57 pages • 1 hour read
S. A. ChakrabortyThe City of Brass
Fiction | Novel | YA | 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.
Themes
Choosing Between Freedom and Belonging
A recurring crossroads for several characters is the choice between freedom and belonging. Their internal struggles, while all different, at their core are the same decision. They must decide which is more important to them: agency over their own life or acceptance from their peers.
When Nahri decides for herself to go with Dara to Daevabad, she considers her options. She was born with total freedom and no belonging. While on their trip she wanted to return to Cairo to regain her freedom, when offered the family, belonging, and understanding that she has always wanted, she ultimately chooses the latter, viewing it as an opportunity to study medicine like she always dreamed. Later, she tries to maintain her personal freedom in small ways like eating meat and not keeping the fire lit in her room, but her peers criticize her. In the final scene of the book, Nahri finds both freedom and belonging under unexpected circumstances. Her entire tribe bows to her despite all of her mistakes. This suggests that freedom and belonging may not be mutually exclusive.
Ali endures a similar struggle. From the start, Ali tries to find a balance between his moral and familial duties. He is born with all familial responsibility and no personal freedom, as opposed to Nahri who is born with the opposite. He tries to have both by practicing his religion, helping the Tanzeem, and serving in his father’s court, but he is unable to strike a balance. He decides to stop working with the shafit so as to help them later on, but if he followed every order as Qaid, he would imprison children, arrest innocents, and murder shafit men constantly, so he quietly shirks his responsibilities and then resigns. Later, Ali is shocked that his ancestors kept the secret that their allies, the Ayaanle tribe, used the marid to conquer Daevabad. Ali has a faith in his people that, by the end of the novel, is shattered by the fact that they lied all along. The belonging he thought he had was an illusion anyway, so when he is banished from Daevabad, he has the opportunity to experience true freedom for the first time.
Long ago, Ghassan chose belonging over personal freedom. Despite his longing to return to his home, his personal belief that shafit are equal, and his desire to keep Ali close to him, he chooses what he believes to be the most secure path forward for his city. His duties outweigh his personal desires every time. His fear for Muntadhir as king is that he will prioritize his desires over his people’s needs, but he believes that Muntadhir’s lack of strict ethics is a gift—he has no moral rulebook to which he must adhere, so he can make decisions with other factors in mind. Through Ghassan, S.A. Chakraborty suggests that one must strike a balance between freedom and belonging.
The Powerful Control the Narrative
In this novel, the character’s perspective determines their sense of a narrative. History itself in the novel is deeply contested, and in the end, powerful people decide the dominant narrative.
When Nahri lives in Cairo, she fabricates a narrative to make a living. In the first scene, she uses her clients’ fears and assumptions to make money. Her client came to her already worried and believing that she made a child with a physical disability walk. While in the society at large she does not have the upper hand, in her healing booth she does have the power. Her clients are already afraid and already looking for the answer to their problem, and they believe that she can provide it, so she uses this power to reinforce a narrative.
When Dara first tells Nahri the history of Daevabad, he has all the power, because she knows nothing about his world, their tribes, or their history. In his retelling, he emphasizes the fact that Suleiman forbade the tribes from reproducing with humans to make shafits, because that is what motivated his actions. His people were terrified of Suleiman, so they carried out his orders. He sanitizes the truth by telling Nahri that, “when the Nahid Council grew more severe in their enforcement of the law, the Geziri didn’t react well” (141). Later, Ghassan tells Nahri that Dara led a genocide against a shafit population, which led the Geziri to unify the tribes to rise up against the Nahid Council. When Dara has the power of knowledge in contrast to Nahri’s ignorance, he constructs a narrative that aligns with what he believes. When Dara is dead and unable to explain himself, Ghassan uses this power to tell Nahri what Dara did.
In Daevabad, the winner tells the story of the war because they killed most of the others. With the Geziri in power, Dara is seen as “The Scourge,” labeled for his most evil act that he was ordered to commit. Dara’s family was murdered in the rebellion, but the daeva tribe maintains their truth that Dara is a hero. They even have a statue in his honor in the Grand Temple. Each tribe believes a different truth about Dara. In the Grand Temple, where the daeva tribe has power, they display their truth.
Ghassan molds the narrative as he wishes to further his agenda. For example, he asks Ali to keep the number of shafit in the city private because if they knew, they may try to rebel. He hides the truth to maintain the belief that they have full control over the city, thereby creating a new narrative. Ghassan also tries on different narratives for Nahri to tell the public after her tribe demands justice for Dara’s death: Dara raped Nahri, and Ali saved her; Nahri seduced Ali, and Dara lost control after seeing Nahri in another man’s arms. Ghassan threatens to tell the public a certain narrative and let the mob tear her to shreds. He has the power of the people, because he has the platform to deliver the story.
Mysterious Forces Determine Fate
This novel has an air of mystery that all characters acknowledge. Whether devout believers or not, they often refer to higher powers. They view the natural world as alive and intentional, providing signs of what’s to come. They refer to mysteries and sit in the unknown. When things unfold, characters see what occurs as their inevitable fate.
In Cairo, Nahri breaks the news to her client that she cannot cure him by saying, “There are some things that are beyond me” (3). This is ironic because the narrative clarifies that Nahri is lying to make money, but what Nahri does not know is that she will find herself in a new world by tomorrow. There are things that are beyond her at that time: her ability to understand languages, her unnatural skills in diagnosing, and her ability to heal herself. She cannot understand these things, but they suggest that there are greater forces leading her to her fate.
Similarly, as Dara describes the history of Daevabad, he leaves the most important part up to a mystery. When explaining Suleiman’s unstoppable power, Dara explains that he was given “a seal ring—some say by the Creator himself” (106). The origin of the seal is unknown but rumored to be given to Suleiman by God himself. The reason the tribes exist, the reason ifrit exist, the reason for shafits and the course of modern history was given to a human to wield for reasons no one knows. An accepted but unknown force has determined the fate of all daeva for thousands of years.
Hinting at another force determining their fate, as Khayzur dies after saving Dara and Nahri, he says, “You still don’t understand, Dara, about my people’s role” (214). He refers to his role in Dara’s fate, a role that Dara does not understand, but he also refers to the greater purpose of his people in the fate of their world that Dara still cannot see. Khayzur sees a bigger picture that no one from their race can see. The narrative then suggests that other invisible powers are at play.
Ghassan, too, believes in fate. After he explains Ali’s namesake, he says, “But I fear now that giving a second son the name of our world’s most famous rebel was not my wisest decision” (502), implying that he unknowingly decided Ali’s fate by naming him after the rebel warrior that conquered Daevabad. All of these characters’ observations about mysterious forces determining fate suggest that people have less power than they think; this is a subversive perspective in a novel about power structures, and it undermines the goals of those who seek power through committing atrocities.
Chakraborty’s use of personification also gestures at the ability of non-human forces to take action. Water inexplicably heals Ali’s stab wound. Fire crawls from Dara’s fingers. When describing the palace garden, Nahri notices that vines “ensnare defenseless fruit trees” (286). The natural world consists of uncontrollable forces that show themselves in the characters’ lives.
