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Book 2, Part 1: Epistemology
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
The Survivors. Beatrice wonders whether her brain is failing her again: the place she’s approaching looks like the Beauford Farm and Estate she remembers, yet horribly run-down and deserted. She asks Kuki, who is driving them, when they’ll reach the farm. Then she sees the sunflower field and yells, “Home!”
Despite her cognitive decline, Beatrice recognizes that the sunflower field marks her home—a detail highlighting the sunflowers’ significance as a symbol of shared memories and histories that continue unbroken through the colonial and postcolonial periods.
Themes
Valentine hoped to visit the farm with just a few people, but now he’s driving Vida and Jestina as well as leading four other cars, carrying Beatrice and Kuki, the Masukus, Minenhle and Mordechai, and Bhekithemba. They park outside a dilapidated house. A man emerges and yells that they’re on private property: “we” purchased it from Beatrice. When Valentine tries to calm the man, the man asks why they brought a white person. Valentine realizes the man is talking about Vida. He’s trying to explain that Vida’s not white when the man recognizes “Jesus.” Vida recognizes the man as Goliath.
Coming near the end of the novel, this convergence of many disparate characters, major and minor, on the Beauford Farm and Estate affirms Genie’s aspirational influence on the people she knew. The novel is also asserting, yet again, that disparate people who share a country and a history can be connected in sundry, unexpected ways—as, for example, when Goliath, Vida’s former street acquaintance, is revealed to have bought the farm from Beatrice.
Themes
Goliath is happy to see Vida. He explains that he and The Survivors had decided they could no longer live in the city. He claims that whereas street people like Vida and the Survivors possess “a code of ethics,” the new people flooding the streets have none, which prompted The Survivors to leave. Genie’s stories about the beautiful sunflower fields on the farm had so moved Goliath that he decided to buy it for The Survivors. When they arrived, they found veterans squatting there—whom Goliath blames for the property’s dilapidated condition.
When orphan gangs like Goliath’s first appeared on the streets, Vida thought they conspicuously lacked a code of ethics, unlike previous street dwellers. Now Goliath in turn believes newer street dwellers are falling below The Survivors’ moral standards—a funny turn of events illustrating that while culture does change over time in history, older generations always think new generations have lower moral standards. As the sunflowers symbolize historical connections among disparate characters, it makes sense that they would unexpectedly draw The Survivors into this convergence of the novel’s characters. Genie’s stories of beautiful flowers inspired Goliath to choose the farm as The Survivors’ sanctuary, illustrating both the power of beauty and the way Genie has inspired others to chase their dreams.
Themes
The other visitors exit their cars. Goliath says Beatrice will testify to the legitimacy of the Survivors’ ownership—though everyone sees that she has suffered too much cognitive decline to testify to anything. When more people come out of the house, Goliath introduces them as the other Survivors. He introduces a woman with a baby as his wife, whom Vida knows as the girl he tried to dissuade from getting into a businessman’s car when she was 11.
When Vida recognizes Goliath’s adult wife as the young homeless girl he tried to save from sexual abuse years ago, it calls attention yet again both to unexpected connections among disparate characters and to the interpenetration of private sexuality and large-scale political issues like homelessness.
Themes
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Goliath asks Vida: “Speaking of wives, where is Genie?” Vida explains that they had heard Genie’s body was found on the farm. Shocked, Goliath says that while the veterans often find bones in the fields, they claimed a “fresh” corpse had appeared among the sunflowers recently. When he asks whether the corpse is Genie, Vida says they’ll have to find out.
Like Bhekithemba did earlier, Goliath mistakenly assumes Genie is Vida’s wife, betraying conventional thinking about sex and relationships but also testifying to Genie and Vida’s obvious love for each other. It seems Genie’s body appeared in the sunflower field; by linking her death to her childhood play in the sunflowers, where she first observed natural cycles of death and rebirth, the novel represents her early death as natural but also hints that she will be, in some sense, reborn.
Themes
Goliath leads the visitors toward the huts the veterans have erected. They pass empty, derelict houses, and Jestina asks where the residents went. Goliath’s wife suggests HIV/AIDS ravaged the former farm community—the veterans have uncovered a lot of bodies. This suggestion confirms what Jestina has always suspected: that the sojas—who sexually assaulted her and Mrs. Hadebe before forcing her to serve Mr. and Mrs. Hadebe poisoned tea—had infected some of their victims with HIV. The thought now torments Jestina that perhaps the sojas assaulted 9-year-old Genie too, and Genie never told anyone.
If soldiers did rape Genie and infect her with HIV during the massacre, it explains several mysteries in the novel, e.g. why Dingani, who bears responsibility for the massacre, believes Genie’s HIV is his fault and why Genie dreamed of the massacre and of a boy playing soldier yelling that he’d killed her before she fell into a coma. This explanation for Genie’s HIV would also reinforce one of the novel’s ongoing themes, namely, that oppressive governments interfere with and harm their citizens in personal, obtrusive, and often sexually violent ways. Additionally, it would emphasize that the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa is a historical phenomenon affected by colonial and postcolonial politics, as well as a public health issue.
Themes
The visitors find the veterans, who ask whether they’ve come because of the body. When Vida says they have, the veterans usher them to a “cold-storage unit” full of skeletons—which they have identified as war deaths or HIV/AIDs deaths according to whether the corpses had coins in their clothes (people in the 1990s were less likely to die with money on them). Valentine praises the veterans’ work, and the veterans explain that while it’s taken them a lot of effort, they felt the bodies deserved to be handled respectfully.
The veterans are largely able to distinguish between people killed during the war (1964–1979) and people who died afterwards during the HIV/AIDS epidemic (which began in the 1980s) by whether their bodies have money on them, showing how large-scale economic, political, and historical forces shape even something as intimate as how an individual dies.
Themes
The veterans lead the visitors deeper into the cold-storage unit, where they see Genie’s body. The veterans claim they immediately recognized her as Golide Gumede’s child. They don’t know when she arrived at the farm, but she must have been alive when she did, because she dug her feet into the soil of the sunflower field before she died. Jestina says they all ought to be glad Genie “chose her own ending.”
Genie’s mysterious reappearance far from the hospital reminds readers that she identifies as a “flying creature”—a free person with individual aspirations—while her decision to dig her feet into the soil of the sunflower fields indicates her “rootedness” in interpersonal relationships and in history. Jestina’s realization that Genie “chose her own ending” recalls how, after the massacre, Genie told Jestina she wanted to choose her own endings from then on. This call-back underscores that Genie has achieved in death an individual moral triumph over oppressive interpersonal and political forces—much as Golide and Elizabeth triumphed by “flying away” as they had desired, despite their apparent deaths in the 1987 massacre.
Themes
Kuki starts babbling denials and saying that Genie was her friend. Kuki is confused by her own reaction and wonders why she wants people to believe that she and Genie were friends. Kuki knows it was Beatrice, not her, who was friends with Genie—Kuki never even really got Beatrice and Genie’s relationship.
Kuki’s unexpected emotional reaction to seeing Genie’s corpse demonstrates the influence Genie has even over people who don’t know her well. In particular, Kuki’s desire that people believe she and Genie were friends suggests that Genie’s death makes Kuki subconsciously regret her own unacknowledged racism and wish she had pursued a friendship with Genie despite the racism she imbibed in the colonial past, the way Beatrice did.
Themes
The visitors take Genie’s body and carefully place it in one of their cars. Marcus surveys the compound, wonders what life he would have had if he’d stayed, and decides it “wouldn’t have been much of a life.” He wonders what home is, remembers Genie’s bloody handprint in the atlas she sent him, and has an epiphany: he’s been trying to keep a grip on something that Genie has long since released.
For much of Marcus’s life, he has assumed that everything would have been better if he had stayed on the farm with Genie rather than leaving with his parents. Genie’s death and the desolate farm force him to acknowledge that due to large-scale political violence, he might have died if he had stayed, and even if he had survived, it “wouldn’t have been much of a life”—he would likely have died young of AIDS. He consciously realizes, for the first time, that the handprint in the atlas Genie sent him was made of dried blood: proof that Genie’s decision to let him go was not only selflessly loving but potentially lifesaving for him. This makes him see the wisdom of Genie’s non-possessive attitude toward love for the first time.
Themes
A boy approaches Marcus and gives him a photo, which the boy says he discovered in a ceiling. The photo shows Marcus and Genie, looking joyful, playing inside the dilapidated car. Full of emotion, Marcus says that he and Genie used to say that if suspicious visitors approached, they would hide in the ceiling with their loved ones and most precious possessions. Jestina, collecting the photo from him, remembers Genie getting her suitcase from the ceiling the morning they fled the farm. She tells him they’ll “always remember” yet “never truly know what happened here.”
Since Genie used to say that she would hide loved ones and precious things inside the ceiling, the photo of her and Marcus in the ceiling proves that her decision to let him go doesn’t negate her love for him or her desire to keep him safe—her decision simply shows the selflessness of her love. Jestina’s claim that they’ll “remember” but not “know” what happened at the farm signifies that history influences individuals’ present lives tremendously while still remaining mysterious and inaccessible—much as Genie’s unfulfilled desire to know more about Vida’s mysterious grandmother Blue did.
Themes
Genie. As “the survivors” watch, Genie soars upward with silver wings—but her heart, which will turn into “the most precious and beautiful something,” remains behind. When she flies with witnesses below, she feels “love as the release of a promise.”
Genie flies away while her loved ones watch, just as her parents flew away while she watched. Knowing her parents could fly contributed to Genie’s unbreakable spirit; as such, this scene suggests that the legacy Genie leaves behind for her loved ones—symbolized by “the most precious and beautiful something” into which her heart transforms—is the same legacy her parents left behind for her, an inspirational legacy of indomitable individual integrity in the face of political oppression and violence. Genie feels love not as the keeping of a promise but as “the release of a promise”—which emphasizes yet again that people who love selflessly don’t try to possess their loved ones but rather to “release” them from obligation and set them free.
Themes
Valentine. Valentine is standing in a gem-toned room with The Man Himself, who is failing to knot his tie. The room is the same as it was when Emil Coetzee worked in it—including the sorts of work done in it—except that the stationery reads The Organization instead of The Organization of Domestic Affairs.
Valentine and The Man Himself are using Emil Coetzee’s old workspace, and the name of the post-independence government’s domestic surveillance organization is almost identical to the old, white-dominated government’s. These details symbolize similarities between the old and new governments’ corruption and oppressiveness.
Themes
The Man Himself mentions that he usually wears clip-on ties but decided to wear a real one for the funeral. Then he congratulates Valentine for succeeding at what Genie asked of him. When Valentine suggests he doesn’t know what The Man means, The Man speculates that Valentine loved Genie, tells him he’s likely to suffer dire consequences, and claims that his efforts have come to nothing, since everyone thinks he and the others are “a group of crazy people intent on burying an empty box.”
If The Man Himself is correct that Valentine helped Genie die the way she wanted, it means that Genie inspired Valentine—who thinks of himself as an unemotional, meticulous pragmatist focused on doing good work for the government—to thwart the Masukus’ attempts to find her and to enable her to fly, like Golide and Elizabeth did, in front of her loved ones. Though The Man Himself says Genie’s mourners seem like “a group of crazy people,” the way he threatens Valentine suggests that Genie’s positive charisma makes him feel insecure.
Themes
When The Man Himself asks Valentine whether it was “worth” the effort, Valentine says it was. Surprised, The Man Himself asks again whether Valentine did it for love. Valentine says he did, though not in the way The Man means. He recalls reading in the paper about Golide, an albino African man, building an airplane—and feeling that “suddenly all things were possible.” He supposes love is the word to describe the feelings of possibility and belief the story inspired in him.
The Man Himself seems to believe that Valentine felt a possessive, sexual love for Genie; in fact, Valentine loves Genie largely for Golide’s sake, because Golide was an inspirational figure who made Valentine feel “all things were possible”—that he could aspire to anything. The article Valentine read was likely the one The Man Himself ordered Bhekithemba to write, which shows yet again that the novel’s seemingly disparate characters are in fact tightly linked by their shared historical context.
Themes
When The Man Himself ridicules Valentine for thinking Genie might love him back, Valentine asks why The Man did “it.” The Man, wrongfooted, asks what Valentine’s talking about. Valentine asks whether it was because “he was capable of flight.” The Man says he did it as an exercise of power, because he was capable of it—and then that he did it because, given power’s fragility, “a man like me does not let a man like Golide Gumede build an airplane.”
The Man Himself mistakenly assumes Valentine’s love for Genie is romantic and so tries to hurt him by calling him undesirable. Yet Valentine is far more focused on “it,” the implied referent being the 1987 massacre. It turns out that The Man Himself engineered the massacre because he came to paranoid conclusions about Golide’s desire to fly, e.g., that Golide would attack the government in an airplane or that Golide’s capability for flight would gain him a political following that could challenge The Man Himself’s power. This paranoid interpretation of Golide’s actions suggests that oppressive political leaders like The Man Himself are fundamentally frightened and insecure in their own power—and, as such, can’t tolerate the free actions and individual aspirations of others. This in turn explains oppressive government’s desire to intrude upon, control, and assault very private areas of citizens’ lives, such as their sexuality.
Themes
Valentine thanks The Man Himself for his honesty and replies with honesty of his own: he aided Genie in her plan because her life “mattered” and “she deserved to choose her own ending.” He takes a “precious and beautiful something” from his pocket and explains that each such “something” was once the heart of one of Golide’s believers. Seventeen died in 1987; Genie makes eighteen. He speculates that The Man has two more and asks what The Man inflicted on Golide and Elizabeth.
By telling The Man Himself that Genie’s life “mattered” and “she deserved to choose,” Valentine is asserting the value of individuals and their personal autonomy in the face of a corrupt, oppressive leader who treats citizens like their lives mean nothing. When he reveals that all Golide’s followers’ hearts turn into a “precious and beautiful something,” it symbolically suggests that when an individual like Golide inspires others, those others go on to inspire people in turn, creating a positive ripple effect in larger groups of people. Valentine’s final question suggests that—despite Genie’s vision of her parents flying away from the site of the massacre—Valentine believes The Man Himself may have had Golide and Elizabeth taken somewhere and tortured before having them executed.
Themes
When The Man Himself refuses to answer, Valentine tells him that The Survivors, who own the Beauford Farm and Estate, will determine what happens to the “somethings” there. The Man, exasperated, says that Valentine would win too if the Organization appropriated the land and that he simply doesn’t comprehend Valentine. Valentine retorts that he comprehends The Man “perfectly.” He exits the room, abandoning The Man in the “seat of power.”
Valentine understands The Man Himself perfectly, while the Man Himself doesn’t understand Valentine at all, and The Man Himself ends up alone with his power—a conclusion suggesting that oppressive leaders are fundamentally lonely, cut off from understanding others due to their selfishness and paranoia and unable to participate in positive group belonging.
Themes
The Real Revolutionaries. A hearse winds through bustling streets, encountering various hawkers and a wedding party. The undertaker driving the hearse explains that in the 1960s, undertakers were only allowed to work with corpses of their own race, so he only handled Colored corpses. He did all the work himself and attended all the funerals. During the war, business picked up, and he worked with some corpses of Black African people and poor white people. He didn’t have time to do everything himself, but he still attended every funeral. By around 1985, though, he had to hire an assistant and could no longer attend any funerals because of all the HIV/AIDS deaths.
The undertaker’s monologue about funerals underscores, yet again, how even something as personal and private as individuals’ deaths necessarily intersects with historical and political group phenomena like segregation, racist social hierarchies, wars, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
Themes
The undertaker notes that while the country is now suffering from mass unemployment and poverty, death has made him rich. While it benefits him, he thinks that “there is such a thing as too much death.” He gestures out the window and says that street crowds used to pause and remove their hats when hearses drove past—but no more.
The undertaker’s claim that “there is such a thing as too much death” asserts that the political phenomena involved in the war and the HIV/AIDS pandemic—e.g., the aftermath of colonialism and its racialized economic exploitation, insufficient foreign aid to African countries, and government corruption—are objectively wrong because they have killed many individuals. Yet this is not just a matter of individual, subjective opinion, and the undertaker cannot believe that high death rates are a good thing even though they have enriched him individually.
Themes
Vida looks where the undertaker has gestured and sees a man, shabbily dressed, who has removed his hat to the hearse. The man has a newspaper tucked lovingly under his arm; Vida knows he’s already done all the puzzles. Vida asks the undertaker to stop the hearse, gets out, runs to the man, and greets him: “David.” David shows Vida a headline—“IMOGEN ZULA NYONI FLIES AWAY”—and offers his condolences. This is the first time Vida has ever heard David speak.
The unexpected appearance of Vida’s old acquaintance from the streets, David, emphasizes yet again the unlikely connections disparate characters are always making due to their shared geographical, cultural, and historic context. David’s decision to speak to Vida for the first time during Genie’s funeral procession, meanwhile, shows Genie continuing to affect and positively inspire others even after death.
Themes
David walks Vida back to the hearse and gets in with him. Vida opens Genie’s coffin and takes out her suitcase, containing Penelope, Specs, Blue’s slippers, and her “childhood clothes,” because while it might be brave to let go of Genie, it’s also brave to “not let[] Genie go entirely.”
Various events in the novel—particularly Genie’s relationships with Marcus and Vida—have suggested that it is selfish and destructive to hold onto loved ones too tightly. People should be willing to selflessly let their loved ones go if that’s what is best for their loved ones. Yet Vida’s conclusion that it’s brave to “not let[] Genie go entirely” indicates that loving people selflessly and non-possessively doesn’t require forgetting them or refusing to grieve their loss.
Themes
While Genie’s grave is filled with dirt, Marcus watches and wonders whether belonging is a feeling, a state, or a way of behaving—whether he ever belonged to Genie, and whether she “ever belonged to them.” He looks at Dingani, Thandi, Krystle, and Eunice, all tired, grief-stricken, and quiet—as they have appeared since Dingani’s confession about 1987. Then he looks at Esme, who is holding his hand. He feels that he “belongs” with this family.
The word “belong” has multiple meanings. It can denote ownership. In this sense, Genie never belonged to the Masukus—they never owned her, despite what their occasionally selfish, possessive behavior toward her implied. Yet “belonging” can also denote membership in a group. In this sense, Marcus and Genie may have belonged together when they were childhood friends—and now that Marcus has finally given up his romanticized false belief that his life would have been perfect if he’d stayed on the farm with Genie, he realizes that he now “belongs” (in the sense of true membership) to his family and with his wife.
Themes
When Marcus leaves the cemetery, he finds he doesn’t want to go back to his dilapidated family home. He abruptly feels that he and his family have to witness a particular place. He moves in that direction. To his surprise, all the mourners follow him: Minenhle, Mordechai, Jestina, Valentine, Bhekithemba, Kuki, Beatrice, Dr. Mambo, The Survivors, the veterans, Stefanos, Matilda, David, the undertaker (whose name is Mr. Mendelsohn), and Vida.
The sudden fusion of Genie’s disparate mourners into a group moving as one shows that Genie’s charismatic example not only inspires the people she knows individually but also, in some contexts, creates in them a sense of group identity and belonging.
Themes
As dawn approaches, the funeral party comes to the Zambezi. A tourist with a camera, observing them with the excited expectation that they’ll do something photo-worthy, suddenly calls Krystle’s name. With astonishment, she recognizes Xander Dangerfield and asks why he’s there. He says he wanted to see “it,” pulls out Krystle’s postcard from Genie, and shows her the inscription about “swimming elephants.” Krystle asks how Genie possibly knew. At Xander’s confusion, she waves her own astonishment away and brings him back with her to the funeral party.
Yet again, at the novel’s end, a seemingly minor character reappears and connects with another. This time, it’s Xander Dangerfield, unexpectedly inspired to travel from the U.S. to Africa by Genie’s description of elephants swimming across the Zambezi. When Krystle asks how Genie knew, it’s not clear whether she means how Genie knew that her funeral party would come to the river or how she knew that the postcard would connect Krystle with a potential romantic interest, romantic fulfillment being something to which Krystle has always aspired. In either case, it seems that Genie was selflessly working to help her loved ones even as she planned her own death.
Themes
Suddenly, elephants appear. The male elephant leading the others trumpets. The group pauses on the bank of the river. Then the leader dives in. Everyone catches their breath: “You understand that in the grander scheme of things you are but a speck . . . a tiny speck . . . and that that is enough . . . There is freedom . . . beauty even, in that kind of knowledge […] It is the kind of knowledge that allows you to fly.” An airplane with silver wings passes over the scene.
The long quotation about being a “speck,” which occurs in the novel’s third-person narration here, echoes the language the novel used to describe Golide’s initial reaction to the elephants before shooting down the passenger plane, as well as the language teenage Genie used to describe the elephants to Marcus right before he kissed her. Through the overt repetition of this language at important points, the novel is insisting that when individuals realize their human limitations (they are “a tiny speck”), they paradoxically realize their own value (“that is enough”), and this realization enables them to achieve their aspirations (“allows you to fly”). The appearance of silver wings after this assertion reiterates, at the novel’s end, the centrality of dreams and aspiration to individual experiences and group belonging.
Themes
