The Theory of Flight: Book 2, Part 1: Epistemology Summary & Analysis

When Genie describes herself as “something rooted but free to fly,” she seems to be realizing that it’s possible to have “domestic,” loving, or other group connections to people while still being an autonomous individual, “free to fly” toward one’s aspirations. Essentially, she is spelling out the meaning of the book’s constant symbolic associations of her with sunflowers (“something rooted” in land and history) and birds (entities “in flight”). She may also be overcoming the aversion to talking about love and connection in the context of her relationship to Vida, an aversion implicitly tied to her negative experiences with Marcus and the Masukus.

This dream is a flashback to Golide’s reunion with Elizabeth and Genie after the war. The novel has used the phrase “precious and beautiful thing” to describe Genie’s heart after death; this passage suggests that Golide’s fatherly love helped make Genie the sort of person who could leave behind a “precious and beautiful” legacy: a person who hatched from an egg, flies, and thereby shows other people that they can fly too.

Vida’s panic, horror, and disorientation (he doesn’t realize he’s covered in blood until Dr. Mambo points it out) remind readers that while his desire to force unwanted medical treatment on Genie may be selfish, he genuinely cares for her and will be deeply wounded by her death.

When Vida thinks it would be “a betrayal” to clean off Genie’s blood, it recalls Kuki’s belief that she betrayed her son Everleigh by continuing to live her life after he died. At one point, Kuki was so distracted by her supposed betrayal—in contrast to Vida’s devotion to Everleigh’s memory—that she hit 13-year-old Genie with her car. This fact strongly indicates that it is unhealthy to grieve loved ones forever—that it is healthier to love people yet let them go, as Genie has done with Marcus and now with Vida. Genie’s packed suitcase recalls her leaving the farm after the massacre, when she told Jestina that she would choose her own endings: Vida is correct that she intended to die, an example of her choosing her own ending.

Vida, who knows Genie’s life story, correctly interprets her decision to die as an assertion of her individual autonomy, selecting an “end for herself.” The possessive streak in his love for her makes him feel that her decision to die is a betrayal of him—so, pettily, he decides to ‘betray’ her by washing the blood from his clothes. This action shows his angry, confused, and self-centered state of mind.

After dreaming of his and Genie’s first kiss, Vida wakes up to a bird on his chest. Since Genie hatched from an egg and is persistently associated with flight, the bird with a broken wing may be a hallucination representing Genie, a manifestation of Vida’s desire to have her back and heal her. The novel has indicated over and over that—despite Vida’s “Jesus” nickname—he is just a human being in secular history like everyone else. Ergo, Bhekithemba’s decision to call Vida “The Messiah of the Streets” and the other false details in his story remind readers that The Man Himself has corrupted journalism in the postcolonial era.

Vida isn’t sure whether he really had a bird with him, further implying that the bird was a hallucination representing Genie and her inspirational presence in his life. Vida’s claim that beauty doesn’t exist anymore indicates that without Genie—who helped him make his beautiful art public—he can no longer see beauty, let alone aspire to make it.

When Vida points out inaccuracies about his race and nicknames in Bhekithemba’s article, Bhekithemba dismisses him, essentially saying that appearances and what sounds good are more important than facts. This dismissal of facts shows how The Man Himself and the corrupt postcolonial government have warped journalism and Bhekithemba’s career in particular.

Bhekithemba is aware of how badly the corrupt postcolonial government has damaged journalism and the public’s sense of reality: deeply important phenomena such as HIV/AIDS, which are important both to public health and individuals’ sexual practices, are ignored because they make the government look bad.

“Jesus wept” is a line from the gospels, John 11:35, which occurs after Jesus sees people mourning his dead friend Lazarus. Shortly after Jesus weeps, he resurrects Lazarus. Vida’s quotation, then, is ironic: he knows that, despite his “Jesus” nickname, he’s just a human being in secular history incapable of raising Genie or anyone else from the dead. Bhekithemba’s tact toward Vida and his guilt over what “happened”—that is, the Beauford farm massacre—reveal that despite his cooperation with a corrupt political regime, Bhekithemba is not heartless or malicious.

Due to Vida and Genie’s decades-long relationship, Bhekithemba mistakenly believes that they are married. Vida’s happiness at the mistake suggests that due to his possessive, obsessive grief, he wishes he had a legal claim on Genie such as marriage.

When Vida compares Dingani to a lion “without his pride,” it’s a pun: Dingani has lost his “pride” (i.e., his lion family) and, in consequence, has also lost his pride (i.e., his self-regard). Dingani’s reaction implies that despite the Masukus’ selfishness toward Genie, part of Dingani’s self-respect came from his relationship to her, from protecting and providing for her after her parents died. 

Vida gets angry with Dingani when Dingani asks what happened to Genie because it seems like Dingani is in denial about Genie’s longstanding HIV-positivity. However, when Dingani starts spouting accusatory phrases like “What did you do?” it suggests that Dingani may be thinking about some additional thing that happened to Genie, not her HIV-positivity per se. Dingani’s closing comment to himself that Marcus shouldn’t be told Genie is in a coma shows that Dingani is as manipulative now as he was when he initially concealed Genie’s HIV-positive status from his children.

The 1976 song “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft,” originally by Canadian band Klaatu, was covered in 1977 by The Carpenters, an American musical group consisting of siblings Karen and Richard Carpenter. Karen Carpenter died in 1983 of heart complications related to anorexia—a condition, like Genie’s HIV, that exists at the intersection of sociopolitical issues and deeply personal issues such as sex, gender, and the body. When Marcus dreams of Genie singing with Karen Carpenter’s voice, it may imply that he intuits she’s dying or that, despite his romantic attachment to her, he thinks of her as his quasi-sister (Karen famously being part of a sister-brother duo). Thandi’s brusque claim that Marcus doesn’t need to come home, meanwhile, illustrates the emotional coldness characteristic of the Masukus’ family relationships.

In previous scenes, Genie has called Vida her “home” and been amused by her “domestic” thoughts of him before falling into a coma. Despite his marriage to Esme, Marcus clearly believes that Vida usurped his role in Genie’s life—the role he would have had if his parents hadn’t reclaimed him.

Genie must have taken the atlas with her when she left the farm after the massacre. Given that context, the “small reddish-brown handprint” might be a print from her hand after playing in the sunflower field’s soil—or after touching her massacred neighbors’ blood. That ambiguity reminds the reader of Marcus and Genie’s rootedness in a shared history (playing in the sunflower field) but also the sharp divergence in their lives (Marcus’s parents took him away before the massacre, while Genie stayed behind and lived through it). Marcus puts away the atlas that Genie sent him as soon as his wife wakes up, which suggests he feels secretive or guilty about his ongoing attachment to Genie. The line “all felled, all felled, all are felled” is from “Binsey Poplars” by English Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889), a poem mourning some beautiful aspens that have been cut down. While the poem is about humanity’s destructive impact on nature, Marcus seems to associate it with the breakup of his own family, since Thandi cut down the trees around their family home before leaving Dingani.

Dingani and Thandi’s decision to keep Genie’s HIV a secret had negative repercussions, yet now Dingani is trying to hide Genie’s coma from Krystle, revealing that Dingani hasn’t learned from his mistakes. When Vida told Dingani about the coma, Dingani started spouting blame, but it wasn’t clear whether he was blaming Vida or himself. Here, Dingani agrees with Marcus’s seemingly unfair claim that “anything” happening to Genie will be Dingani’s “fault,” which suggests that he was blaming himself, not Vida, and that he feels responsible for Genie’s health for some as-yet-unknown reason.

The California Towhee is native to the U.S. and Mexico; Krystle’s encounter with wild California Towhees suggests she no longer lives in her home country. Together with her decision to ignore Marcus’s calls, this fact emphasizes the Masuku family’s geographic dispersal and emotional estrangement. As birds represent individual aspiration in the novel, this wounded baby bird may represent the ailing Genie, who has supported the aspirations of others—or it may foreshadow that the adult Krystle’s own aspirations have been damaged in some way. When Krystle worries that the mother bird will reject the wounded baby, it subtly reminds readers of the vexed relationship Krystle and Genie both had with status-obsessed Thandi, whom Krystle believes has failed to live up to circulating cultural narratives about mothers (hence her thought that you should doubt stories you hear “especially” when they are “about mothers”).

Krystle’s identification with the wounded baby bird suggests that it represents her own thwarted aspirations, e.g. her desire to complete her PhD. When she remembers her childhood ambitions ruefully, it isn’t clear whether she’s regretting the internalized sexism of her former ambitions (they involved giving up her career for a husband who frequently neglected her to go on business trips) or simply reflecting on the fact that she never manages to achieve her aspirations.

Genie told Marcus about the elephants she saw swimming across the Zambezi, but Krystle’s confusion at the postcard suggests that she was never told or doesn’t remember. Yet Genie discontinued her medication and decided to send this postcard at the same time, indicating that Genie thought the postcard’s message was important enough to be her dying words to Krystle. Given that the novel has repeatedly linked the swimming elephants to its symbolism of flight and aspiration, the message suggests that Genie knows Krystle feels defeated and is trying to inspire her—but Krystle’s belief that she can’t do much for the baby bird reveals that she hasn’t yet understood or accepted Genie’s message.

In the song “Mr. Paganini,” singer Ella Fitzgerald (1917–1996) urges a musician, Mr. Paganini, to play additional, modern music after he has finished performing his usual “repertoire.” The allusion indicates both Krystle’s desire that the bird survive (“keep playing,” metaphorically) and her own aspirations to do something new and different.

The phrase “rebel with a cause” is a play on the title of a famous film, Rebel Without a Cause (1955), about confused teenagers in California engaged in meaningless delinquency due to difficult relationships with their parents. When Krystle hopes the bird is a “rebel with a cause,” she seems to be projecting—she’s hoping that she’s living “with a cause,” not meaninglessly, and that she’ll eventually achieve some aspiration despite her difficult relationship to her family.

When Krystle tells Xander that she doesn’t need the postcard back, it emphasizes both that she doesn’t yet understand Genie’s efforts to inspire her and that Dingani’s desire to hide Genie’s coma from her is cruel—after all, Krystle might want the postcard if she knew it could be the last thing she ever received from Genie. Krystle’s awkward flirtation with Xander and subsequent embarrassment suggest that romance is one of her aspirations but that her self-esteem may be too low to pursue it.

As a child, Marcus pretended to be a “hero,” like He-Man, and insisted that Krystle and Genie play “the bad guy[s],” roles that revealed Marcus’s indoctrination into traditional masculinity and his assumption that girls could only be supporting characters. Krystle believes that a blood transfusion after a car struck Genie—an accident for which Krystle was partially responsible—gave Genie HIV. As such, she blames herself for Genie’s illness and believes her whole family blames her too; her guilt and defensiveness cause her to believe, accurately or not, that Marcus is casting himself as a superhero, Genie as a damsel in distress, and Krystle as a villain. When Krystle jumps to this negative conclusion, it emphasizes both the negative impact of gender hierarchies on personal relationships and the painful estrangement of the Masukus.

The Masukus’ decision to gather together despite their estrangement initially suggests that Genie’s illness is leading them to behave better and less selfishly—but their exclusion of Esme, who evidently knows and “loves” Genie, reveals that they can still be thoughtless and cruel to people they ought to consider family members.

Marcus’s ringtone is “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft.” When Thandi called him in the night to tell him about Genie’s coma, he dreamed Genie was singing the song before he woke up. He then acted secretively around Esme about the news. That scene suggested the song was linked to private, romantic feelings Marcus still has for Genie—but this passage reveals that Esme also has memories connecting Genie with the song, emphasizing that Esme and Genie have their own relationship and that the Masukus are cruel to exclude Esme from their reunion after Genie falls into a coma. When, in this flashback, Esme misunderstands who Marcus means by “Jesus” and Genie calls Christians “hypocritical,” it reminds readers that the religious allusions in the novel are largely symbolic or ironic—despite its magical-realist elements, the story takes place in a secular-historical frame, not a religious one.

Gloriosa superba, a species of flame lily, is the national flower of Zimbabwe. Marcus’s rather sour claim that nobody can understand Genie contrasts with Esme’s immediate affection for Genie and belief in her claims about flight—suggesting both that Genie inspires Esme and that Esme’s an emotionally generous person who deserves better than to be excluded by her in-laws the Masukus.

The Masukus’ beauty lured Esme in, and she realized they were “brittle”—breakable into sharp pieces—only later, which suggests that sometimes, beauty not only supports social hierarchies but also confuses onlookers about the true nature of what they’re seeing. Esme hides a black suit “at the bottom” of Marcus’s suitcase so he’ll have something to wear to Genie’s funeral if she dies; this act shows Esme’s forethought and tact, but it also hints that the Masukus may be excluding Esme because she’s more willing to face the truth than they are.

Esme knows that Marcus’s longstanding obsession with Genie is a threat to their marriage, yet she still loves both Marcus and Genie. Esme’s intelligence and emotional generosity highlight that Marcus is cruel to shut her out and treat her cavalierly.

It seems that Esme and Genie were close enough—and emotionally mature enough—to have a frank, friendly talk about their respective relationships to Marcus. This fact again emphasizes how unfair it is for the Masukus to exclude Esme from their gathering occasioned by Genie’s illness.

The Six Million Dollar Man (1973–1978) was an American TV show about an astronaut who becomes a bionic superhero. Krystle’s intrusive memory suggests that Marcus used to pretend to be the Six Million Dollar Man and that she is still worried about Marcus casting her as the villain to his superhero in this situation. Her sense that his t-shirt’s profound statement doesn’t suit his personality, meanwhile, suggests that she has a somewhat negative or condescending view of him.

Thandi cut down the jacarandas around the Masukus’ house before she moved to Belgium. Since Marcus kissed Genie near the jacarandas right before he found out she had HIV, the trees likely had a special significance for him. Thus, when Krystle brings him jacaranda blooms, it shows she knows and loves him even though she sometimes takes a dim view of him. By calling his marriage co-dependent and suggesting he should figure out “what Esme means,” Krystle hints to Marcus that Esme understands and feels threatened by his obsession with Genie—and that Esme is trying to communicate with him through the t-shirt with the slogan about travel and love.

The country’s beauty from the plane window belies its violent postcolonial history, a detail that emphasizes again how beauty can obscure the facts of a situation. Eunice’s claim that Thandi and Dingani are “plotting to overthrow the government” suggests that she is suffering from dementia, but it also indicates how deeply colonial and postcolonial political turmoil can affect the minds of the people who lived through it—leading Eunice, in a state of cognitive decline, to become paranoid and suspicious of her own family.

Despite the massive impact of history on the present, Krystle believes the past is inaccessible. She “can never go back home” because her family, represented by the crumbling house where they once lived together, has fallen apart. “Stand by Your Man” is a famous country song, released in 1968 by singer Tammy Wynette; the lyrics advise women to put up with inexplicable and hard-to-take behavior from the men they love. When Krystle describes Thandi as a former “stand-by-your-man wife,” it suggests that Thandi was once socially indoctrinated to put up with poor behavior from Dingani—but eventually rejected that indoctrination.

Marcus kissed Genie under the jacarandas right before he found out she was HIV-positive, and Thandi cut down the jacarandas right before leaving Dingani. When Krystle says that Marcus cut off contact with Thandi “because of the jacarandas,” the context seems to imply that Marcus really cut off contact either due to his lingering resentment for how Thandi hid Genie’s HIV status or his anger at her decision to divorce Dingani. Thandi’s insistence that she had to cut down the jacarandas “to save the house” and Krystle’s claim that the house always had cracks, meanwhile, hint that the house is a metaphor for the Masuku family: Thandi believes her actions toward Genie and Dingani were necessary to save the family as a whole from severe damage, whereas Krystle believes the family was always severely damaged. When Marcus claims that Thandi has already cut down the tree containing his childhood treehouse, his words imply that Thandi’s actions have already symbolically destroyed Marcus’s childhood memories anyway, so it doesn’t matter what she does now.

Krystle and Marcus both seem to associate “Binsey Poplars” with the loss of their childhood jacarandas and, implicitly, the break-up of their family. Genie’s favorite lines, on the other hand, are about humans injuring a “tender” country—implying that she associates the poem with exploitative environmental practices and perhaps also the postcolonial government’s oppression of newly independent (and thus young and “tender”) Zimbabwe. When Dingani echoes one of Genie’s favorite lines, it suggests that he too sees the poem’s relevance to Zimbabwe’s political situation.

When Krystle experiences the room she shared with Genie as a “monument to [Genie’s] absence,” it recalls Genie thinking about Vida’s and Marcus’s palpable absences as she was falling into her coma. The emphasis on absence in different characters’ relationships suggests that losing connections to others can be as important a formative experience as gaining connections and finding a group identity. Eunice’s alarming reaction to Genie leaving the Masukus’ reveals how unreasonable Eunice’s (and perhaps Thandi and Dingani’s) expectations of Genie were: unless she did what they wanted and always acted grateful for their generosity, she was “a disappointment.”

When Krystle wonders what age her family would expect an apparition of Genie to be, feels abandoned by herself to Genie’s “absence,” and criticizes her family’s rose-colored glasses vis-à-vis their treatment of Genie, it shows that Krystle herself has recognized how “jealously,” “possessively,” and “imperfectly” they love Genie—but it also reveals that Krystle thinks she’s the only one of her family members to have recognized this fact. Given Dingani’s intense guilt about Genie, Krystle may be wrong about her family, but her unspoken judgment on them emphasizes how badly the Masukus are communicating with each other right now.

Despite the novel’s largely ironic treatment of Christian religious allusions, Vida’s sense that the body is “an entry point” for “something that can fly away” implies his genuine belief in an immaterial human soul or spirit. This sense convinces him that Genie is not her comatose body—the flying part of her, the aspiring and inspiring part of her, is gone. It isn’t clear exactly what decision Vida makes in this scene; however, he has been selfishly clinging to Genie despite her desire to die until this point, so a new decision from him suggests a reversal of that behavior.

Though ARVs (i.e. antiretroviral medications) are indeed expensive, many countries in Africa were largely unable to access them in the first decades of the HIV/AIDS epidemic partly due to the aftereffects of European colonialism. For example, some countries were poor and unable to afford ARVs because their natural resources had been violently extracted by foreign powers for decades. Thus, Genie’s individual, private experience of illness is connected with large-scale political and historical forces. The appearance of “Jesus,” i.e. Vida, at the window during this scene suggests that Genie was planning to “do something good” for or with Vida for at least two years before she left the Masukus to live with him. 

Dr. Mambo perceives Genie and her “defiance” in the face of illness as unusual and inspirational—which recalls the awestruck witnesses observing Genie’s ascent skyward after her death. Despite Genie and Vida’s ban on talking about love, external observers see that they do love each other—which suggests that their refusal to talk about it is a result of their trauma histories: Genie’s negative experiences with the Masukus and Vida’s loss of Everleigh. Nevertheless, Genie and Vida do love each other.

As Genie’s doctor, Dr. Mambo has a professional interest in Genie’s survival. Yet she is immediately able to see Genie’s decision to die as “defiance”—as an insistence on controlling her own life despite adverse circumstances. Without selfish love blinding her, Dr. Mambo can find Genie chasing her goals simply inspiring. Genie’s disappearance from the hospital, meanwhile, suggests that someone—perhaps Vida?—has decided to help her avoid additional treatment.

“All that glitters is not gold” means that not everything that appears beautiful on the surface is actually valuable. When Valentine applies this saying to the Masukus, he is saying that their beauty is misleading—if you look beneath it, they are unattractive people. “Dickensian” is a reference to English writer Charles Dickens (1812–1870), whose writing famously represents extremely poor working conditions in Victorian-era workhouses and factories. To call something “Dickensian” is to say that it represents impoverishment and squalid conditions. In other words, Krystle and the Masukus are laughing at Valentine’s unkempt office on the assumption that he won’t understand a literary reference. 

Since the Organization is a shadowy domestic surveillance operation, it is a disturbing revelation that they “processed” Dingani in 1987 (“processed” is likely a euphemism for arrest, interrogation, and even torture). Since 1987 is also the year the Beauford Farm massacre occurred, Dingani’s arrest and his secret may have to do with the massacre, though Valentine doesn’t make that clear. His thorough knowledge of Dingani, Thandi, and Marcus’s pasts—including Dingani’s secret and Thandi’s hidden “shame”—shows how invasive the oppressive government’s presence is in citizens’ private lives. His judgment that Marcus seems effeminate is implicitly negative, suggesting that Valentine holds conservative views about gender performance. Finally, his perception that Krystle may be a “rebel […] with a cause” echoes Krystle’s own thoughts about the wounded bird she saved, reinforcing the interpretation that the wounded bird symbolizes Krystle and her damaged individual aspirations.

After humiliating the Masukus by revealing to them that he understood their literary insult, Valentine contemplates how people tend to make snap judgments about him due to his ugliness, assuming he’ll try to compensate for his lack of beauty with a “heart of gold.” Yet Valentine doesn’t value surface beauty of the kind the Masukus have. By implication, he doesn’t feel devalued by his own surface ugliness, either, and so he feels no need to compensate for it. Valentine inflicts pain on people because he feels it’s necessary, not out of resentment. While readers may feel that working for an oppressive government that hurts its citizens is both unnecessary and immoral, Valentine believes Genie at least understood his motivations—a detail reminding readers that Valentine has known Genie for a long time and seems to like her.   

The Masukus want to file a missing persons report so they can return Genie to the hospital, suggesting that they either don’t know or selfishly don’t care about Genie’s desire to die. Moreover, they accuse Vida of engineering her disappearance, though it’s not clear whether they have evidence to back up the accusation.

It turns out the Masukus have no evidence that Vida engineered Genie’s disappearance, which suggests that they blame him out of resentment, because Genie left them and went to live with him. Implicitly, they seem to feel that Vida has taken and is taking Genie away from them, though Genie made the decision to leave them by herself. This in turn suggests that the Masukus like blaming Vida because, if Vida lured Genie away, they don’t have to confront the possibility that they may have driven her away. When Valentine won’t do what the Masukus want, they immediately try to bribe him and “scoff” at his claim that he doesn’t take bribes. Their reactions emphasize the widespread and widely known corruption in the postcolonial government.

Valentine is monitoring “Jesus,” i.e. Vida, which hints that he may have been tracking Genie and her associates before this point. This hint again seems to underscore that oppressive governments intrusively surveil their citizens and may interfere in their lives without cause.  

After taking a comatose Genie to the hospital, Vida found a pair of sunglasses abandoned in their house that didn’t belong to either of them. Now Valentine is missing his sunglasses, a detail hinting that he is the mysterious person who visited Genie shortly before she fell into her coma. When the receptionist tells Valentine, “She’s still up there waiting for you,” it reveals that Valentine comes to see “The Firebird” frequently. Valentine has such an intense reaction to the statue’s beauty, which was inspired by Genie, that he almost accidentally touches it; his intense reaction may suggest that he has a more extensive relationship to Genie than has yet been revealed.

Viewers can disagree about what “The Firebird” represents, which suggests it’s more abstract than realist. The old white woman and her husband specifically disagree about whether it represents a bird or “a woman suspended in the air”; given that Genie is associated with birds throughout the novel and flies at her death, these details suggest that the beautiful, abstract statue is Vida’s representation of her essentially free, aspirational nature. That Marcus bought this particular statue of Vida’s—which was presumably very expensive, given that the others were bought by international art galleries—indicates his obsessive desire to possess Genie and to intrude on her relationship with Vida.

Valentine quickly leaves when the old woman speculates that he “wanted to touch something beautiful,” indicating that he is deeply uncomfortable at having revealed to a stranger how much he appreciates beautiful art. Because she mentions that Valentine has a physical disability, readers may infer that she thinks Valentine wanted to touch the statue as a kind of antidote to his own supposed ugliness. Ergo, the events imply that Valentine is uncomfortable because the woman has offensively misinterpreted him, reading his aesthetic or emotional reactions solely through the lens of his disability. 

On the one hand, law enforcement is treating private-school girls differently from other shoplifters because the private-school girls’ parents might be important; this suggests a corrupt favoritism toward the rich. On the other hand, the Organization’s treatment of 15-year-old Genie is deeply disturbing; they arrest her without witnessing her do anything criminal, arrest her but don’t notify her adult guardians, force her to strip, and interrogate her while she’s naked. This last action in particular demonstrates yet again how oppressive governments intrude on citizens’ privacy and weaponizes sexuality against them.

In another example of Genie’s defiance, she refuses to betray whether her government interrogators’ attempts to discomfit and sexually humiliate her are working. Moreover, when Valentine asks impatient questions about “them” (i.e. whatever he’s assuming she stole), she gives an answer asserting her own high standards and aesthetic sense for beauty: she wanted an “interesting blue,” didn’t find it, and so took nothing.

Valentine finds Genie’s response about searching for an “interesting blue” color “intriguing” and ultimately believes her because he notices her underwear is evidence of an aesthetic sense focused on bright color. His reactions suggest that he identifies with Genie because he has his own developed sense of what’s beautiful, too. Yet despite his positive disposition toward her, he is ordering horrifying treatment of her, threatening her—a 15-year-old girl who seems to have done nothing wrong—with a cavity search of her vagina and anus while a strange man watches her through a one-way mirror. Although Valentine and his partner ultimately don’t go through with the cavity search, even the threat of it reveals the government’s corruption and weaponization of sexuality against its own citizens.  

Here Genie reveals that her defiance and self-possession derive from her parents’ capacity for flight. In other words, she thinks of them and herself as “flying things”—creatures that dream and achieve dreams—and not mere bodies, physical objects that the government can abuse and destroy. Valentine’s reaction to discovering Genie’s parents’ identity indicates that he had already heard of them, though they were killed approximately seven years before he joined the Organization; said reaction may foreshadow further revelations about Valentine’s relationship to Elizabeth and Golide.

When the narration, focalized through Valentine, refers to the Masukus’ “portable electronic devices,” it may mean they are using a variety of fancy devices—or it may indicate that Valentine is thinking of their fancy smartphones using an elevated euphemism as a way of mocking their status-conscious materialism. Valentine’s immediate, defensive reaction to Krystle’s laughter emphasizes how sensitive he is to class status and how much he dislikes having his appreciation of beauty misinterpreted.

When Thandi says that Marcus “needed to stretch his legs,” her brusque tone suggests that Marcus may actually have left because he was fighting with his other family members—hinting once again at discord among the Masukus. The revelation that the official records believe Genie died in 1987, during the Beauford Farm massacre, illustrates once again that while history is tremendously important to the present, our knowledge of history is often confused, incorrect, or incomplete.

If Minenhle reported Genie “slain,” it suggests that the Beauford Farm survivors told Minenhle Genie was killed in the 1987 massacre rather than admit they drove a 9-year-old girl away because they blamed her parents for the killings. When Marcus says “I should never have let go of her hand” in response to clearly false news of Genie’s death, it suggests that he takes any evidence that something bad has happened to Genie as further confirmation that their childhood separation ruined everything—an irrational and egotistical interpretation of Genie’s life.

Jestina accompanied 9-year-old Genie off the farm because the traumatized survivors of the massacre, blaming Genie’s parents for the violence, drove her away. That the Masukus would claim Jestina kidnapped Genie suggests that they did not understand the circumstances of Genie’s departure from the farm and were unnecessarily suspicious of a helpful person. Valentine’s claim that people “do not disappear” is disingenuous; as a government worker, he would presumably know about the 1982–1987 Gukurahundi genocide in Zimbabwe, during which people of the Ndebele and Kalanga minority ethnicities were “disappeared” (i.e. arrested without trial or murdered) by government soldiers. Despite the novel’s frequently negative portrayal of Thandi, her insistence to a high-up government worker that people did in fact disappear in Zimbabwe in the 1980s is brave, given the government’s responsibility for the disappearances.

Valentine clearly finds the Masukus rude and dislikes what he perceives to be their essential superficiality. Whether or not this is his ultimate motive for thwarting them, he is clearly leveraging government power against them by insisting they must disprove irrational claims suggested by various official forms (e.g. that Genie died in 1987 and was kidnapped in 1988). Valentine’s tactics show the easily abused power of the government over its citizens.

Genie’s aunt Minenhle is waiting for news of Genie (“her”) from someone, but she reacts badly when she sees Thandi and Marcus at her door. Thandi dislikes Minenhle due to the trauma Thandi suffered when Minenhle’s student, but Minenhle’s apparent dislike of the Masukus suggests that Thandi or the others at some point managed to alienate Minenhle in turn—a selfish action given that Minenhle is one of the Masukus’ adopted daughter Genie’s few living relatives.

When Genie decided to discontinue her medication, she sent Mordechai and Minenhle a bird. After Genie fell into a coma, Vida thought he encountered a bird with a broken wing, but it wasn’t clear whether the bird was real or a hallucination brought on by Vida’s grief over Genie. The appearance of a bird with a broken wing in Mordechai and Minenhle’s apartment hints that this is the bird Genie released to fly to them, which also encountered Vida at some point after it injured itself. Given the association of birds with aspiration throughout the novel, the bird seems to represent Genie’s desire to communicate with loved ones and support their aspirations even after her own death. 

Both Mordechai and Minenhle refer to Genie as “her” rather than say her name in front of the Masukus, Mordechai stands between Minenhle and the Masukus as if he thinks they’re a threat to her, and Mordechai and Minenhle trade loaded glances before they agree to help the Masukus. All these details again imply that the Masukus have selfishly harmed or otherwise alienated Minenhle at some point even though she is one of their adoptee Genie’s only living relatives.

The narration has previously suggested that Thandi has an unreasonable, vindictive dislike of Minenhle. Thandi’s rant here reveals that she likely did buy a business just to prevent Minenhle from having it—and participated in Dingani’s plan to adopt Genie to thwart Minenhle, who also wanted to adopt Genie. This is a decidedly malicious motive for adopting an orphan, emphasizing how selfish Thandi has been in their treatment of Genie. Marcus’s negative, “lonely” reaction to imagining young Genie growing up in “comfort”—implicitly, emotional more than physical comfort, as the Masukus were able to provide the latter—but “without him” demonstrates a similar selfishness in his love for Genie. That the Masukus may have bribed the judge who determined who would adopt Genie, meanwhile, suggests that economic and political corruption in postcolonial society gives unfair advantages to rich families like the Masukus while hurting less well-off people like Minenhle.   

Ironically, C10 and the gentlemanly man who accompanied Minenhle—whom readers can assume is Mordechai—are the same person. The vast difference between Mordechai’s Organization persona and his character after he rejected the organization show both the corrosive influence of corrupt governments on their agents and Minenhle’s aspirational effect on him. Minenhle’s fear that the Masukus will bribe Valentine to retaliate against Vida underscores that average citizens expect government officials to be corrupt; it also hints that Minenhle knows from previous experience how willing the Masukus are to attack Genie’s other loved ones selfishly if said loved ones get in their way. Minenhle’s stark claim that the government is “too intimate” with its citizens sums up how, throughout the novel, the government and its agents have inappropriately interfered with different citizens’ private lives, including their sexual lives. Valentine’s silent agreement with Minenhle reveals that he isn’t the yes-man for The Man Himself’s government that he might have previously appeared to be. 

The narration describes Genie’s heart after death as transformed into a “beautiful and precious something”; before Genie dies, agents of The Man Himself also discover a “beautiful and precious something” on the Beauford Farm and Estate. When Valentine muses that Minenhle contains a “most precious thing,” it immediately recalls the description of Genie’s transformed heart—and suggests that the magical transformation it underwent is symbolic of her “unbroken” spirit and its lasting inspirational effect on the people who knew her. As birds are associated with aspiration throughout the novel, the appearance of the bird that Genie sent Minenhle and Mordechai in this scene suggests both that Genie continues to inspire them and that Genie and Minenhle have had some inspirational influence even on the pragmatic, unemotional Valentine.

Valentine’s preference for colonial houses over “postcolonial monstrosities” indicates that beauty has no necessary relationship to other virtues, such as equality or political freedom. An oppressive, racist political culture may build pretty houses, and an independent country may build aesthetic “monstrosities.” BSAP stands for British South Africa Police, a police and paramilitary force that fought against guerillas seeking to overthrow the white-minority government during the Zimbabwe War of Independence (1964–1979). RF stands for Rhodesian Front, the white-dominated conservative political party that ruled Rhodesia from 1965–1979. In other words, Lawrence fought for the losing side in the war, associated with the colonial past, but subsequently became an operative of the postcolonial government, indicating a disturbing continuity between the two governments. Earlier, Valentine claimed that he absolutely did not have “a heart of gold;” Lawrence’s claim that he does suggests that Valentine may be a kinder person than he himself knows.    

The description of the Masukus’ beauty as “menacing” again emphasizes that their superficial beauty is a weapon they use to protect themselves and their status, not a sign of any inherent goodness. When Marcus, Krystle, and Thandi all deny that Genie is dead, it shows their desperate love for her—but also their tendency to deny her reality when it suits them.

While Eunice clearly is suffering from dementia, her fixation on a plot to overthrow the government and the accusations she has thrown at various people hint that she may have some traumatic, memorable political experiences in the colonial past, despite Dingani’s assurances to the contrary.

Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu’s Ph.D. dissertation, which she wrote at Stanford University in California, was titled “‘A Country with Land But No Habitat’: Travel and Belonging in Colonial Southern Rhodesia and Postcolonial Zimbabwe.” The description that Esme gives of Krystle’s unfinished dissertation—a project about national belonging throughout Zimbabwe’s history—thus alludes to Ndlovu’s own real-life scholarly work. Esme’s attentiveness to Krystle’s interests shows her sensitivity, while Marcus’s dismissal of the topic as “too . . . political for Krystle” shows that while he may love his sister, he doesn’t believe she would take on serious topics. It may also indicate that he, like Dingani, believes their family can choose to exist outside of and untouched by politics and history, despite abundant evidence to the contrary.

The sudden reappearance of Jestina Nxumalo in the narrative insists on the connectedness of all characters tied together by the country’s colonial and postcolonial history, despite their apparent relative unimportance to or seeming disappearance from Genie’s story.

When the narration describes Marcus as thinking “rather generously” that Jestina isn’t an insecure braggart, it’s likely ironic. The scene is focalized through Marcus, so he’s actively noting that he would usually judge Jestina negatively and then praising himself for not doing so—not generous behavior. Marcus’s allusion to the “diasporic world” likely refers to the Zimbabwean diaspora, in which large numbers of Zimbabweans emigrated to other countries after the white-dominated minority government declared independence from the U.K. in 1965 and again after 2000. When Jestina asks what “they” did to Genie after learning of her HIV, it suggests that Krystle may have been wrong to blame Genie’s HIV on a blood transfusion and that there’s more to the story than readers yet know.

Marcus seems to feel some tenderness toward Jestina due to the role she played in his childhood, calling her by the nickname “MaNxumalo.” Supposedly, Thandi is trying to specify who he means when she calls Jestina her “parents’ maid,” but it seems likely that she’s also indirectly criticizing Marcus’s use of the affectionate nickname, reminding him of the status difference between the privileged Masukus on the one hand and former maid Jestina on the other. Thandi may be jealous of or insecure about Jestina because Jestina was one of the adults who cared for Marcus while Thandi and Dingani were furthering Dingani’s career in the U.S.

Since “the thing that [the Masukus] have tried to keep at bay” fills their house with grief, it seems likely that the “thing” in question is their acceptance that Genie is really dead. Marcus’s belief that this fact could shatter his family indicates that their love of Genie helped bond the Masukus despite their fractiousness and selfish treatment of her. Krystle’s claim that the Masukus “know who ‘they’ are” is somewhat mysterious; her further discussion of “unforgiven” sins suggests she may think “they” refers to the Masukus themselves, since Krystle blames herself for Genie’s HIV and since Krystle and Marcus have both desired forgiveness from Genie in the past without receiving it.

This passage reveals what Marcus meant when he confronted Genie while she was out mattress-shopping with Vida and accused her of never forgiving him for what he did after he found out she had HIV: he reacted with fear and disgust, showing that his instinct for self-protection was stronger than his love for her. Eunice’s demand that Thandi and Dingani tell Marcus the truth “before it is too late” exposes that she also harbored deep prejudice against Genie due to her HIV status and feared Marcus would enter a romantic relationship with her. Marcus believes that in response, Genie developed “the look of letting him go”—in other words, he believes that if he had reacted differently in that moment, she might have stayed and held onto their romantic relationship.

Throughout the novel, sunflowers have symbolized disparate characters’ shared history. When Dingani mentions the sunflower field here, it points to Dingani and Marcus’s difficult history: Dingani and Thandi left Marcus with his grandparents as a newborn and didn’t come back for him for many years, an arguably selfish decision for which Marcus judged them. Despite recognizing his own selfishness, however, Dingani still hopes his son can love him “after”—that is, after he reveals his involvement in the Beauford Farm massacre, an unexpected revelation reminding readers once again that history connects the novel’s characters to one another in unexpected ways.  

The colonizers’ smug assumption that they were “civilizing” the indigenous peoples of Africa shows how racist stereotypes about indigenous people’s barbarism were used to justify oppression and exploitation. The juxtaposition of Mbongeni’s political interests and his physical abuse of Dingani and Eunice may subtly imply that oppression has led Mbongeni to take out his political frustrations in his private life, on his family—or it may simply be an acknowledgment that people interested in egalitarian politics can still behave in unjust, cruel ways.

Stereotypes about sex workers motivate Mbongeni’s controlling and abusive behavior toward Eunice, which shows again how economic and social constructs (sex work, gender roles) often shape private interpersonal relationships. Eunice’s past as a sex worker, an abused wife, and a maid signals that she became obsessed with respectability and status later in life because she lacked it as a younger woman.

The novel has mentioned the yellow Formica table multiple times, notably in the scene where Krystle overhears Eunice announcing Genie’s HIV-positive status in the kitchen, but its exact significance hasn’t been clear.  The revelation that Mbongeni wouldn’t let Dingani or Eunice sit at the yellow Formica table, which later becomes a gathering place for Dingani’s family, suggests that the Masukus’ status-consciousness, selfishness, and “brittleness” may derive in part from Dingani and Eunice’s earlier experiences of abuse, humiliation, and cruelty within the family.

Lobengula Street is a street in Bulawayo, the second-largest city in Zimbabwe, where the novel’s author Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu was born. Dingani’s aspiration to live in the suburbs one day illustrates one reason why the nation continues to have problems with oppression and corruption even after independence: some oppressed people see their high-status oppressors and want the opportunity to be high-status themselves, rather than wanting to make society more equal. Dingani’s suburban dream also makes clear that not all individual aspirations are morally good or even morally neutral.

“Mr. Coetzee” likely refers to Emil Coetzee, the pre-independence spymaster who married Kuki, fathered Vida’s first love, persecuted Beatrice politically, hunted Golide, and ordered Mordechai to torture Minenhle. Eunice’s unexpected connection to Emil Coetzee emphasizes yet again that history and national identity links the novel’s characters together despite their disparate backgrounds and their enmities. 

Eunice knows where Emil Coetzee, a figure involved in “matters of great national importance,” is going to be because she overheard her female employer (whom she calls, formally, “Madam”) gossiping about it on the phone. With this detail, the novel affirms yet again the interpenetration of the political sphere and the private or domestic sphere, especially under conditions of oppression.

The male voice, which presumably belongs to Madam/Agnes’s husband, threatens revenge if her gossip harms his political career. This threat illustrates another way that the political and private spheres intersect: people can take out their frustrations about political phenomena on their family members.

The word “domestic” describes things relating to home life, but it can also be used to describe things related to or within a particular country (e.g., domestic affairs, domestic politics). When Emil tells Eunice that his job doesn’t involve “those kind of ‘domestic affairs,’” he’s playing on the multiple meanings of “domestic.” He doesn’t yet realize that a situation can be domestic in both senses: deeply relevant to Eunice’s home life and yet also important to the country’s internal affairs. When Eunice tells Emil that Mbongeni has been “plotting to overthrow the government,” readers realize that after she develops dementia, she keeps returning to the moment when she informed on her abusive husband to oppressive government powers. 

The word “reward” on Eunice’s newspaper clipping suggests that Eunice informed on her abusive husband to gain money as well as to rid herself of him. “Hell hath no fury” is a shortened version of the saying “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” which paraphrases lines from English playwright William Congreve’s 1697 tragedy The Mourning Bride, about a romance that ends in murder and suicide. By quoting this saying, Emil asserts that he knows Eunice must have private, personal motivations other than money for informing on her husband.

African nationalism was a political movement that arose in the middle of the 19th century in resistance to European colonialism; African nationalists believed that Africa shouldn’t be controlled by foreign colonial powers but should contain independent countries that controlled their own internal politics. That Mbongeni was imprisoned for allegedly holding these political beliefs highlights the extreme, racist political oppression under which indigenous Africans lived in pre-independence Zimbabwe. Dingani’s decision to “never disappoint” Eunice clearly derives from his worry that she’ll treat him as she treated Mbongeni, who did disappoint her; in other words, Dingani’s relationship to his mother is based on fear. Meanwhile, Eunice’s assertion that they should become “respectable” likely derives from her desire to put her previous low-status jobs behind her, while her desire to be apolitical hints that she feels some guilt for informing on Mbongeni despite his abuse of her and Dingani.

In a sense, Eunice inspires Dingani to chase dreams—but it’s her dream that he become a doctor, not his. Additionally, he’s inspired by fear of what will happen if he “disappoint[s]” her, not by his own passion. Moreover, while Eunice gives the Masuku family a group identity, the identity of being “somebod[ies],” it’s an identity based on an exclusionary idea that lower-status people are nobodies. Thus, Eunice and Dingani’s backstory makes very clear that aspirations and group identities can be destructive or unethical.

Stanley Hall is a venue in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, built in the 1930s and declared a national monument in 2017. The inability of Dingani’s band to decide on its name reflects Dingani’s deeper uncertainty about who he is as an individual separate from his frightening, controlling mother, Eunice. By contrast, Thandi’s belief that Dingani knows the answer to her question makes him feel “certainty and assuredness.” This little scene indicates that Dingani found Thandi initially attractive because she made him feel more decisive, more in control, and (maybe) more masculine.

Eunice’s judgment that Thandi knows “how to take care of disappointments” draws a parallel between Eunice’s decision to inform on her abusive husband and support herself and Thandi’s decision to leave baby Marcus with her parents for years so she and Dingani can pursue their careers internationally. Yet while Eunice’s husband was physically and psychologically abusive, the baby did nothing wrong—he simply required more care than it was easy or convenient for two young professionals to give. By comparing her blameless grandson to her abusive husband, Eunice reveals a disturbing, loveless pragmatism in her attitude toward her descendants.

The novel claims it would be “unfair” to believe that Thandi and Dingani returned to Zimbabwe for selfish economic reasons rather than to secure Marcus’s safety—yet the very mention of the possibility is a subtle, ironic suggestion that it may be true. Emil Coetzee’s suicide on the eve of independence symbolizes that the end of colonialism beneficially destroyed the country’s old, white-supremacist social hierarchy, which Coetzee enforced. Yet the revelation that the Masukus moved into Coetzee’s house after his suicide—and the mention that they brought Mbongeni’s yellow Formica table with them—hints that a new economic hierarchy still based on a history of violence, not widespread equality, is taking the old racial hierarchy’s place.

Ironically, Dingani worries about his lack of political involvement because he thinks it makes him less masculine, not because he thinks it’s socially irresponsible. Dingani’s preoccupation with political involvement as a sign of “being a man” again shows how personal concerns such as one’s gender performance can heavily influence whether and how one engages in public spheres like politics.

Dingani’s initial praise of Golide seems sincere: he recognizes and appreciates that Golide’s goal, inspiring others to “fly,” is a legitimate political project. Once he realizes he’s impressed his friends, he transitions from voicing his own tentative opinions to gossip about Golide’s appearance that proves they know one another. This transition indicates that what other people think about Dingani still motivates him more than what he thinks himself.

When Dingani is arrested, he immediately wonders which of his friends informed on him, indicating how, in a politically oppressive society, people suspect upon their arrests that someone personally close to them has betrayed them. In this dangerous situation, Dingani returns mentally to a scene of childhood trauma and echoes his mother’s accusation about his father—that Golide wants “to overthrow the government.” In response, The Man Himself, like Eunice, declares that Dingani is not disappointing—which makes Dingani safe, at least temporarily. Eunice informed to Emil Coetzee, while Dingani informs to The Man Himself, a parallel that illustrates once again how similarly the oppressive colonial and postcolonial governments operate.  

This passage clarifies Dingani’s motive for adopting Genie: suppressed guilt at having contributed to her parents’ deaths. Given that Dingani accepted blame from Marcus for Genie’s failing health in their phone call about her coma, it seems likely that Dingani believes she contracted HIV during or due to the massacre. Dingani hallucinates the floral dress Eunice wore to inform on his father when he sees the checks from The Man Himself, indicating that he is passing subconscious negative judgment not only his own behavior but on Eunice’s. Nevertheless, he ultimately spends the blood money he intended to give to Genie on the Masukus’ lifestyle, suggesting that he still tends to be more interested in maintaining his high-status, comfortable life than in suffering to do the right thing.