86 pages • 2 hours read
Elizabeth AcevedoClap When You Land
Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | YA | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Water
In literary tradition, water as an antagonistic force is most commonly associated with the romantics-era concept of the sublime, which suggests sheer power and the mutability and transience of humankind in the face of such an awesome force. When Papi’s plane crashes into the Atlantic, water is ultimately his killer. In the novel’s opening poem, Camino uses the metaphor of mud to illustrate her growing need to leave her hometown: “I know that when a street doesn’t have sidewalks / & water rises to flood the tile floors of your home, / learning mud is learning the language of survival” (1). However, Camino’s affinity for water is also the source of escape from the hardships of her life: “Swimming might be the closest to flying a human being can get. There is something about your body displacing water [...] that makes you feel / Godtouched” (38). In Clap When You Land, water plays dualistic roles as a source of escape for Camino and as a destructive and powerful force.
However, water takes on new meaning as a connection to the story’s strong themes of synchronicity and fate when Tía Solana compares Camino’s love of the ocean to her mother’s: “She was always happiest when she was near the water. / It’s why she loved visiting El Malecón” (270). This quote weaves Camino’s life more tightly with those of her parents, who, in an anecdote recited by both Yahaira and Camino, rekindled their love at the sea wall, or El Malecón. By placing Camino’s mother at the sea wall not in search of a suitor but in appreciation of the sea, the story elevates the affair to a chance encounter, or destiny. These seemingly disparate themes of water and magic culminate in a quiet scene at the sea wall in which Camino and Tía Solana pour offerings into the water for La Virgen Regla: “The patron saint of the ocean / is known for containing many parts of herself: / she is a nurturer, but she is also a ferocious defender. & so I remember that to walk this world / you must be kind but also fierce” (224). In this scene, water’s chaotic symbolism is clarified for Camino and for the readers, suggesting that love, like water, can be gentle or direct and steadfast.
Magic and Spiritualism
Throughout Clap When You Land, Acevedo explores the role of magic subtly through Tía Solana’s ceremonies, her work as a healer, and her participation in Santeria, a religious system especially prevalent in the Caribbean, born out of the early spread of Catholicism. Yahaira is surprised to learn that Papi used to pray at the same altar that Tía Solana keeps in her home. Before Camino’s climactic confrontation with El Cero, Yahaira’s eyes are drawn to the altar, where she recognizes a coin that Papi used to keep with him. From here she discovers the money Camino has taped to the back of Papi’s portrait. Later, Yahaira’s previous discovery of the money, now missing in Camino’s absence, leads Yahaira to intuit her sister’s disappearance, ultimately leading to Camino’s rescue.
This seemingly magical series of events coincides with an earlier passage in which Camino explains that the Saints will try to warn of ill-fate: “when bad news is coming / the Saints will try to warn you: / will raise the hair / on the back of your neck, / will slip icicles / down your spine, / will tell you brace brace / brace yourself, muchacha” (11). In another scene, Yahaira reflects on the power of the Saints as they exist in the milieu of Acevedo’s Clap When You Land: “Camino [...] says the prayers & sacrifices / are important to having a relationship with the Saints, [...] those who sweep the way, / nudge open the doors for us to walk forward,” (364). Although the text never concedes to the intervention of deities, if not for Yahaira inspecting the altar of Saints, there would have been no sign of Camino at all and no rescue to deliver her from El Cero’s attack.
Light and Shadow
Light has various meanings in Clap When You Land, used most often as a symbol for strength and feminine power. Early in the novel, Camino first draws out its connection to childbirth: “I’ve always loved that phrase for birthing: / dando a luz giving to light” (13). When Carline is giving birth, Sosúa is in the darkness of a blackout that ends at the precise moment her newborn draws its first breath: “& then the baby inhales a deep gasp / just as the electricity returns to the barrio / & the small house becomes filled, brilliant bright” (169). In Sosúa, rolling blackouts are so common that Papi has bought Camino and Tía Solana a generator “para cuando se va la luz” (34), for when the lights go out. Therefore, when Camino learns her sister’s name, which means “to light, or to shine” (220), she considers her sister as a metaphorical source of illumination. When Camino first encounters her sister on video chat, there is a radiance behind Yahaira: “[T]he light behind the girl / is bright bright bright” (275). Finally, at the novel’s climactic ending, when Yahaira appears in time to save Camino from El Cero’s vicious attack, she brings light in the form of Mami’s rental car headlights, causing enough distraction to force El Cero to back down. As Acevedo crafts her epic poem on sisterhood and loss, her images recall the old masters’ work of deep shadow and brilliant light.
Chess
Although there are no games of chess depicted in Clap When You Land, Yahaira’s career as a competitive chess player echoes in the events of the novel in several ways. As a poetic image, the monochromatic color scheme of the game is used at several junctures to draw out themes of double consciousness. For Yahaira, the game was a lesson in confidence, teaching her to be assertive even in the face of adversity:
Playing chess taught me a queen is both:
deadly & graceful, poised & ruthless.
Quiet & cunning. A queen / offers her hand to be kissed,
& can form it into a fist
while smiling the whole damn time.
But what happens when those principles
only apply in a game? & in the real world,
I am not treated as a lady or a queen,
as a defender or opponent
but as a girl so many want to strike off the board (94).
Yahaira also considers her father’s double life in terms of chess. In his constant moving between his lives in the Dominican Republic and United States, Yahaira finds that her father created a game of dichotomous self-identity for himself, likening his constant migration to the black and white tiles on a board: “When he was here—he was mine, / when he was there he was theirs. / He would glide from family to family, / square to square & never look back” (254). Later, after Camino and Yahaira meet in the Dominican Republic, Yahaira despairs as she compares herself to her new sister: “My Spanish is nowhere near as good, & it’s my first language. / I feel like I am losing to my sister & it’s only the / opening” (328). Openings in chess are the beginning movements players use to position their advantage on a board. This subtle wordplay illustrates the way chess has changed the way Yahaira views the world and herself.
Outside of its thematic consequences, Acevedo often engages with the aesthetic qualities of chess, superimposing them in inventive ways over her characters as she transforms Camino, Yahaira, and the other key players into game pieces. At the novel’s climax, the various female figures are assembled against El Cero. While this moment serves as a natural resolution to each character’s unique arc, it also creates the image of pieces on a board protecting a queen: “Tía like a bishop, / slashing her long machete. Mami, the knight with / rims. My body / in front of my sister’s body: queens. / Papi, who I know is here too. He did build that castle / he always promised” (388). Camino’s plan to take Yahaira’s place can further be construed as castling, a defensive chess move in which a knight and a rook can switch positions.
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