49 pages • 1 hour read
Kiese LaymonLong Division
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Intersection of Race, History, and Identity
City Coldson’s adventures in Jackson and Melahatchie, Mississippi, teach him about how his cultural background and nation’s past impact who he is in the present and can be in the future. In Part 1, City initially defines himself according to his style and intellect. He sees himself as the one with “the best waves of anyone in the history of Hamer” and “the second-best rebounder in the school and a two-time reigning CW (Class Wittiest)” (5). He isn’t at the top of his class, but he’s “known as the best boy writer in the history of [his] school” (4). These facets of City’s life define who he is and grant him a sense of pride. However, once City participates in the Can You Use That Word in A Sentence contest, he begins to realize the importance of his personal, familial, and national history. As Mama and Principal Reeves teach him, he has to take “responsibility for the morality and future of this country” by making informed choices in the present (18).
However, the novel also pokes fun at the idea that any individual’s choices can “solve” a problem as sweeping as systemic racism. Whatever Couch Stroud suggests, the decision about whether or not to buy a watermelon in front of a white person is not going to shatter racist stereotypes. However, an obsession with performing Blackness “correctly” can do violence to oneself, as LaVander’s experience in the contest—the culmination of his efforts to distance himself from stereotypical Blackness—makes clear. The novel therefore urges recognition of the dynamics of racial oppression and exploitation while also trying to imagine how its characters might seize control of their own narratives such that they can simply “be themselves” (as Shalaya is constantly urging City to do).
Part 2 broadens the novel’s exploration of this theme with its more explicit consideration of how the past, present, and future interest. Shalaya’s consciousness of the future and Evan’s consciousness of the past are particularly influential in shaping City’s understanding. Shalaya is desperate to “change the future” and aspires to be president, send kids like herself through school, and “make it illegal for parents to leave their kids with their grandma in Melahatchie for more than three days” without “cable or good air” (9). Meanwhile, Evan wants to change the past to save his family from the Ku Klux Klan. These projects turn out to be interrelated—first narratively, when Evan demands that Shalaya help him change the past before he will divulge the details of the future, but then thematically. City and Shalaya ultimately discover that in the timeline where they marry and have Baize, they also die in Hurricane Katrina. Their deaths representing systemic racism’s ultimate erasure of identity, which they can prevent only by recognizing how their stories intersect with those of others.
Impact of Media on Self-Perception
City’s participation in the Can You Use That Word in a Sentence Contest challenges how he sees himself, demonstrating how the media and technology might influence the individual’s self-perception. The contest both forces City on stage in front of a live audience and broadcasts his experience on national television. At 14, City doesn’t understand the racist politics that underpin the contest or the way in which his own actions will be interpreted through the lens of his race: He regards the contest as a fun activity through which he can prove himself better than his rival, LaVander Peeler. However, after his outburst on camera, City feels guilty for “act[ing] a fool at the contest” and shaming Grandma and Mama (51). Furthermore, watching LaVander finish the competition helps City understand the way the media is exploiting him and LaVander. The contest therefore marks a turning point in City’s self-discovery journey and challenges him to reevaluate who he is in his wider cultural context.
The online responses to the sentence contest further complicate City’s understanding of himself. He feels excited to see himself in footage online because it makes him feel famous. At the same time, watching the YouTube videos of himself online and reading the comments distorts City’s self-perception. He notices how someone “added the T-Pain voice coder to [his] voice when [he] was talking to the Mexicans from Arizona” and discovers that people are “selling T-shirts online with a picture of [him] brushing [his] waves with the word ‘niggardly’ with a question mark underneath in deep black” (85). These media representations of City exploit his youth and vulnerability as well as his racial and cultural identities: Even the responses that ostensibly celebrate him as a voice against racism elide the complexity of how he actually felt in the moment and after (e.g., his regret over having lashed out at the Mexican American girl). City therefore isn’t free to discover who he is in a safe environment after the sentence contest, as he’s turned into a meme for others’ amusement.
These dynamics reveal the ways in which the American media and entertainment industries have historically co-opted Black identity to reinforce racial stereotypes and to make money. City is a victim of these historical trends and therefore struggles to see himself outside of the way the culture is teaching him to see himself. However, the Long Division book that he finds in the principal’s office offers an alternative form of representation. The book is not only about City but also, increasingly, written by him, and in both 1985 and 2013, it proves key to helping City understand himself. Kiese Laymon therefore provides City with a mechanism through which he can literally take control of his own story and self-perception.
Intergenerational Trauma and Resilience
As a novel that spans multiple time periods, Long Division is explicitly interested in how the trauma of systemic racism manifests across generations. In both the 2013 and 1985 storylines, City must come to grips with that trauma and develop tools to resist it.
City initially lacks awareness of just how deeply racism has shaped the lives of his older relatives and influenced how they engage with him and others. The 1985 version of City has this reality brought home to him in a very literal way when his impromptu visit to The County Co-Op in 1964 helps him understand the shame and trauma Mama Lara may have experienced during the Jim Crow era. For a moment, he feels as if he’s experiencing “a dream, or […] somehow, some way, [that he’s] gotten trapped in someone else’s story” (57). The word choice is significant: What City is experiencing is not merely empathy for his family and community but rather immersion in their past, symbolically evoking how different eras become entangled as trauma is passed down from generation to generation.
The 2013 version of City comes to his parallel realization in a less dramatic way, though his arc also involves his relationship to his grandmother. Learning that a woman as upstanding as Grandma gave into the desire for vengeance by keeping Sooo Sad in the shed opens City’s eyes to how much pain and trauma she carries. However, it also furnishes him with the novel’s first tool for combatting trauma: compassion and forgiveness. Although the novel advocates for justice—City wants Sooo Sad to apologize for his racist treatment of City—it is careful to distinguish that from the desire to see others suffer as one has suffered oneself. Grandma ultimately says that she was wrong to have acted as she did, and City embraces love as a path toward healing.
Finding ways to extend love and mercy despite one’s own pain is also a key concern for City in 1985, but so too is giving voice to what one has experienced. Mama Lara helps City understand that in spite of all that he, his family, and his ancestors have suffered, he has the power to honor and authenticate that ancestral suffering with his writing. This is why City goes back into the hole with Baize’s computer at the end of the novel and starts to write his story again. Together, City and those he conjures with his writing teach “each other how to revise until all of [their] characters [are] free” (135), their personal resilience giving them the strength and courage to combat future trauma for future generations. Indeed, the story they write helps City in Part 1, and the story that City writes in Part 1 helps the characters in Part 2. The interplay between the novel’s two sections enacts the ways in which writing might upset intergenerational trauma and birth new, redemptive stories.
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