Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Power, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Power and Violence
Corruption
Gender Reversals and Sexism
Stories, History, and Perspective
Religion and Manipulation
Revolution and Social Change
Summary
Analysis
Tunde makes friends along the road, through the city and satellite towns, and then towards the mountains. The laws may have changed, but it is hard to enforce them immediately. Tunde’s plan is to travel for a few weeks and record what he sees, building the last chapter of the book that is waiting for him on USB sticks and notebooks he has in Nina’s apartment.
Even though Tunde is putting himself in deep danger in Bessapara, he understands the necessity of his reports, since they’re a crucial way of exposing the injustice of what is happening.
Themes
Tunde had heard rumors from Peter that the worst events had been happening in the mountains, because when the power first came, the men there would blind the girls with hot irons. Now men don’t go there anymore. In Tunde’s eighth week, he arrives in a town and tries to buy food from a bakery with a man behind the counter. But the man indicates that Tunde doesn’t have the proper papers. Tunde can see scars along his arms, and the man refuses to sell him food.
Alderman demonstrates in this exchange how the dynamic between men and women has not achieved equality in Bessapara; it has merely flipped. Just as women and men were nervous about helping other women escape sexual slavery, this man feels he cannot help Tunde for fear of retribution. This chapter and the next are deep repudiations of the idea that women would create a more equal society if they had more power.
Themes
Along the road, people willing to help Tunde are few and far between. Older men are the most likely, while young men are too frightened. Women are too dangerous: when he walks past a group of women, Tunde says to himself, “I’m nothing, don’t notice me, you can’t see me, there’s nothing to see here.” They call to him as he passes, using obscene and racist words. He writes in his journal about his deep fear.
Tunde’s thoughts highlight another gender reversal: just as the women in Delhi predicted, now men are the ones who are afraid to walk alone in the streets as they pass a group of women, echoing the fear that many women feel today when walking alone and passing a group of men in the street.
Themes
In the tenth week, Tunde comes upon a dead man tied to a post in the road. He has scars all along his body. Around his neck is a sign with a single word in Russian: “slut.” Tunde photographs the body with care.
This is another example of a gender reversal. “Slut,” in contemporary society, is a very gendered word usually applied to women. When applied to a man who is killed for a supposed crime, readers recognize that the true crime stems from people abusing a power disparity and using disproportionate violence based on a person’s gender.
Themes
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That evening, Tunde becomes aware he is being followed as he walks. He sees a woman behind him making an arc between her hands. He starts to walk faster. She starts to laugh, and he runs as fast as he can: “sobbing, gulping, with the focus of an animal.” He runs to a village a mile away.
Tunde again experiences the visceral fear of being targeted just because he is a man. It is important that Alderman includes one male protagonist because Tunde’s perspective allows readers—particularly male readers—to understand the fear that happens when one has lost all power, particularly when that is a new and shocking experience.
Themes
Tunde desperately climbs a fire escape into an empty storeroom. Tunde decides it’s time to leave Bessapara. He plugs his phone into an outlet and sends emails to Nina, Temi, and three editors he’d worked for. While he waits for a reply, he looks at the news. He sees an article by Nina about Bessapara. Then he receives a reply: “I don’t find this funny. Tunde Edo was my friend. If you’ve hacked this account, we will find you.”
It is later implied that Tatiana Moskalev orchestrated a car accident to make it appear that Tunde had died, thus discrediting any future reports from him. It is yet another attempt by those in power to prevent Tunde’s stories from shifting global sympathies away from Bessapara.
Themes
Tunde panics. He looks up his own name in the news. He finds his own obituary, full of backhanded praise for his work making the news simpler for a younger audience, with a few minor mistakes, and the names of five famous women he’d influenced. It reports that he died in Bessapara, involved in a car crash which left his body a charred wreck, leaving only his suitcase (the one that he’d left in the hotel room) to identify him. Tunde realizes someone had taken the suitcase and faked his death.
Tunde experiences yet another piece of sexism: the evaluation of one’s work in a context that places more weight on the writing of women. His work is trivialized and the women’s works are given equal weight to the works that he has written, even in his own obituary. Obituaries are another form of storytelling as they frame the story of one’s life, and it is clear from the perspective of this writer that Tunde’s work is not thought to be as important as the work of those of women.
Themes
Tunde flips back to Nina’s story, reading that it is an extract from a longer book she’ll be publishing later that year. It is his reporting, his photographs, his ideas and notes. It has been lauded as an instant classic. She has stolen it from him. Tunde lets out a sob of grief. Then he hears a woman’s voice outside the door, shouting. He panics, grabs his bag, and runs onto the roof and into the forest. It is only then that he realizes he left his phone plugged into the wall.
This is a deep betrayal by Nina and demonstrates her own corruption: she steals his work simply because she is able to, in part because people now expect women to produce superior work. This is particularly upsetting following Tunde’s obituary, where his work was trivialized. Here, with the only difference being that it’s printed under a woman’s name, his work is heralded as revolutionary. Alderman is also calling attention to the fact that many women have not had their work recognized throughout history, simply because their perspectives weren’t as valued.
Themes
That night, Tunde sees a ceremony in the woods. Women have lit a fire, with men and women dancing naked. At times, a woman would push a man to the ground, mounting him and showing her power as he “urg[ed] her to hurt him again, harder, more.” Tunde watches, even yearning to join them. Tunde then sees a blind woman in a scarlet robe: when she emerges, the others kneel to her. A young man is pushed forward: the “willing sacrifice that would atone for all the others.” Tunde takes out his manual camera and photographs the scene. The blind woman presses her forehead to the young man’s and kills him.
This woman is one of the young girls who was blinded when the power first came, as Peter described. But even though this woman has suffered a lot, this scene begs the question of how to atone for those kinds of gendered crimes. As the reader, viewing the scene through Tunde, it is appalling that the women would be just as cruel as the men were. But this is one of Alderman’s main points: that power, no matter who wields it, leads to violence and corruption.
Themes
In the morning, Tunde is unsure if what he witnessed was a dream. He will have to wait until the photos are developed. Tunde decides he needs to find an internet connection to convince someone he is still alive and starts to walk south. He quickly realizes, however, that some women have been waiting for him. He runs and runs, but he trips and is soon jolted in the back of the neck. Tunde wakes in a cage in the encampment of the blind woman. Next to him stands a woman he recognizes from Tatiana’s party: Roxy Monke.
Alderman demonstrates yet another aspect of how corrupted Bessapara has become. Just like the instance of sacrifice in this chapter and the incidence of rape in a later chapter, Alderman shows here how gendered power dynamics in Bessapara have become so extreme that it is now nearly impossible for men to escape it without a woman’s help.
Themes
