60 pages • 2 hours read
Lesley Nneka ArimahWhat It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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.”
