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
Twenty-one-year-old Tunde swims in the pool, watching seventeen-year-old Enuma read a magazine nearby. Enuma is visiting a cousin who is a friend of Tunde’s from his photojournalism class. A group of his friends had taken a trip to the beach together, but Enuma didn’t like the beach, and Tunde had pretended to have an upset stomach in order to stay home with her. As he swims, she retrieves a can of Coca-Cola from the kitchen. He calls out to her, in a “mock-lordly tone,” saying, “Hey, servant girl, bring me that Coke.” She smiles at him, coyly refusing.
Tunde’s story opens on a much less violent note than Roxy’s, but it too establishes an aspect of contemporary dynamics between men and women. The flirtation here is a performance of Tunde and Enuma’s gender roles—with Tunde taking on the position of power, or a kind of master role, while Enuma performs that of a demure, lower-status servant.
Themes
Tunde gets out of the water. He’s never had a girlfriend before—he’s been waiting for someone that he really wants. He walks over to Enuma, smiling and insisting that she give the coke to him, flirting. She flirts back, declining. He play-wrestles her, taking care “not to really force her” and believing that she is enjoying their playful fight. She holds the can away from him, laughing and wriggling, saying that she will defend it with her life.
Even though this encounter does not have nearly the same kinds of violent tones as Allie’s introduction, it is still an establishment of gender roles. Even if Tunde believes that he is not forcing Enuma, simply the knowledge that he can overpower her, or turn the interaction violent, makes it difficult for her to resist genuinely.
Themes
Tunde leans into Enuma and grabs for the can once more. She puts her hand to his. At first he feels as though an insect has stung him, then the feeling intensifies and he cannot move his left arm. Enuma continues to giggle. He is afraid and excited, realizing that she could do whatever she wanted to him. He is very aroused, and she kisses him softly before diving into the pool.
It is only when Enuma is able to hurt Tunde that she is able to flip the power dynamic between the two of them, highlighting Alderman’s argument that one’s capability for violence is the primary basis of one’s power more generally.
Themes
Tunde waits for the feeling to return to his arm. He feels excited, but also ashamed. He is afraid to ask Enuma what happened, worried that she will laugh at him again. Later, when he imagines asking his friends, he worries that they will think he is crazy, weak, or lying. He wonders if she did it on purpose—by the last day of the trip she is holding hands with another boy. In bed at night, he thinks about his “absolute vulnerability, the feeling that she could overpower him if she wanted.” The thought of it continues to excite him, as “lust and power, desire and fear” are entangled in his mind.
Alderman begins to include parallels in some of the language surrounding gender and sex, using language that is most often used to describe women and applying it to men instead. It is more typical that women are made to feel ashamed of sex, and to experience pain as a part of their first sexual encounter—thus intermingling desire, power, lust, fear, and pain just as Tunde describes here. This parallelism allows readers, particularly men, to imagine these kinds of encounters and gain a new perspective on the power inequality between genders during sexual experiences.
Themes
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One day, Tunde and a friend are in the supermarket when he sees a girl around age 15 get into an argument with a man around age 30. She tells him to get away from her, but the man continues to advance on her. Tunde feels a prickling in the air and immediately pulls out his phone, knowing that something is about to happen. He films the girl as a charge jumps from her hand to the man’s arm. The man falls to the ground, “fitting and choking.”
As more and more women start to gain this power, Alderman carries out a thought experiment as to what might happen if power dynamics were flipped not only on an individual level (as has been explored thus far), but on a grander scale. This scene serves as another example of how the ability to cause hurt inspires fear, which is in and of itself a form of power.
Themes
Tunde follows the girl with his camera as she runs away. Someone calls out, “That girl was a witch!” Tunde turns back to the man, whose eyes have rolled back and whose head is thrashing. Looking at the man cough up red mucus and cry, Tunde feels fear well up inside him. He realizes that Enuma could have killed him if she wanted. Later, he puts the video online, which incites “the Day of the Girls.”
Alderman introduces two other themes in this episode, one of which is the importance of stories to history itself. Because of Tunde’s video, women worldwide start to realize that they have this power. Having the information, and being able to report it, is in and of itself a kind of power. Additionally, this scene shows why gradual change can be so difficult. If this woman were the only woman to have gained the power, she would quickly be seen as a threat and either locked up or possibly killed. But a global shift and an immediate, seismic change allows instead for a revolution.
Themes
