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Book 2, Part 1: Epistemology
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Theory of Flight, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Individual Aspiration vs. Group Belonging
Colonialism and Postcolonialism
Love, Family, and Selfishness
Gender and Sexuality
Beauty
Summary
Analysis
The Survivors. Beatrice wonders whether her brain is failing her again: the place she’s approaching looks like the Beauford Farm and Estate she remembers, yet horribly run-down and deserted. She asks Kuki, who is driving them, when they’ll reach the farm. Then she sees the sunflower field and yells, “Home!”
Despite her cognitive decline, Beatrice recognizes that the sunflower field marks her home—a detail highlighting the sunflowers’ significance as a symbol of shared memories and histories that continue unbroken through the colonial and postcolonial periods.
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Valentine hoped to visit the farm with just a few people, but now he’s driving Vida and Jestina as well as leading four other cars, carrying Beatrice and Kuki, the Masukus, Minenhle and Mordechai, and Bhekithemba. They park outside a dilapidated house. A man emerges and yells that they’re on private property: “we” purchased it from Beatrice. When Valentine tries to calm the man, the man asks why they brought a white person. Valentine realizes the man is talking about Vida. He’s trying to explain that Vida’s not white when the man recognizes “Jesus.” Vida recognizes the man as Goliath.
Coming near the end of the novel, this convergence of many disparate characters, major and minor, on the Beauford Farm and Estate affirms Genie’s aspirational influence on the people she knew. The novel is also asserting, yet again, that disparate people who share a country and a history can be connected in sundry, unexpected ways—as, for example, when Goliath, Vida’s former street acquaintance, is revealed to have bought the farm from Beatrice.
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Goliath is happy to see Vida. He explains that he and The Survivors had decided they could no longer live in the city. He claims that whereas street people like Vida and the Survivors possess “a code of ethics,” the new people flooding the streets have none, which prompted The Survivors to leave. Genie’s stories about the beautiful sunflower fields on the farm had so moved Goliath that he decided to buy it for The Survivors. When they arrived, they found veterans squatting there—whom Goliath blames for the property’s dilapidated condition.
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The other visitors exit their cars. Goliath says Beatrice will testify to the legitimacy of the Survivors’ ownership—though everyone sees that she has suffered too much cognitive decline to testify to anything. When more people come out of the house, Goliath introduces them as the other Survivors. He introduces a woman with a baby as his wife, whom Vida knows as the girl he tried to dissuade from getting into a businessman’s car when she was 11.
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Goliath asks Vida: “Speaking of wives, where is Genie?” Vida explains that they had heard Genie’s body was found on the farm. Shocked, Goliath says that while the veterans often find bones in the fields, they claimed a “fresh” corpse had appeared among the sunflowers recently. When he asks whether the corpse is Genie, Vida says they’ll have to find out.
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Goliath leads the visitors toward the huts the veterans have erected. They pass empty, derelict houses, and Jestina asks where the residents went. Goliath’s wife suggests HIV/AIDS ravaged the former farm community—the veterans have uncovered a lot of bodies. This suggestion confirms what Jestina has always suspected: that the sojas—who sexually assaulted her and Mrs. Hadebe before forcing her to serve Mr. and Mrs. Hadebe poisoned tea—had infected some of their victims with HIV. The thought now torments Jestina that perhaps the sojas assaulted 9-year-old Genie too, and Genie never told anyone.
The visitors find the veterans, who ask whether they’ve come because of the body. When Vida says they have, the veterans usher them to a “cold-storage unit” full of skeletons—which they have identified as war deaths or HIV/AIDs deaths according to whether the corpses had coins in their clothes (people in the 1990s were less likely to die with money on them). Valentine praises the veterans’ work, and the veterans explain that while it’s taken them a lot of effort, they felt the bodies deserved to be handled respectfully.
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The veterans lead the visitors deeper into the cold-storage unit, where they see Genie’s body. The veterans claim they immediately recognized her as Golide Gumede’s child. They don’t know when she arrived at the farm, but she must have been alive when she did, because she dug her feet into the soil of the sunflower field before she died. Jestina says they all ought to be glad Genie “chose her own ending.”
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Kuki starts babbling denials and saying that Genie was her friend. Kuki is confused by her own reaction and wonders why she wants people to believe that she and Genie were friends. Kuki knows it was Beatrice, not her, who was friends with Genie—Kuki never even really got Beatrice and Genie’s relationship.
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The visitors take Genie’s body and carefully place it in one of their cars. Marcus surveys the compound, wonders what life he would have had if he’d stayed, and decides it “wouldn’t have been much of a life.” He wonders what home is, remembers Genie’s bloody handprint in the atlas she sent him, and has an epiphany: he’s been trying to keep a grip on something that Genie has long since released.
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A boy approaches Marcus and gives him a photo, which the boy says he discovered in a ceiling. The photo shows Marcus and Genie, looking joyful, playing inside the dilapidated car. Full of emotion, Marcus says that he and Genie used to say that if suspicious visitors approached, they would hide in the ceiling with their loved ones and most precious possessions. Jestina, collecting the photo from him, remembers Genie getting her suitcase from the ceiling the morning they fled the farm. She tells him they’ll “always remember” yet “never truly know what happened here.”
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Valentine. Valentine is standing in a gem-toned room with The Man Himself, who is failing to knot his tie. The room is the same as it was when Emil Coetzee worked in it—including the sorts of work done in it—except that the stationery reads The Organization instead of The Organization of Domestic Affairs.
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The Man Himself mentions that he usually wears clip-on ties but decided to wear a real one for the funeral. Then he congratulates Valentine for succeeding at what Genie asked of him. When Valentine suggests he doesn’t know what The Man means, The Man speculates that Valentine loved Genie, tells him he’s likely to suffer dire consequences, and claims that his efforts have come to nothing, since everyone thinks he and the others are “a group of crazy people intent on burying an empty box.”
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When The Man Himself asks Valentine whether it was “worth” the effort, Valentine says it was. Surprised, The Man Himself asks again whether Valentine did it for love. Valentine says he did, though not in the way The Man means. He recalls reading in the paper about Golide, an albino African man, building an airplane—and feeling that “suddenly all things were possible.” He supposes love is the word to describe the feelings of possibility and belief the story inspired in him.
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When The Man Himself ridicules Valentine for thinking Genie might love him back, Valentine asks why The Man did “it.” The Man, wrongfooted, asks what Valentine’s talking about. Valentine asks whether it was because “he was capable of flight.” The Man says he did it as an exercise of power, because he was capable of it—and then that he did it because, given power’s fragility, “a man like me does not let a man like Golide Gumede build an airplane.”
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Valentine thanks The Man Himself for his honesty and replies with honesty of his own: he aided Genie in her plan because her life “mattered” and “she deserved to choose her own ending.” He takes a “precious and beautiful something” from his pocket and explains that each such “something” was once the heart of one of Golide’s believers. Seventeen died in 1987; Genie makes eighteen. He speculates that The Man has two more and asks what The Man inflicted on Golide and Elizabeth.
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When The Man Himself refuses to answer, Valentine tells him that The Survivors, who own the Beauford Farm and Estate, will determine what happens to the “somethings” there. The Man, exasperated, says that Valentine would win too if the Organization appropriated the land and that he simply doesn’t comprehend Valentine. Valentine retorts that he comprehends The Man “perfectly.” He exits the room, abandoning The Man in the “seat of power.”
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The Real Revolutionaries. A hearse winds through bustling streets, encountering various hawkers and a wedding party. The undertaker driving the hearse explains that in the 1960s, undertakers were only allowed to work with corpses of their own race, so he only handled Colored corpses. He did all the work himself and attended all the funerals. During the war, business picked up, and he worked with some corpses of Black African people and poor white people. He didn’t have time to do everything himself, but he still attended every funeral. By around 1985, though, he had to hire an assistant and could no longer attend any funerals because of all the HIV/AIDS deaths.
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The undertaker notes that while the country is now suffering from mass unemployment and poverty, death has made him rich. While it benefits him, he thinks that “there is such a thing as too much death.” He gestures out the window and says that street crowds used to pause and remove their hats when hearses drove past—but no more.
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Vida looks where the undertaker has gestured and sees a man, shabbily dressed, who has removed his hat to the hearse. The man has a newspaper tucked lovingly under his arm; Vida knows he’s already done all the puzzles. Vida asks the undertaker to stop the hearse, gets out, runs to the man, and greets him: “David.” David shows Vida a headline—“IMOGEN ZULA NYONI FLIES AWAY”—and offers his condolences. This is the first time Vida has ever heard David speak.
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David walks Vida back to the hearse and gets in with him. Vida opens Genie’s coffin and takes out her suitcase, containing Penelope, Specs, Blue’s slippers, and her “childhood clothes,” because while it might be brave to let go of Genie, it’s also brave to “not let[] Genie go entirely.”
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While Genie’s grave is filled with dirt, Marcus watches and wonders whether belonging is a feeling, a state, or a way of behaving—whether he ever belonged to Genie, and whether she “ever belonged to them.” He looks at Dingani, Thandi, Krystle, and Eunice, all tired, grief-stricken, and quiet—as they have appeared since Dingani’s confession about 1987. Then he looks at Esme, who is holding his hand. He feels that he “belongs” with this family.
When Marcus leaves the cemetery, he finds he doesn’t want to go back to his dilapidated family home. He abruptly feels that he and his family have to witness a particular place. He moves in that direction. To his surprise, all the mourners follow him: Minenhle, Mordechai, Jestina, Valentine, Bhekithemba, Kuki, Beatrice, Dr. Mambo, The Survivors, the veterans, Stefanos, Matilda, David, the undertaker (whose name is Mr. Mendelsohn), and Vida.
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As dawn approaches, the funeral party comes to the Zambezi. A tourist with a camera, observing them with the excited expectation that they’ll do something photo-worthy, suddenly calls Krystle’s name. With astonishment, she recognizes Xander Dangerfield and asks why he’s there. He says he wanted to see “it,” pulls out Krystle’s postcard from Genie, and shows her the inscription about “swimming elephants.” Krystle asks how Genie possibly knew. At Xander’s confusion, she waves her own astonishment away and brings him back with her to the funeral party.
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Suddenly, elephants appear. The male elephant leading the others trumpets. The group pauses on the bank of the river. Then the leader dives in. Everyone catches their breath: “You understand that in the grander scheme of things you are but a speck . . . a tiny speck . . . and that that is enough . . . There is freedom . . . beauty even, in that kind of knowledge […] It is the kind of knowledge that allows you to fly.” An airplane with silver wings passes over the scene.
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