66 pages • 2 hours read
Rajani LaRoccaRed, White, and Whole
Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | Middle Grade | 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
Alienation and Belonging
Reha is constantly caught between what she sees as two different lives. She belongs to two cultural milieus: Indian and American. The first half of the book teases out these contradictions in Reha’s life and the difficulties that her sense of alienation brings her. Many teenagers feel that they do not quite fit in, but Reha’s experience is specific to her position as the daughter of immigrants. She has two lives, but she feels she does not fully belong in either one. Accordingly, there is always something holding Reha back or keeping her apart from those around her, or so she believes. She looks, dresses, and behaves differently from her American classmates, and even though she was born in America, people sometimes assume that she does not belong. This phenomenon is most striking in the scene at the mall, in which the food court employee loudly asks her if she speaks English. She is equally out of place in India, where she worries that people can tell she is a foreigner because of “how [she talks], and [walks], / and [breathes]” (80).
Even when Reha feels alienated, she still has moments of genuine connection to both cultures. Music helps her connect to everyone around her, both Indian and American. Although most American kids eat meat, Reha is not the only one to have dietary restrictions; Rachel does, too. These moments of connection suggest that neither American nor Indian culture is an exclusionary monolith. There is space in both for someone like Reha to be herself, even if she cannot yet see what that space looks like. When she considers the Indian immigrants she knows, Reha feels that “despite [their] differences, / [they] have so much in common / trying to make [their] lives here” (42). The same thing applies to her, for her differences do not erase her commonalities with the important people in her life.
As her story progresses, Reha ultimately finds a sense of belonging in many different niches in her everyday life. It is true that some things make her different from others, but she does not have to be perpetually on the outside of things. When Amma gets sick, the local Indian community rallies around Reha and her father, bringing them food and trying to find a bone marrow match. Likewise, Reha’s American classmates spend time with her after school and help her to process her feelings. Rachel “keeps [Reha] on track with all [her] schoolwork” (197) while she is struggling to function normally. Reha realizes that she does not have two lives, but one; the streams that once seemed separate come together.
Familial Expectations
Reha is acutely aware of her family’s expectations for her. She is her grandparents’ only granddaughter, her parents’ only child, and the only member of her family to be born in America. Her parents moved to America so that they and their future children would have more opportunities for success. They made big sacrifices along the way; they left their families behind, and Amma dropped out of university and permanently changed her career prospects. Knowing all this, Reha is aware that her parents expect her to study hard and make the most of the opportunities presented to her. In the early part of the novel, Reha struggles with this pressure. She does well in school, but she also thinks about what it would be like to dress like her peers and date boys. She wants to become a doctor, something that would surely live up to her parents’ hopes for her, but she faints at the sight of blood despite her interest in biology.
After first railing against all of her parents’ familial expectations, Reha tries hard to fulfill them when her mother gets sick. She hopes that by being the perfect daughter, she will somehow be able to save her mother’s life. Her efforts suggest that although she has found her family’s hopes stifling in the past, she still sees value in pursuing success. Her actions also serve as a classic example of the “bargaining” stage of grief. Thus, at this point in the story, Reha is really the one putting expectations on herself. Her parents do want her to succeed, but both of them understand that Amma’s illness is a difficult development for their daughter to process.
Amma’s posthumous aerogramme to Reha shifts Reha’s understanding of her family’s expectations in a positive way. She learns that she is already “everything [Amma] ever hoped for in a child” (232). She also realizes that Amma did understand what she was going through, even though the two of them never talked about Reha’s difficulties directly. Instead of criticizing Reha for not being what her parents want her to be, Amma says that she recognizes Reha’s experience of “loving [her] parents so much, but wanting something different from what they had” (232) as she decides what to pursue in life. Although Amma does want Reha to work hard and succeed, she also offers a wide-ranging view of what that success might look like; as she says, Reha can “[b]e a doctor, if [she likes]. Or be a poet, or an actress, or a mother who stays at home with her children. Or all of these things together” (233). Reha’s family does have expectations of her: to build a life that makes her happy.
Grief and Loss
Red, White, and Whole is a book about what it means to lose a parent. Reha’s grief is an overwhelming force in the story, particularly in the final chapters. She goes through a whole range of emotions both before and after her mother’s death. She feels lost, then determined to be dutiful and virtuous, then helpless to do anything for her mother. The opportunity to donate her bone marrow highlights the true extent of Reha’s devotion and the intensity of her love for her mother. After Amma dies, Reha accepts that Dr. Andrews was not at fault, though she feels angry, jealous of her friends, and frequently numb to the day-to-day events of her life. At the very end of the story, after she receives Amma’s aerogramme, Reha starts to accept her mother’s death and understands that her own life must continue.
Although Reha’s devastation after her mother’s death is the most salient and intense version of grief in the story, it is not the only example of how loss and grief shape the characters’ lives. Amma and Reha share the experience of losing a mother to illness at a young age. Reha knows about her grandmother’s death, but it is not much more than a dry fact in her awareness, and she does not give it much thought until Amma gets sick. Instead, it is simply part of the background of her life, not something that is directly relevant to her own experiences.
By crafting a wealth of poetic glimpses into Reha’s life and inner thoughts, the author demonstrates just how deeply grief and loss impact the girl. And just as Reha is devastated by the loss of her mother, so too was Amma a grief-stricken teenager when her own mother died years ago. To further compound the history of grief in Amma’s background, her father, Reha’s grandfather, died while she was in America, and she was not able to attend his funeral. For most of the story, Amma communicates regularly with her sister, Prema, who is her only surviving immediate family in India. Prema, too, goes through the loss of both of her parents, the departure of her sister to America, and then her sister’s death. Thus, although Reha’s story marks the primary plotline, every member of her family must deal with their own unique experiences of grief and loss.
In a more philosophical contemplation of loss and death, Reha thinks about Savitri’s story several times as Amma’s illness progresses. She feels that if she could only be virtuous enough, she might be able to trick the Lord of Death into letting her mother live a long life. In fact, the relationship is the other way around. If Amma’s life is interpreted as a legend similar to Savitri’s story, it can be argued that it was Amma who tricked Lord Yama into giving her more time to raise her daughter. From that perspective, Amma got the chance to live long enough to raise her daughter into the “strong and steadfast young woman” (232) that Reha has grown to be. Although Red, White, and Whole is Reha’s story, the author makes it clear that grief and loss are universal experiences. As Reha says when she imagines the ending of Savitri’s story, death “is the end / of every person’s story” (230).
