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Book 1, Part 4: Teleology
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Theory of Flight, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Individual Aspiration vs. Group Belonging
Colonialism and Postcolonialism
Love, Family, and Selfishness
Gender and Sexuality
Beauty
Summary
Analysis
Vida. Genie wakes Vida up by blocking the sun shining down on him. She thanks him for saving her life and proclaims her intention to save his. Vida is discomfited by her smell of “vanilla” and “woodsmoke” and her gap-toothed smile, which give him a funny feeling in his stomach. He claims he doesn’t need saving; she insists he does. Vida’s friend Mick, a displaced American mercenary, approaches them and introduces himself to Genie. When Vida tells Mick that Genie has come to save him, Mick asks whether Vida, as “Jesus,” should be the savior instead. He also asks about Genie’s salvation plan; she admits she doesn’t have one yet.
Vida’s discomfort and funny physical sensations when he smells Genie may be hinting that he’s attracted to her but doesn’t want to be, whether due to his tragic romantic history or her young age. Her desire to “save” Vida reveals that she, like her father Golide, wants to help and inspire people. That the character named “Jesus” is the one that needs to be saved emphasizes the novel’s ironic take on religion and its insistence that it takes place in secular history.
Themes
As the sun begins to set, Vida gets up and announces—nominally to Mick—that he’s going to Scobie’s for a drink. When Genie follows him, he tells her to go home—but also notices her inner radiance, which he previously attributed to sunlight. She keeps following. Worried, he asks whether “anything funny” was inflicted on her at home. She doesn’t understand. When he clarifies, she says no. Thankful, Vida says again that she should go home. She refuses, saying “it’s time” for her to save him. Vida gives up on convincing her to go away.
When Vida asks whether “anything funny” was inflicted on Genie, he’s clearly worried that someone in her family sexually abused her. This worry implies that he has met other young people on the streets who became homeless for this reason—a phenomenon illustrating how large-scale social problems like homelessness can be related to individuals’ sexual trauma. Genie’s claim that “it’s time” for her to save Vida suggests she has been planning to join him on the streets for a while.
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Genie shivers. Vida gives her his jacket, tells her to leave it outside for him if she goes home after all, and enters Scobie’s. After two hours, he exits Scobie’s and sees Genie across the street, talking to a man in a car. Vida sprints across the street and hits him. He drives away. When Genie claims the man was asking for directions, Vida says she’s too naïve for the streets and needs to go home. She replies, “I am home.”
Vida clearly believes that the man in the car was attempting to solicit sex from Genie. His reactions suggest that the sexual exploitation of homeless women is a widespread sociopolitical problem as well as an individual sexual trauma. Nevertheless, Genie claims the streets as her “home,” indicating that for her, homelessness is preferable to living with the Masukus.
Themes
When Vida wakes up beside Genie in the alley behind the bakery, he is conscious of a tremendous “responsibility.” He decides the funny feeling in his stomach is fear: he believes he will fail Genie. He’s sure that street life changes people for the worse, and he doesn’t want to contribute to a negative change in Genie. Again he tells her to go home; again she tells him that she is home. The way she looks at him makes him feel as though she both knows him intimately and believes in his potential. He walks away from her but suspects they are already fatefully “intertwined.”
Vida comes to interpret his funny physical sensations around Genie not as attraction but as fear of “responsibility.” After his first love Everleigh’s death, Vida has tried very hard to have no relationships with other people, yet he feels “intertwined” with Genie after only a few positive interactions—a reaction that shows how important relationships and group belonging are to individuals.
Themes
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People get used to seeing Vida and Genie together, though they make an odd pair: he’s pale, dour, and standoffish; she’s dark, cheerful, and friendly. Everyone knows that Vida salvages metal, but no one knows why. Genie starts helping Vida salvage metal, and he worries that she’ll ask him why—and he’ll tell her. Genie’s a helpful salvager because she notices “beauty and value” in things Vida doesn’t.
Vida fears not only that Genie will ask him a personal question but that he will answer it, revealing his awareness of his own desire to have an open, honest relationship with her. Vida respects Genie’s sense of “beauty”—the way young Marcus did in the sunflower field but teenage Marcus did not when she was explaining her experience with the elephants. The implicit comparison and contrast between Vida and Marcus suggest that appreciating Genie’s sense of beauty is important to being friends with her.
Themes
Though Genie doesn’t ask about the metal, Vida eventually shows her the warehouse where he welds scrap into giant sculptures of people he knows from the street. He has always loved the process of sculpting and enjoyed imposing his vision on metal, but when he sees her overwhelmed emotional and aesthetic reaction to the sculptures, he realizes that they might “have lives of their own—beyond him.”
Vida has his own sense of beauty, or he couldn’t create his sculptures. Yet Genie’s reaction to his sculptures shows him that the sculptures might have “lives […] beyond him"—that is, a real value to and effect on others. This revelation again suggests that appreciating beauty fully can be a group project, something friends help each other do. Vida’s friendship with Genie also helps him expand his artistic aspirations—not only to create art he himself loves but to share it with others.
Themes
Though Vida considered becoming an artist when young, the war made art seem inappropriate, and his wartime experiences made him feel like an inappropriate vehicle for art. He thinks perhaps he and Genie have connected to teach him that he can create beautiful art, until one day she cuts herself by accident in the workshop, demands he stay away, and tells him “the story of her life,” including details about “sunflowers, sojas, saviors, and secrets.” After, Vida blurts that he “didn’t save her after all.” He realizes that was the wrong thing to say, remembers a time when his father gave him “absolute understanding and acceptance,” and decides that she needs the same.
Colonial and postcolonial history harmed Vida’s aspirations by making him feel like his art was frivolous or irrelevant given the violence around him. At first, Vida interprets Genie’s presence in his life rather egocentrically, thinking she’s there to enable his beautiful art. Then she tells him about her HIV (when she tells him to stay away after she cuts herself, it’s presumably to keep him from touching HIV-positive blood). The narration does not reveal exactly what Genie tells him, though the phrase “sunflowers, sojas, saviors, and secrets” suggests she told him about her history on the Beauford farm (sunflowers), the massacre that took her parents (sojas), the car accident after which Vida caught her (saviors), and the Masuku parents’ hiding her HIV (secrets). When Vida blurts out that he “didn’t save her after all,” he betrays that he thinks her HIV-positive status means she’s doomed. Yet unlike the Masukus, who continued to react badly to Genie’s HIV, Vida draws on memories of his own father’s “absolute understanding” of Vida’s own sexuality and gender presentation in order to treat Genie better.
Themes
In a flashback, 13-year-old Vida happily roams Thorngrove until boys he knows start chasing him and yelling “moffie.” Though Vida hasn’t heard the word before, he knows that they’re yelling because he and Robbie McKop kissed on a dare. Whereas Robbie performed theatrical disgust afterwards, Vida didn’t. Vida intuits that for this, the other boys decided to attack him when he was “alone and vulnerable.”
Thorngrove is a suburb of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe (the novel’s author was born in Bulawayo). “Moffie” is a homophobic slur in Afrikaans, the language of Afrikaners, a white ethnic minority in southern Africa descended from Dutch colonizers. The homophobic bullying Vida suffers shows how private personal characteristics such as one’s sexuality can become public, political issues under conditions of oppression.
Themes
Vida stays calm until he reaches his house, when the boys throw a stone at him and disperse. Tearing up, he sees his father, a mechanic, on the stoop with a beer and his toolbox. His father enters the house and returns with a second beer. Vida, tremendously relieved, takes it. Vida’s father says that Vida can cry if he wants and that he'll always love Vida. Vida wonders if his father would still say that knowing Vida had kissed a boy and liked it. But then his father puts his cap on Vida’s head, opens his toolbox, and tells him there are many different ways to be a man. They go off together, and Vida’s father shows him how to disassemble and reassemble an engine.
Vida’s father is presented as a stereotypical macho man: a gruff, laconic, beer-drinking mechanic. Perhaps counter to readers’ expectations, Vida’s father also tells his young bisexual son that he loves him and recognizes different legitimate expressions of masculinity. This is in stark contrast to Emil Coetzee, who hates his gay son Everleigh and essentially bullies him into enlisting in the army during a war, which leads to Everleigh dying. This contrast shows that whether one has a loving or a hateful parent can be a matter of life and death.
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In the present, Vida realizes that his father’s words and actions both mattered. He wipes Genie’s tears and tells her about his own parents’ death, Everleigh and Rosamond, meeting Golide during the war—his whole life. Genie wipes his tears in turn. Having shared the whole truth with each other, they accept one another and so achieve “a liberation.”
Vida’s action—wiping Genie’s tears—is meaningful because fear and prejudice sometimes lead HIV-negative people to shun any physical contact with HIV-positive people. Vida and Genie reach “liberation” by telling each other their histories, suggesting that people can only be free of their painful pasts if they discuss and understand those pasts.
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Genesis. Vida and Genie enter “The House That Jack Built,” the mansion of Vida’s white Afrikaner great-grandfather Jakob de Villiers. His grandfather Frederick, born after Jakob impregnated his servant Blue, could only live there as another servant “given the zoning laws of the land.” His father Ezekiel, hating the house, left it at 13. It was only after Vida returned from the war that he learned Jakob had willed him the house. Feeling neither love (like his grandfather) nor hate (like his father) for the structure, Vida simply avoided it—not living in it, but not getting rid of it—until he heard Genie’s life story.
“The House That Jack Built” is an allusion to a nursery rhyme, “This Is The House That Jack Built,” which lists a long number of animals, people, and objects associated with the eponymous house. The novel’s prologue argues that it’s necessary to know about a large cast of characters to understand Genie’s life; similarly, the nursery rhyme implies that you need to know a large cast of characters to understand the history of a house. That Vida only entered this family house—associated as it is with the country’s racist past, where the “zoning laws” would only let non-white family members live in the house as servants—after Genie inspired him shows how freeing it was for him when they swapped personal histories.
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In 1975, social clubs devoted to antiques and gardens got the house and gardens named “city treasures,” so city employees named Matilda and Stefanos have been caring for it. Rich people and tourists indulge in nostalgia for the “colonial past” by holding events there staffed by Black servants. In 1985, The Man Himself—though he had previously enjoyed the facilities—criticized the clubs maintaining the house’s status for their “colonialism” and had funding for the house’s upkeep taken away. Yet Matilda and Stefanos still do some unpaid work on the property.
Nostalgia for the country’s white-supremacist colonial past shows the ongoing influence of racism on the country’s postcolonial society. The Man Himself first parties on the property and then takes away its funding due to its “colonialism”—which shows how he hypocritically mobilizes progressive rhetoric for his own corrupt ends.
Themes
When Vida and Genie come to live in the house, they spend a great deal of time cleaning the interior and revamping the gardens, with Matilda and Stefanos’s help. They also keep salvaging scrap metal, and Vida keeps making statues. Exhausted at night, they settle into their respective bedrooms and get used to the house’s amenities. Vida finds his grandfather Frederick’s few possessions in the servants’ quarters; supposing there must be more, he searches the house, finds nothing, and becomes very sad. He fidgets repeatedly with his grandfather’s things, but they don’t “make his grandfather more legible or tangible.”
Vida and Genie sleep in separate bedrooms, implying that their relationship has not become sexual. Vida’s grandfather’s few belongings aren’t “legible or tangible” to him, a detail that emphasizes history’s elusiveness: while history shapes the characters’ realities, that doesn’t mean they know or have hard evidence about what happened in their families’ pasts—especially when their ancestors were oppressed people.
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Genie, meanwhile, searches the house for evidence of Vida’s great-grandmother, the Khoisan maid Blue. Finding nothing, Genie develops more questions—for example, whether Blue loved Frederick, herself, or anything—and starts picturing her as a child “playing in a field of sunflowers,” the way Genie used to, without knowing whether sunflowers had been planted in the country at the time. Genie’s inability to find Blue in the house feels like “a haunting.”
The Khoisan are a group of indigenous peoples in southern Africa. Though Genie knows little about Blue, she seems to identify with her, imagining her “playing in a field of sunflowers” the way Genie used to. Previously in the novel, sunflowers have represented the characters’ shared colonial and postcolonial histories; when Genie imagines Blue among sunflowers, it suggests that Genie mourns Blue’s “haunting” absence from the historical record due to her oppressed status.
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Vida can only tell Genie that Blue passed as Jakob’s manservant for a long time before he impregnated her. Genie wonders whether Blue chose to leave nothing behind, worried that her own life could vanish too. At last, she discovers “baby-blue silk slippers” in a chest near Jakob’s bed and decides, without hard evidence, that they belonged to Blue: “something so soft, so delicate, that still remained of her.”
Due to the racial and economic power imbalance between Blue and Jakob, it’s hard to imagine that their relationship was entirely without coercion, once again showing how oppressive systems impinge on individuals’ private and sexual lives. Here, Genie is preoccupied with what she’ll leave behind for others and for history when she dies. She takes comfort in the idea that Blue might have left behind something “soft” and “delicate” yet persistent, suggesting that Genie too would like to leave behind a legacy marked by tenderness.
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Vida, Genie, & Marcus. Vida and Genie go to buy a new mattress. Genie wants to inspect the mattresses closely. When a humpbacked man and an attractive woman walk into the store, Genie goes and asks the man’s opinion. The man identifies Genie as Golide Gumede’s daughter, helps her and Vida buy a mattress, and introduces himself as Valentine Tanaka. Afterward, Genie insists they go buy ingredients for custard with the mattress still tied to the top of their car. When they get out, Marcus appears to talk to Genie. Vida walks away to give them privacy, glances back, and sees Marcus gesture to the mattress with “despair.” It makes Vida wonder suddenly whether he will lose Genie in the future.
The unexpected appearance of Valentine Tanaka, a close subordinate to The Man Himself, in Genie’s early life once again emphasizes that the novel’s seemingly disparate characters are connected both by chance events and by momentous historical occurrences. Marcus’s “despair” at seeing Genie and Vida mattress shopping suggests he feels an intense, possessive jealousy over Genie’s relationship with Vida. Vida’s unexpected empathy for Marcus, wondering whether he’ll lose Genie as Marcus has, shows Vida’s sensitivity but may also foreshadow that in the future he’ll act possessively and unfairly toward Genie, the way Marcus is doing now.
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Marcus is unhappy that Genie isn’t more upset to learn that he’s leaving for the U.S. He only planned to ask her to come home, but when he sees her with Vida hauling around a mattress, he asks her to come to the U.S. with him and declares his love. Genie, smiling, tells him that he wants to love her, which isn’t the same. Marcus accuses her of never forgiving him—for “that morning in the kitchen,” for momentarily ceasing to touch her, or “for what [he] did after.” Genie replies, “There is nothing to forgive.” She recalls how she used to stick her feet into the sunflower field’s earth, while Marcus wouldn’t. She says: “My letting you go is my way of loving you.”
Marcus only decides to declare his love to Genie and ask her to move with him after he sees her with Vida, indicating that he is motivated by possessiveness and jealousy. His references to “that morning in the kitchen,” not touching her, and “what [he] did” all imply that he reacted very badly to learning that Genie was HIV-positive. His implied behavior contrasts sharply with how Vida reacted to the information, wiping Genie’s tears and telling her his life story. While Genie claims that “there is nothing to forgive” in Marcus’s behavior, readers may infer that there actually was—an inference that casts doubt on Genie’s reassurances to Krystle that there was nothing to forgive her for, either. The contrast Genie draws between her own behavior in the sunflower field and Marcus’s suggests that she wants to be connected to the land and to history, while Marcus doesn’t—and to respect his real preference for disconnection, Genie is “letting [him] go.”
Themes
Vida and Genie. Vida and Genie are catching their breath, Vida still experiencing Genie’s taste and the memory of touching her. Genie says that sex is “beautiful” and physically necessary. She sits up, looking radiant, and asks Vida never to mention love to her—not mentioning it is liberatory. Vida promises. He is remembering the intense well-being he once felt “looking into a pair of startlingly blue eyes,” and he’s glad Genie isn’t searching for that feeling from him.
Coming directly after Genie’s confrontation with Marcus, this passage suggests that while Genie finds sex with Vida “beautiful” in itself, she doesn’t want to add love to the mix because Marcus’s—and the Masukus’—selfish, possessive love of her make her consider love a constraint on her autonomy. The “blue eyes” Vida recalls are Everleigh Coetzee’s, implying that Vida is glad to avoid love due to the personal and historical traumas surrounding the end of their relationship.
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Vida. Though at first Vida resists his bond with Genie, he grows used to living with and sharing a bed with her. He’s happy when she can access antiretroviral medication, and he notices that she makes him feel the same “sense of wonderment” he felt in the elephant grass. They share their lives without mentioning love. Eventually, Genie’s intervention makes Vida’s art famous: she convinces him to show his sculptures to Beatrice, who pays him a great deal of money for them and donates them to the city, which places them in a sculpture park that becomes a tourist attraction.
Vida’s “sense of wonderment” links to the novel’s flight symbolism through the motif of elephants. Golide realized he could inspire others to fly by watching a herd of elephants follow their leader across the Zambezi; on the same day, he encountered Vida in the elephant grass. The association of these events through Vida’s “sense of wonderment” suggests that Genie is inspiring Vida to fly, symbolically speaking—she is helping him achieve his youthful dream of bringing beautiful art to the public.
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Art critics tout Vida as a “postcolonial artist;” he feels that they are reading too much into his street life and freighting the term “postcolonial” with more than its literal meaning. They seem to find his use of scrap metal particularly meaningful and inspired. Salvaging metal with Genie and spending time in the workshop with her helps keep the praise from going to his head.
“Postcolonial” literally describes anything that occurs after a colonial period, but it is also used in art criticism to describe works that critique the ongoing repercussions of colonization on formerly colonized countries. Vida worries that critics are interpreting his work as more consciously political than he intended it to be.
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Vida creates a sculpture sequence called “The Theory of Flight,” comprised of three sculptures (“Golden,” “Lady in Waiting,” and “The Firebird”) and dedicated to Genie. Critics disagree wildly on what it means—which, for some reason, convinces them all that it’s especially postcolonial and forward-looking (claims that make Vida wonder: “the way forward to where?”). The sculpture sequence ends up in the National Art Gallery, where The Man Himself cuts the ribbon at the opening ceremony.
Since “The Theory of Flight” is the name of the novel as well as of Vida’s sculpture sequence, it’s possible that author Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu is using Vida’s dubious reaction to art critics to playfully warn readers not to interpret her work solely through the lens of postcolonialism. While her novel does critique postcolonial Zimbabwe, it’s doing other things as well. The titles of the individual statues seem meaningful: “Golden” recalls Genie’s childhood play in golden sunflowers, “Lady in Waiting” suggests the time Genie spent waiting to leave the Masukus and join Vida, and “The Firebird” was Genie’s favorite library book as a child, in which a mythological flying creature helps the hero defeat an evil sorcerer. This last sculpture suggests that Vida sees Genie as a “firebird” who is inspiring him to defeat his own demons.
Themes
Yet after some political disturbances, tourists stop visiting the sculpture park. People start vandalizing the sculptures. The Man Himself declares Vida “‘too white’ to be a truly postcolonial artist” and demands that his sculptures be destroyed. Instead, the city sells them to art venues in the U.S., Canada, South Africa, China, and Belgium. The Man Himself hires “utterly postcolonial” artists to sculpt pieces representing him; when these sculptures are displayed, people vandalize them so regularly that The Man Himself makes vandalizing them a crime carrying a life sentence.
Unfortunately, beautiful art can become involved in, and even prop up, damaging hierarchies. Rather than focus on Vida’s sculptures as art, The Man Himself attacks Vida’s mixed-race background, essentially declaring that biracial people don’t truly belong in the postcolonial nation and that biracial artists can’t comment on it. The Man Himself sees artistic beauty as a political tool, so he wants public art to represent him only—a sign of his authoritarian tendencies. Meanwhile, rich art venues in mostly Western countries buy up Vida’s sculptures, so that people in Zimbabwe—including the original inspirations for the sculptures—won’t be able to see them unless they’re rich enough for international travel. The fate of Vida’s art thus reflects unjust global economic and political hierarchies.
Themes
Each year Vida goes to an artists’ conference in Stockholm, and each year Genie welcomes him home with a kiss. Yet one year, when Vida’s in his late 40s, Stefanos and Matilda greet him instead. They inform him that Genie has been refusing food for five days. When Vida sees Genie, he notes that she seems peaceful but that she is surrendering to some force that’s killing her, a surrender he interprets as “a betrayal.” He might have accepted her death earlier in their relationship, prior to ARVs, but now it seems to him that if she’s dying, it’s because she wants to.
“ARVs” stands for antiretrovirals, drugs that dramatically increase the life expectancy of people with HIV. If Vida is in his late 40s, this scene likely takes place in the mid-2000s; starting around 2001, international bodies began working much more concertedly to distribute antiretroviral drugs in Africa. Vida’s feeling that Genie’s choice to die is a “betrayal” can be interpreted in at least two ways: it can be interpreted as Vida coming to love her more selfishly and possessively, the way Marcus does, but on the other hand, it can be interpreted as an acknowledgment that his desire to be an individual completely independent of other people was a fantasy—he’s realizing he needs Genie.
Themes
Vida determines to fight the force intruding between him and Genie. He makes her eat, even as she says that she’s exhausted and that he ought to “let [her] go.” Eventually she refuses to take food, even when he tries to force her. He tells her that she has to eat, given the medication she’s on, and she informs him she’s stopped taking the medication. Then she tells him that veterans are squatting on the Beauford Farm and Estate; though this seems like a non sequitur to Vida, she adds conclusively: “You need to let me go.”
When Genie turned down Marcus’s offer to come to the U.S. with him, she told him she was loving him by letting him go. Now she’s requesting that Vida “let [her] go.” Although it’s a rule of her and Vida’s not to talk about love, the subtext of her request is that Vida is loving her badly and selfishly, the way Marcus did, by demanding that she stay with him.
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Vida realizes that Genie has been planning this for a while. Wounded and angry, he tries again to force food into her mouth; she spits it back at him. When he asks whether she wants to die, she says she does. He demands to know how she could want to abandon him. She replies that she has realized love is “selfish,” though she used to think it was generous. He points out that they’d promised each other not to talk about love, and she replies that they did so because she had trusted him to keep the promise. When Vida protests that their promise didn’t entail this, Genie tells him to have courage and points out that he can’t “save” her.
Given the generous, loving upbringing that Genie received from Elizabeth and Golide, it seems likely that she decided love was “selfish” only after the Masukus adopted her, due to the egocentric and hurtful ways they treated her. This background suggests that while Vida is wrong to force treatment on Genie that she doesn’t want, Genie may also be wrong in believing all love is selfish. Genie’s insistence that Vida can’t “save” her reminds the reader that though Vida’s name means “life” in Spanish and his nickname is “Jesus,” he doesn’t have power over life and death: he’s just a human being living in secular history, like the other characters.
Themes
Vida carries Genie to the hospital against her will, where nurses keep her alive on an IV. Dr. Mambo reveals that they have discovered precancerous lesions on Genie’s cervix, such that her hospitalization is “a blessing in disguise.” Vida is unconvinced of the “blessing,” though he feels gratitude toward the doctor. Genie returns from the hospital in improved health and doesn’t mention the incident, but Vida continues resenting her attempt to die.
Because doctors have found the precancerous lesions on Genie’s cervix, surgeons can remove the lesions and reduce the likelihood that Genie develops cancer. This is why Dr. Mambo calls Genie’s hospitalization “a blessing in disguise.” Vida rejects the religious language of “blessing,” revealing that despite his “Jesus” nickname, he's very aware of his and Genie’s status as mere humans in secular history. His ongoing resentment of Genie shows selfishness and possessiveness mixed with his love of her.
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Years pass. Vida manages to put aside his resentment of Genie, for the most part. The day he turns 57, she wakes him with kisses. As they have sex, her focused attention on him reminds him of the “beautiful things” their relationship has given him, and he blurts out that he loves her. She loses focus, says his name, and orgasms. Afterward, she sees him off at the airport for his visit to Stockholm. When she tells him he’s her “home” and kisses the scar Goliath left on his shoulder, he wonders whether that’s her way of responding to his love declaration—but before he can ask, she kisses him, and he’s overwhelmed by the same sensation he once felt in the elephant grass.
Vida tells Genie he loves her during sex, while thinking of the “beautiful things” she’s given him. This confluence of events suggests that a) Vida’s love of Genie is tied up with how she inspires him to chase his aspirations and create beautiful art, but also b) Vida thinks that love, sex, and human connection are inherently beautiful. His memory of the elephant grass when she kisses him goodbye emphasizes the connection between his love for her and how she has helped him chase his aspirations. Genie’s claim that Vida is her “home” seems to imply that he has helped her heal after the traumas of the farm massacre and the Masukus’ bad treatment of her.
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