The City We Became suggests that abuse can make victims stronger—if they direct the anger at the abuse they’ve suffered toward the right people: their abusers. One major character, Bronca, suffered abusive sexual harassment from adult men in her neighborhood when she was 11. One man, rumored to be a former police officer fired for his conduct toward an “underaged witness,” ambushed her while she was wearing steel-toed boots—at which point she kicked his knee, putting him in the hospital. By standing up to her abuser, Bronca gained strength: throughout the novel, she uses her steel-toed boots as a potent symbol of her power and desire for justice. By contrast, some characters in the novel who suffer abuse never direct their anger at their abusers, and so remain mired in problematic behaviors. Another major character, Aislyn, suffers from her sexist, racist father Matthew’s abuse: he monitors how much she drives, may have installed a GPS tracker in her car, and constantly instills fear in her of people outside of their family’s home borough, Staten Island—he especially teaches Aislyn to fear non-white men. Yet Aislyn never allows herself to get consciously angry at her father. Instead, accepting his abuse and mimicking his racism, she rejects the help of the other city avatars—all of whom are non-white—and becomes an ally of the destructive Woman in White, an extradimensional alien who appears to Aislyn as a white woman to manipulate her prejudices. Thus the novel illustrates how people who suffer abuse can develop a keen sense of justice—or they can come to perpetuate abuse themselves. It all depends on whether they can accurately identify who is abusing them and recognize the injustice of the abuse they have suffered.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Abuse ThemeTracker
Abuse Quotes in The City We Became
He’s been talking like this since he showed up—places that never were, things that can’t be, omens and portents. I figure it’s bullshit because he’s telling it to me, a kid whose own mama kicked him out and prays for him to die every day and probably hates me. God hates me. And I fucking hate God back, so why would he choose me for anything? But that’s really why I start paying attention: because of God. I don’t have to believe in something for it to fuck up my life.
“Just getting sick of these immigrants,” he says. He’s always careful to use acceptable words when he’s on the job, rather than the words he says at home. That’s how cops mess up, he has explained to her. They don’t know how to keep home words at home and work words at work.
So when she’d seen this man step out of the crumbling entryway of an old building shell, with a smirk on his lips and his hand prominently resting on the handle of his gun, she’d felt like she does now, fiftyish years later in an art center bathroom. She’d felt bigger. Beyond fear or anger. She’d gone to the doorway, of course. Then she grabbed its sides to brace herself, and kicked in his knee. He’d spent three months in traction, claiming he’d slipped on a brick, and never messed with her again. Six years later, having bought her own pair of steel-toed boots, Bronca had done the same thing to a police informant at Stonewall—another time she’d been part of something bigger.
Bigger. As big as the whole goddamn borough.
“Nothing human beings do is set in stone—and even stone changes, anyway. We can change, too, anything about ourselves that we want to. We just have to want to.” She shrugs. “People who say change is impossible are usually pretty happy with things just as they are.”
“I know it I know it I know . . . made me for this, but am I not a good creation?” Gasp. Sob. Now the voice hitches. “I . . . I know. I see h-h-how hideous I am. But it isn’t my fault. The particles of this universe are perverse—” There’s a long pause this time. Bronca has almost reached the ground level when the voice chokes out, now thick with bitterness, “I am only what you made me.”
Aislyn loves her father; of course she does, but Conall is right on one level: her whole life, Aislyn has had to scrape and struggle to maintain her own emotional real estate. If she doesn’t leave this house soon, her father will snatch it all up and double the rent on anything he doesn’t want her to feel.
Conall is very, very wrong, however, about something important. He thinks that the meek, shy girl that her father has described, and whom he is currently terrorizing, is all there is to Aislyn. It isn’t.
The rest of her? Is as big as a city.
Everything that happens everywhere else happens on Staten Island, too, but here people try not to see the indecencies, the domestic violence, the drug use. And then, having denied what’s right in front of their eyes, they tell themselves that at least they’re living in a good place full of good people. At least it’s not the city.
[…]
Evil comes from elsewhere, Matthew Houlihan believes. Evil is other people. She will leave him this illusion, mostly because she envies his ability to keep finding comfort in simple, black-and-white views of the world. Aislyn’s ability to do the same is rapidly eroding.
“I know an apology don’t make up for it […] I know it don’t, okay? I damn sure got called a dyke enough myself just for stepping into a ring that dude rappers thought was theirs by default. Motherfuckers tried to rape me, all because I didn’t fit into what they thought a woman should be—and I passed that shit on. I know I did. But I got better. I had some friends slap some sense into me, and I listened when they did. And I figured out that the dudes were fucked in the head, so maybe it wasn’t the best idea to imitate them.”
[Aislyn] can see [Hong’s] filthy, foreign foot planted square on the dill.
The anger comes on faster than Aislyn’s ever gotten angry in her life. It is as if Conall has broken a dam within her, and now every bit of fury she has ever suppressed over thirty years just needs the barest hair trigger to explode forth.
