how the boroughs are already part of a New York City community even though they may not know each other individually.
Themes
Brooklyn gets a text and shows Manny, on her phone, a mural representing the city “as its whole and distinct self rather than the agglomeration of images and ideas that are its camouflage.” He realizes the Bronx must have painted it. Brooklyn tells him that after his description of the Bronx, she asked people to search for this mural, whose name she couldn’t remember. Then she shows him the artist’s information: Bronca Siwanoy, director of the Bronx Art Center. Brooklyn suggests they split up, one finding Queens and one the Bronx. Manny disagrees: safety in numbers. They decide to find Queens first, since she’s nearby.
Bronca’s art can represent the city as its “whole and distinct self,” beyond the “images and ideas” that people use to understand it but that prevent them from seeing it clearly. Thus, the novel suggests that art is a tool for seeing reality—including the essential nature of cities—more clearly. Manny’s refusal to split up with Brooklyn, meanwhile, suggests he believes the city’s avatars can only defeat the Woman in White by working together, not on their own.
Themes
