Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Darius the Great Is Not Okay, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Friendship
Family
Persian Identity and Culture
Mental Health, Depression, and Connection
Bullying
Summary
Analysis
It’s bad enough to have to wake up at three in the morning, but Darius’s morning gets even worse when he discovers a massive zit between his eyebrows. After popping it, Darius packs the messenger bag from Dad. It has the Kellner & Newton logo on it, and it doesn’t fit as much as Darius wants it to—and Dad is not in a good mood at this time of the morning, especially when he sees Darius hasn’t packed his carryon. Darius chooses to take The Lord of the Rings to read, and he also packs a tin of fruity, floral tea from Rose City Teas that he bought for Mamou. Hopefully she likes it; it’s hard to buy gifts for someone you’ve never met.
It adds insult to injury when Darius not only can’t take his broken backpack to Iran, but he has to use one of Dad’s messenger bags. Since it has Dad’s name on it, it signifies that Darius is Dad’s son—and right now, Darius doesn’t feel much like Dad’s son, or like he even wants to be Dad’s son. By packing the special tea for Mamou, Darius hopes to be able to connect with her over something he loves. But this, of course, isn’t guaranteed, given that Darius doesn’t know his grandparents well.
Themes
Darius is a little bit grateful for the messenger bag at the airport, as he can easily carry both it and Laleh, who’s still mostly asleep. He holds onto her until the lady in front of them gets through security and then sets her down gently so she can go through the scanner. Even though Darius doesn’t have any liquids in his messenger bag, he’s still “randomly selected” for enhanced screening. He tells the security officer that his family is headed to Yazd, Iran to see his grandfather, who has a brain tumor. The security guard wishes Darius a good trip—and says he didn’t realize “your people did the dot thing too,” pointing to his own forehead. Darius is mortified and explains it’s just a zit..
Given the messenger bag’s association with Dad, it’s a positive sign that Darius starts to think the bag isn’t so bad here—it offers some hope that Dad and Darius will be able to repair their relationship on this trip. However, this positive aside, Darius still finds that traveling by plane while being Middle Eastern is no simple task: it means he’s liable to experience bigotry and racial profiling, as he does here when the security seems to mistake Darius’s acne for a bindi (a decorative, colored dot worn on the center of the forehead by Hindis, Buddhists, and other religious groups from the Indian subcontinent. Acne, for that matter, affects teenagers everywhere, regardless of ethnicity. The security guard’s bigotry, then, seems to stem from his ignorance.
Themes
