The Theory of Flight

Best friend to Beatrice, wife to Emil Coetzee and later Todd Carmichael, and mother to Vida’s first love Everleigh, Kuki begins life as Kuki Sedgwick, a freckly, redheaded girl who embraces conventional ideas and finds her friend Beatrice’s liberal thinking scary. At age 15, Kuki falls in love with handsome, macho Emil Coetzee and spends the next several years trying to make herself attractive enough to win his love. After they marry, Emil cruelly tells her that he only married her because her family name would help his career. Though unhappy in wedded life, Kuki adores her and Emil’s son Everleigh, a musical and artistic boy. After Emil browbeats Everleigh into accepting a draft to fight in a conflict implied to be the Zimbabwe War of Independence (1964-1979), Everleigh dies by landmine—and Kuki, finding courage in despair, obtains a divorce. Kuki wants to spend her whole life grieving Everleigh and judges herself for remarrying and trying to heal emotionally. She feels inadequate compared to Vida, Everleigh’s teenage love, who rejects society and lives as a homeless person after Everleigh’s death. One day while driving, Kuki is distracted by the sight of Vida on the street and hits 13-year-old Genie with her car. As a much older woman, Kuki is trying to find someone to take her nursing-home-bound friend Beatrice to the salon occasionally when she connects Beatrice with Genie. Though Kuki believes herself to be liberal because her second husband was liberal, she in fact holds racist beliefs, believing that Black people have sent the country into decline in the postcolonial era. Accompanying Beatrice on the convoy to retrieve Genie’s body from the Beauford Farm and Estate, Kuki has an unexpected reaction to the sight of Genie’s corpse, saying “no, no” and insisting that she and Genie were friends, though they weren’t. This reaction suggests that Kuki feels deep shame at her own lack of courage relative to people like Beatrice, Vida, and Genie, as well as guilt at her complicity in the white-supremacist systems that damaged the country’s history and contributed to Genie’s death.