Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Outcasts United, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Refugees, Discrimination, and Resilience
Community and Teamwork vs. Division
Leadership and Respect
Discipline, Dedication, and Success
Summary
Analysis
Luma knows nothing of Clarkston or the refugees when she moves to nearby Decatur, only a few miles away. She gets a job waiting tables before finding a job at the Decatur-DeKalb YMCA, coaching the fourteen-and-under girls’ soccer team. She coaches following the example set for her by Coach Brown, running very demanding practices.
As Luma transitions to coaching, she takes up Coach Brown’s prerogatives: demanding discipline and dedication from the players, just as Coach Brown demanded of her. Though Luma resented Brown’s strict rules while playing on her team, she has clearly come to appreciate her methods as a coach herself.
Themes
Luma’s approach isn’t universally well-received. She’s very tough and expects the girls to take responsibility for how they play and behave at practices. During her first season, Luma’s team loses every game. But over time, the dedicated players improve, and those who aren’t dedicated leave. In her third season, the team goes undefeated and wins their year-end tournament.
Luma begins to understand that just as she didn’t always like Coach Brown, she doesn’t need to be universally liked by the girls on the team. Her methods ultimately prove successful anyway, as the discipline and dedication she demands ends up allowing the girls to succeed.
Themes
Luma focuses on the team, but she is also homesick, and she misses her family. In 2002, Munawar, the only family member who still speaks to her, dies. As Luma grieves, she drives around the greater Atlanta area and finds a small Middle Eastern market called Talars, which sells some of her favorite foods from home. She is surprised to find a community of people in African and Middle Eastern dress at the store, but she doesn’t give much thought to it.
Although Luma eventually works to counteract some of the divisions within the Clarkston community, St. John implicitly acknowledges the comfort in finding one’s own community in a foreign place. The only reason Luma is introduced to Clarkston is because she finds a Middle Eastern market that reminds her of Jordan.
Themes
Luma decides to start her own business: a café that sells ice cream and sandwiches. She cobbles together a set of investors from the contacts she’d made, and opens the café, called Ashton’s. Running the café is tough—she puts in sixteen-hour days, and the café doesn’t pull in enough customers to make money. She is also still coaching the girls’ team in the evenings and is exhausted.
Just as Luma expects discipline and dedication from her players, she is disciplined and dedicated in her own endeavors: both in coaching the girls’ soccer team, and in keeping Ashton’s afloat in order to support herself.
Themes
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One day, when visiting Talars, Luma notices a group of boys playing soccer in a nearby parking lot. She is amazed that they seem to come from many different backgrounds and watches them play. On her next trip to Talars, she brings a new soccer ball and asks to join in. They are wary but allow her to join. She becomes pleasantly lost in the game, noting that it reminds her of what she misses about her own community, and how much she still feels “like such an outsider.”
Finding a community that reminds her of home is what actually leads Luma to the young soccer-playing refugees in Clarkston. But at the same time, she quickly realizes how soccer represents a unifying community for the boys and allows them all (including her) to find something familiar in a country that is so different from their homes.
Themes
Over the next few months, Luma continues to stop by Talars and join in on the soccer games. She gradually gets to know the boys, who are eager to connect with her. Luma understands “the loneliness of being uprooted.” She also learns that pickup soccer is all that they can afford—even teams at local schools cost too much. This fact prompts Luma to decide to begin a free soccer program for young refugees, feeling a “nagging urge to do something.”
Luma recognizes the boys’ need for this community, particularly because they, too, feel like outsiders in Clarkston. Luma’s decision to create the Fugees program stems not only from her desire to lead a soccer team, but to lead these boys to a sense of belonging, and something that can bring them a sense of success in their lives after so much hardship.
Themes
Luma floats the idea for the program to a mother of one of the players on the girls’ team, who is on the board of the YMCA. The Y agrees to commit money to rent the field at the community center in Clarkston and to buy equipment. Then, with the help of friends, she creates flyers announcing tryouts in English, Vietnamese, Arabic, and French. She posts them in apartment complexes in Clarkston, unsure if anyone will show up.
From the beginning, Luma understands the necessity of combatting some of the divisions that would be present on her team—particularly that of language. This is why she makes flyers in many different languages: to invite refugees of all backgrounds. But on the field, she encourages them to speak English so that they can all communicate with one another.
Themes
