39 pages • 1 hour read
Another Brooklyn
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Symbols & Motifs
Hair
Hair is a point of pride for August and her friends. When August compares her situation to the children of Biafra, she notes that while they are unkempt, her hair is combed. Living in Brooklyn, she must, however, rely on a salon to do her hair: her father washes it and sends her across the street. When Sister Loretta begins to spend time at their home, she does August’s hair. Well-kempt hair is essential to August’s self-image, and when Sister Loretta is able to help her achieve this within her home, it builds intimacy between them. August is likewise fascinated with Sister Loretta’s hair.
Gigi’s hair is also a source of fascination for August and her friends. When they wish to comfort and console her, they unbraid it and play with it. Her hair is an essential part of her beauty, and when she commits suicide, August wonders if it fanned out behind her. Her friends believed her beauty (and her beautiful hair) would carry her to stardom; when it doesn’t, it comes as a shock and surprise
Music
At the outset of the novel, August laments that her friends never knew about jazz music: they never knew that their pain and loneliness was inscribed in a cultural tradition. Instead, they had pop music, which stressed love and joy. In the final chapters, she reveals that she herself discovered jazz in college. Listening to it, she thought back to her friends and all they had endured.
In this light, it is significant that Gigi kills herself after singing a cracked note. Her aspiration is to be a singer, but when her voice falters while singing “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” in Jesus Christ, Superstar, she is humiliated in a way she cannot bear. What might have happened, the narrative asks us to imagine, if she had been singing jazz instead?
Nails
August’s mother told her to keep other women “a whole hand away from the furthest tips of her fingernails” and to “keep her fingernails long” (19). Soon, though, August finds herself drawn to her friend’s painted nails. When she describes her intimacy with them, she notes that their fingernails traveled up each other’s arms. Nails have an obvious symbolic resonance: they scratch. In this text, they are a symbol for both intimacy and the pain that sometimes comes with it.
“This is Memory”
Throughout the text, August repeats the words “this is memory.” As she moves between fragments from the 1970s and beyond, she acknowledges that this is how memory functions: in leaps and jumps. In addition, it is sometimes uncertain, and often more painful than the moment remembered.
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