Punching the Air

Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | YA | Published in 2020

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Freedom Is Worth Hoping For

Throughout the novel, Amal hopes for his freedom. Though his hope sometimes wavers, it is a constant factor for Amal and his mother while they wait for his exoneration. Even when the jury convicted Amal, both he and his mother believed that when Jeremy Mathis awoke from his coma, his statement would exonerate Amal. While in prison, Amal’s mother writes to him about maintaining his hope and emphasizes just how much faith she has in him. Zenobia, Amal’s crush from school, also writes to Amal to say that she believes that he is innocent. These encouraging words help Amal stay true to himself and help him justify holding on to his innocence.

Amal’s art becomes a representation of his freedom, particularly when he starts painting butterflies. When in solitary confinement, Amal can still see the butterflies he drew on the walls “fluttering around [his] head / as if telling [him] a secret” (303). Amal wants to fly away from his confinement like the butterflies that he paints. Even after being beaten down by the oppressive carceral system, struggling with his conviction, and the people of power around him doubting him, Amal knows that freedom is a possibility. Throughout the novel, Amal’s potential as an artist and as a student blossoms. Before incarceration, he went to a special arts school and had hopes of going to college to pursue his art. Amal remembers this after receiving Zenobia’s letters, and when his siblings come to visit him. He has potential that being in prison cannot take away from him, and even when Amal struggles to see it, he knows that he is ultimately not what others paint him to be.

When Jeremy wakes up from his coma, Amal and his family continue to foster hope that Jeremy’s words will free Amal. Umi even misses her monthly visit with Amal in order to sit in Jeremy’s hospital room so that his eventual statement is accurate and unprejudiced. The lawyer he had before, Clyde, gets fired and replaced by a new lawyer in whom Umi has more faith. This adds to the hope that maybe things will go differently once Jeremy makes his statement. Amal continues to hope that he will be freed, and although the reader never knows if that happens, Amal underscores his determination to stick to his truth when he sends his art to Imani.

Destiny Cannot Be Controlled

Amal has very little control over what happens to him throughout the novel. In the first poem, Amal must rewatch footage of his birth despite not wanting to. Amal does not have any control over what happens to him, whether at home or at school. When Amal goes to court, he echoes this sentiment by stating the following: “it’s as if this event in [his] life / was something that was / supposed to happen all along” (8).

He has this idea that no matter what he or other people do, that he would’ve ended up in the courtroom anyways.

Ms. Rinaldi’s testimony about Amal’s anger issues adds to the idea of fate because Amal cannot control how Ms. Rinaldi views him as a person, and yet she has a large role in his destiny. The same can be said for Amal’s lawyer, Clyde, whom Amal sees as two-faced: he’s saying one thing to Amal but thinking another thing entirely. Amal has a sense that the people who claim to have his best interests at heart are hurting him through willful neglect.

When Dr. Bennu visits Imani’s class, he emphasizes that Amal doesn’t even really belong to himself anymore:

You don’t belong to anyone

while you’re in here

Not even to yourself

And you already know that (279).

Amal’s experiences in school and in the detention center underscore that Amal has no say in what happens to him. Even when he makes choices on his own, including talking back to/questioning authority in school and painting on his walls in jail, he’s met with severe punishment. Fate controls the strings of his life, except for his inner world. Even at the end of the novel, his fate falls into the hands of Jeremy Mathis—a kid he doesn’t know, whose white privilege makes it hard for Amal to trust. Nobody knows if Jeremy’s statement will exonerate Amal, which is a frightening truth considering that Amal is indeed innocent of the crime for which he was convicted. The novel’s ending doesn’t reveal Amal’s fate. However, the choice to exclude Jeremy’s statement by the authors exemplifies how destiny is completely out of anyone’s control and cannot be influenced by anything. On the other hand, the ending suggests that, despite the machinations of fate, inner strength, hope, and self-respect can help battle (to some extent) exterior forces like systems of oppression.

The System Perpetuates Racism

Systemic racism plays a huge role in what happens to Amal, along with what happens to the other young men whom he meets in prison. Throughout the novel, Amal makes several comparisons between school and prison, especially in the poem “Pipeline”:

But here and now

it’s not a classroom, it’s a cell block

it’s not a restroom, it’s open stalls and showers

it’s not a lunchroom, it’s a mess hall

it’s not friends, it’s inmates, felons, and delinquents

If I squint

I almost can’t tell the difference (119-20).

The similarities between schools and prisons are not a coincidence: They are both meant to teach individuals how to behave and act. They punish those who don’t follow the rules, even if the rules that are in place are not fair. Schools often institute arbitrary rules, such as Amal’s school only teaching white artists and punishing him for speaking out about the racist curriculum. Prisons, meanwhile, implement punitive measures for crime and then place individuals back into society—often without the skills or reform that might help individuals not repeat offenses. Many in fact argue that the prison system is ineffective, and that it overwhelmingly destroys Black men and Black households. There are also many correlations between prisons, prison labor, the nature of carceral punishment, slavery, and involuntary servitude in the US.

Amal’s imprisonment is a product of being a part of the system that perpetuates racist thinking: that Black people are less human than white people. Systemic racism explains why Ms. Rinaldi wants to save Amal from his anger without realizing that he needs saving from her embedded belief of needing to fix him. Her righteous drive makes her oblivious to the fact that Amal’s anger stems from how she treats him differently as a Black kid. Systemic racism is also why a random passerby describes Amal and his friends as a “mob,” while the white boys they were fighting were “full of potential / boys” (202). The novel shows that justice is only given to those deemed good by a system that is synonymous with “whiteness.” Being “in the wrong skins” is the difference between being seen as innocent and being seen as guilty (200).

Although Amal can see the system working against him, he cannot escape it. The entire system, from how schools are structured, to what he learns, to who is in power, is meant to break him down into the monster the system thinks he is. The white people in the novel, although they think they’re helping, are really only cramming Amal into the image of him they want to see. Simultaneously, the other Black people in his life are trying to uplift him and give him hope while knowing that his fight is so much harder because of his skin color.