Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Copper Sun, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Slavery, Dehumanization, and Resistance
Horror vs. Beauty
Friendship
Memory and Storytelling
Gender, Race, and Power
Summary
Analysis
The next morning, Amari sees with horror that all the homes in her village are burned. Bodies lie everywhere. Amari knows that the strangers probably don’t know their burial customs, but the Ashanti are supposed to be the brothers of Amari’s people. She can’t figure out why the Ashanti would do this or who these strangers are. The other survivors are all young and healthy people. Esi huddles with her husband. Amari remembers how just yesterday, Esi announced that she’s pregnant with her first baby. Finally, Amari notices Besa at the other end of the group. His eyes are glazed, and she spots his crushed drum.
It’s telling that Amari gives the white men the benefit of the doubt when she reasons that the strangers probably don’t know their burial customs. In essence, she’s telling herself that they’re leaving the bodies because they don’t know what to do, not because they don’t care about their victims. This mindset speaks again to Amari’s ability to see goodness and beauty anywhere, an outlook that the cruelty of the Ashanti and the white men will test.
Themes
One of the strangers comes over and shouts in a strange language for the captives to get up. Amari tries to ask an Ashanti what’s happening, but someone whips her across the back. One stranger pulls out iron neck shackles that will link the prisoners to each other, six to a group. Amari wouldn’t even use such a thing on animals. Amari is shackled in behind Tirza. Besa is at the front of his group, and he won’t look at Amari. For days, the Ashanti and the pale strangers whip their captives as they slowly march along the big river. One day, Amari hears a captive asking an Ashanti guard why he’s doing this. The Ashanti says that their tribes have been at war and that he’ll be rewarded.
Amari and her neighbors believed that since they and the Ashanti are friends, they could trust the Ashanti to not betray them. Now, they have to reevaluate this belief in light of what the Ashanti are doing—purely for economic gain, no less. The shackles that are too dehumanizing even for animals begin to show Amari what’s to come: horrors that will make her feel like an animal, if not less than an animal. The experience of being chained and constantly whipped discourages Amari and her friends from talking, thereby denying them the ability to even make sense of what’s happening.
Themes
The captives are shackled to one another at all times and have to sleep and relieve themselves while shackled. Amari notices after a few days that Tirza seems to give up. Tirza whispers one night that she’d rather die than be enslaved, and the next morning, she’s dead. Their captors curse, unshackle her body, and toss it to the side of the road. One spits on it for good measure. Amari is sad when she realizes that her group moves faster and more easily without Tirza.
Amari’s realization about Tirza’s death making things easier suggests that she’s beginning to shift her thinking to focus on survival rather than community and caring for the group. This is one of the other horrors of slavery that the novel highlights—if enslaved people want to survive, they must sometimes think and act selfishly.
Themes
