Another Brooklyn features a central narrative that seems to mark it as being primarily concerned with grief and loss. And while those themes are thoroughly explored and analyzed in the storyline, they are really situated more tangentially as extensions of a much broader concern that touches upon every other aspect covered by events and characters, including race, sexuality, friendship, and family relationships among other things. What the story is really about is given voice several times by August, the protagonist of the novel. “This is memory” becomes her mantra and this mantra vocalizes the seamless interplay between the multiple elements all invisibly working together.
The centerpiece of the exploration of the effects and consequences of memory is strangely cryptic conversation that takes place between August and her father. In fact, it is more than cryptic; it is purposely building a mystery thanks to vital information left out that would be useful in extricating meaning. It is a short conversation that begins with the question “What’s in that jar, Daddy?” and ends with August repeating her mantra. In between is reference to burying Clyde as the answer to what’s in the jar: ashes. Oddly, the reader is given access to the question of what’s in the jar, but the jar itself remains shrouded in ambiguity. The mantra is, one supposes, the key to figuring things out. “This is memory” is August’s go-to answer for a variety of images and experiences related through the book.
Another significant moment is when August is contemplating the consequences of “white flight” and considers how when white people left urban centers behind to find refuge from multiculturalism in the suburbs, they left behind flotsam and jetsam of memories of the past which became future of Puerto Ricans and Blacks and single mothers and junkies. Everybody’s left-behind is somebody else’s gonna-be. This is memory at work because the thing separates something from being left behind from the very same thing holding the promise of what could be isn’t the thing itself or even that thing as memory, but the emotional investment one puts into that thing.
The book explores how the past is always coming back to intrude upon the future even at moments when that may be the last thing that is wanted. Memories are things which get imprinted into the mind and that imprint can’t be willfully changed. People often think it can because memory is not neat and tidy, but ever-changing, but those alterations are still the memory itself and simply wanting to make them different doesn’t make the change. The only control people have over their memories is how the impact they make emotionally. One can change that, though it takes either a great deal of will or a great deal of time.
One of the most visceral examples of this put across in the book is August remembering how her mother decided to respond to the imprinted memory of learning that Clyde was killed in Vietnam. Her mother’s memory of being informed of this can no more be willfully changed than willing that Clyde had not be killed. The closest that she can come to either of those possibilities is to control her emotional response to that memory which is to deny it and, through the act of denial, undo not the memory itself, but her emotional response to it. That alteration is made real—to her—by the simple fact that now she can respond to inquiries about him by saying “Clyde is fine.” This is memory; this is how it works.
The book teaches that you can try to run from grief—which is, remember, seemingly the thematic foundation of the book—but what you are really trying to run from is the memory that stimulated the grief. Mourning is the proper—for lack of a better term—emotional response to the memory of death that is imprinted into the mind. One can definitely run away from the process of mourning, but ultimately, as August learns, that is not the answer. Just because one can temporarily succeed in escaping an unwanted emotion by replacing it with an experience that stimulates a more welcome emotion does not mean that one can escape the memory which is stimulating the undesirable response. Symbolically speaking, that would be like trying to run away from the emotional discomfort of remembering there are ashes of a dead relative in a container simply by calling it a jar instead of an urn.
