What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2017

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Symbols & Motifs

Hair

Hair is an important motif in What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky, often developing the theme of Patriarchal Control of Girls and Women. In “Light,” for instance, Enebeli damages his daughter’s hair when he attempts to relax it, so the girl’s aunt fixes it by cutting it close to her scalp. That he only relaxes the girl’s hair at his wife’s request symbolizes his appreciation for the girl’s nature versus the mother’s desire to control her. He fails in raising the girl as his wife wants, metaphorically shown in his botched attempt to apply the chemicals. The new shorter haircut is a success, but then the “mother ruins it by adding that she can’t wait till it grows out so she can look like a proper girl again” (60-61). The mother has clear ideas of what it means to be a proper woman, which play out symbolically through the girl’s hair. Similarly, various stories feature men abusing women or girls by pulling their hair, as Godwin does to Bibi in “The Future Looks Good” and Brother Benni does to the narrator of “Redemption.”

“Who Will Greet You at Home” takes the symbolism of hair even further with a malicious baby created from salon hair clippings. Hair here represents its owners’ differing personalities, all vying for dominance and demanding care and attention. However, in other stories, the care characters devote to hair shows love, such as a mother fixing a girl’s braid in “Windfalls” and the hours Uche spent with her mother in a hair salon in “Second Chances.”

Untimely Deaths

The motif of untimely deaths appears multiple times throughout this collection, beginning with the conclusion of “The Future Looks Good,” when Godwin shoots Ezinma in the back. The victim in this case is an innocent: someone trying to help another who pays the price for her sister’s defiance of gender norms.

Most of the other deaths in the collection happen before the start of the story, but they all emphasize the idea that fate can deal out hardship and suffering at random, changing the course of survivors’ lives. Car accidents take the lives of a mother in “Second Chances” and a father in “Buchi’s Girls” and “Wild.” All three leave the surviving families with words unsaid, deeds undone, and stories untold. The deaths force the remaining family members to alter or reassess how they now relate to one another, developing the theme of How Mothers Shape Their Children through either their presence or absence. For some, such as Uche in “Second Chances,” the result of loss is overwhelming guilt. For Buchi, it is financial ruin and a determination to scrape out some kind of survival for her daughters. On the flip side, the death of Amara’s father from an oil rig accident in “Windfalls” leaves her and her mother with a good amount of settlement money, but it is not enough for the mother, who fills the void with the temporary comforts of unscrupulous men and sacrifices her daughter’s well-being to get them.

Get access to this full Study Guide and much more!

8,800+ In-Depth Study Guides
4,700+ Quick-Read Plot Summaries
Downloadable PDFs

Two other deaths are noteworthy in how they explore the concept of being frozen in one’s grief. The death of Nneoma’s mother in “What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky” forms the centerpiece of her personal story, as her father’s grief disturbs her so much that she violates the rules about doing griefwork on family members. This in turn leads to a relationship-ending argument with her partner, Kioni. Despite these consequences, Nneoma clings to her grief as a way to avoid fully empathizing with that of others. In “War Stories,” the author presents a family impacted by the father’s PTSD and depression over a friend’s death by suicide. His young daughter, unable to ease her father’s pain, acts out her confusion and anger when triggered by the mention of the friend’s name, showing the ripple effects of an untimely death.

Two Sisters

Several stories in this collection feature two sisters. Ezinma and Bibi in “The Future Looks Good” have a strained relationship, largely stemming from Bibi’s resentful relationship with the mother whose stubbornness she inherited. Uche and Udoma’s relationship in “Second Chances” similarly reflects their relationships to their mother. Uche, several years older than Udoma, had her mother to herself for most of her young life; at the same time, her own demanding personality put her at odds with her mother, whereas Udoma was still young when their mother died. Uche says of her sister, “I envy her the uncomplicated relationship with our mother, where Mom was just Mom and not yet a woman with whom she disagreed” (73). Uche’s guilt and anger mean she has a harder time processing their mother’s death and accepting her post-death reappearance. This dynamic of guilt and acceptance plays out in “What is a Volcano?” as well, where River eventually accepts that she will never recover her twin daughters, while her sister cannot forgive herself for her negligence and transforms into the Bereaver, forever on the hunt.

Not all the sisters in the collection are at odds with their mother or each other: Louisa and Damaris are an example, though their responses to their father’s death do contrast with one another. By contrast, Buchi and Precious are in opposition to one another. The source of the iciness in their relationship is not explained, but the class difference that now separates them presents another variation on the basic pattern. Overall, the motif suggests an interest in exploring how two people, ostensibly with the same upbringing and parental influences, can diverge in character, worldview, and outcome.