What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky

Nwando represents two elements the author examines in this collection: emotional inheritance and attempts to tame young girls’ fieriness, developing the theme of Patriarchal Control of Girls and Women. The story immediately establishes Nwando’s transgressiveness. Motivated by a desire to determine the truth of the girl’s claims, she opens another girl’s shirt to reveal whether she is wearing a bra and is reprimanded for it (that wearing a bra is required for membership in the “Girl Army” underscores the gender dynamics underpinning the scene). Nwando’s mother also sees her as in need of disciplining but cedes responsibility for this to Nwando’s father: “At such moments I became my father’s daughter, a confounding creature who had no doubt inherited a vein of insanity from one of his yeye ancestors” (11).

However, Nwando’s father only asks for her explanation of the incident and then tells her one of his frequently repeated war stories. Though these tales are apparently “intended to impart some inscrutable lesson” (12), Nwando struggles to grasp her father’s meaning as he references a variety of her actions, from stealing her aunt’s lipstick, to putting ants in a classmate’s hair, to getting in a fight with people who criticize her father’s odd behavior. These episodes further establish that Nwando is a plucky girl willing to spar with classmates, but it is unclear whether her father hopes to change her behavior. The lesson of the story about the gun might be to heed the warnings from others, or there might not be any lesson there for Nwando at all. Nwando only plays chess with her father because his friend died by suicide, and the family recently moved in an attempt to escape the painful reminders of this. In addition, his demeanor suggests trauma from the war itself. His tale may just be a recital for himself—a memory of a time that was nerve-wracking but really only practice for the true hardships and violence to come.

In fact, trauma itself may be his real legacy to Nwando, though hers largely takes the form of patriarchal oppression (that the girls refer to themselves as an “army” makes the connection to Nwando’s father’s experiences explicit). Nwando inadvertently participates in that oppression when she opens Anita’s shirt for proof of a bra. Boys afterward torment Anita and “lift up her skirt, as though [Nwando’s] actions had given them permission, as though because they had seen her bare breast they were entitled to the rest” (15). Nwando feels guilty about this but does not stop it, and her newfound leadership position in her Girl Army underscores her new role as an enforcer of patriarchal norms. The two traumas merge when the name Emmanuel triggers memories of her father’s friend; her fondness for her father’s friend mixes with her anger about how his death by suicide affected her father, and she punches the girl.

The story also meditates on the nature and value of stories. Earlier, thinking of her father’s tendency to exaggerate, she recalls how, “Emmanuel used to take him to task for it, interrupting my father with laughter and calls for ‘Truth! Truth!’ With Emmanuel gone, the assignment fell to me” (12). Truth, then, is something Nwando initially feels she needs to seek out, but the ugliness of truth is too heavy for her to bear. Her father’s story about Emmanuel killing snakes has the tinge of a fable about it—exaggeration or embellishment pointing toward a larger truth. The reminiscence it provokes, however, pulls her father into his unreachable, unresponsive state. Nwando’s avid response to her mother pulling her away and comforting her with a story about finding a termite nest suggests that she now understands the comfort in made-up stories. They can provide comfort when reality cannot.