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.
Chapters 8-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “Yahaira”
At the pool hall that her father owned, Yahaira’s family has made a memorial. Yahaira recalls the night Papi took her to the pool hall to celebrate a match she won, when he put on bachata music and gave her Coke “he had splashed with a little bit of rum” (173). Yahaira leaves a black queen chess piece at his memorial outside. She cites the ancient Greeks, who made sure to die with money to be ferried into the afterlife.
On the train ride home from Papi’s memorial, we learn that Dre has come to guard Yahaira, who has grown to dislike train rides. Yahaira recounts the attack on the train that marked the last time she would play chess. After winning and shaking hands with her opponent, Manny, Yahaira boards the train with her back to a man leaning on the doors. While the train runs for three stops, Yahaira feels the man gripping her legs and eventually feeling her inside of her underwear.
As school draws to a close for Yahaira 21 days after the crash, representatives from the airline come to Yahaira’s and Mami’s home with an advance payment of half a million dollars in reparation for Papi’s death. Tío Jorge goes over the paperwork and launches into a host of consultations, arguing that they should still sue the airline and hold out for a settlement after a lengthy legal process. Mami rejects his advice, telling him that he was Papi’s advisor and did not offer advice when he was alive. Yahaira can sense that there is something that is not being said and wonders again whether Mami knows about the certificate. Yahaira escapes to the community garden where Dre is working in her plot.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Camino”
In the Dominican Republic, Tía Solana receives a phone call from Tío Jorge about the airline’s payout. Camino overhears but waits for Tía Solana to bring it up as they sit on the porch together: “I keep rocking next to her. Sometimes / words / need time to form” (192). When Tía Solana does tell Camino about the call, she says that Camino has a sister, Papi’s other daughter by a woman named Zoila, who made it difficult for Papi to bring Camino to the United States. Now there is money that Camino is entitled to, but Zoila is likely to fight her claim. Camino is struck by the revelation: “I have a sister. I have a sister. I have a sister” (195).
For Camino, the news that she has a sister stokes equal parts pain and elation. She seeks solace with Carline, who has decided to name her son Luciano. It is a brave thing to do and goes against the wisdom of elders in the community, who have cautioned against becoming too attached so soon. Carline has also heard rumors of El Cero and Camino being seen together leaving the beach, and again, Camino keeps her silence concerning El Cero’s unwanted advances.
At Camino’s next swim, El Cero reappears at the beach, but this time he tells Camino that he turned away a man claiming to be a friend of Papi’s who came asking for her home address. Camino knows that this is a thinly veiled threat: “I hear the other words El Cero does not / say: I can give your address / to anyone, I can call attention to you” (205). When another man arrives at the beach, El Cero’s threat becomes real as he tries to force Camino into his car. Camino pushes El Cero away, and Vira Lata’s barking distracts the men long enough for Camino to run from the beach. Covering the short distance home, Camino remembers that a Santero and other practitioners have gathered in a drum circle to take part in one of Tía Solana’s ceremonies. In the community, it is commonly held that due to Tía Solana’s presence there, the house is a place of power favored by saints. Camino describes the ritual as a ceremony of grieving and prayer. Dancing with Tía Solana, Camino imagines herself pushing El Cero out of her life: “I push the air with my body as if pushing El Cero & his / friends […] I pray myself free” (208).
Chapter 10 Summary: “Yahaira”
After the meeting with the insurance representatives, Yahaira worries that Mami is spending money they do not have. She notes a change in Mami’s behavior, likening her sudden and brash behavior to an invading force: “She ignores work, forgets appointments. I do not recognize this reckless woman / who has taken residence in my mother’s body” (209).
With school over, Yahaira walks her city aimlessly. At Dre’s house, Yahaira falls asleep. When she wakes up, she confesses to Dre’s mother, Dr. Johnson, that she is not sleeping well at home. When Dr. Johnson attempts to engage Yahaira about her grief, Yahaira excuses herself politely and leaves. In her interior monologue, she considers the sounds of the Johnson’s family. Yahaira describes her inability to bear the sounds of their happy home: “a place that’s gone on as if [Papi] never existed” (214).
Later in the week, Yahaira’s cousin Wilson comes to announce his impending wedding engagement, despairing that he is a campesino—a peasant, of modest means. Wilson is one of many from Mami’s side of the family who have come in search of money after hearing of the airline’s reparations. Without hesitating, Mami writes four figures on a check for Nelson’s wedding. Yahaira is curt with her mother’s family, insulted by their sudden interest in Mami. In a terse confrontation, Mami argues that Yahaira does not know the extent to which her father embarrassed her: “if this death money / will unshame me with my family, so be / it” (218).
Chapter 11 Summary: “Camino”
Although Camino is struck with wonder at the revelation that she has a sister, she is also forced to contend with the anger that comes with the knowledge of Papi’s betrayal and Yahaira’s privileged ignorance of Camino: “I do not want to hate a girl with a glow- / ing name. But I cannot help the anger planted in my chest” (220), she says, referring to the fact that Yahaira means “light.” As she considers the unpaid bills, her plans for Columbia University, and the question of the airline money, Camino decides that she must be firm in her choice. After weeding through the many Yahaira Rioses on social media, Camino finds a profile in tribute to Papi’s recent death. She sends Yahaira a message.
At the waterfront, Tía Solana and Camino pour offerings over the sea wall for La Virgin de Regla. Camino feels guilt for contacting Yahaira, recognizing the shock she might have imposed on her half-sister, who will not have the benefit of Tía Solana’s honesty to blunt the sting of such a truth. Camino considers the patron saint they are honoring with gifts and the many kinds of love she exemplifies: “she is a nurturer, but she is also a ferocious defender” (224). Camino takes a sack of rice and beans to Carline’s in-laws. Carline has been crying and tells Camino that she was fired from the resort after she refused to cut short her maternity leave and return to work. Camino shares a little of her own troubles, and Carline eases her cautious guilt when she assures Camino that her choice was justified: “you did what you had to do” (228).
Chapters 8-11 Analysis
The account of Yahaira’s sexual assault begins with an account of Manny, who she defeats in her final chess match, but Yahaira admits that this is a misdirection: “this is not a story about Manny” (174). Yahaira’s true attacker is nameless and, in Yahaira’s recollection, possibly faceless because she was assaulted from behind. However, Manny’s inclusion in the poem is central to the portrait of abuse, representing a dangerous male entitlement both Yahaira and Camino are forced to navigate as young women. When Yahaira leaves her trophy on the floor of the train car following the attack, it forces the chess tournament into closer scrutiny.
In the poem’s opening section, Yahaira says that even as a competitor, Manny would smile across the table at her. When Manny shakes Yahaira’s hand, he allows it to linger too long. By juxtaposing the unwanted male attention from Manny together with the moment of Yahaira’s attack by a stranger, Acevedo is drawing a distinct connection between both moments that highlights the ways they are the same. Both Manny and the man on the train represent a sinister male entitlement, a theme that is further mirrored in the dangerous “world of men” Camino describes El Cero belonging to. In the world of men that Acevedo is depicting, Yahaira’s skill as a chess champion is still mutable enough that Manny’s handshake can linger as innuendo. In the same world of men, a stranger on a train can casually violate a young girl without fearing reprisal or persecution on a train of crowded commuters. Through her poetry, Acevedo is capturing a world where women are made small no matter what power they wield.
When insurance adjusters award Mami and Yahaira a half-a-million-dollar reparation to prevent legal action, Acevedo engages in the poetic constructions that characterize Clap When You Land. On page 188, the poem repeats the phrase “Tío Jorge Says” ten times, indicating that Tío Jorge is speaking out of turn about money that more directly concerns Yahaira and her mother. Eventually, Mami tells him as much. As Yahaira wonders what is not being said, so have many poets throughout history strived and prodded at that question through the use and construction of repetition, or anaphora. Anaphora is just one of the poetic constructions Acevedo uses to convey meaning.
By repeating the phrase, not only does the author communicate that Tío Jorge is speaking too much, but she also imparts the musical qualities of assonance and consonance. Assonance in poetry is the repetition of vowel sounds. Consonance is the repetition of exact sounds close together. Acevedo uses these qualities to imply a drone or diatribe for Tío Jorge’s overpowering presence, but in an exchange between Dr. Johnson and a melancholic Yahaira, Acevedo uses repetition again to create more pleasing sounds that slowly taper into harsher rhyme:
Dr. Johnson asks
Yaya, honey, have you been sleeping?
I answer
Kinda, Dr. Johnson
Dr. Johnson asks
Do you want to talk about it?
I answer
Nah, Dr. Johnson
Dr. Johnson asks
Have you talked to anyone about your grief?
I answer
Thanks for the meat loaf […] (212).
By paying attention to the vowels at work in Dr. Johnson’s first lines, which are gentle sounds, we can trace the subtext of the scene. As the consonance of Dr. Johnson’s lines pushes and grows into stronger vowel sounds, Yahaira’s responses are a flat ‘a’ sound. Only by paying attention to the assonance can we see that the innocuous “thank you for meat loaf” is a sonic joke, a slant rhyme matching Dr. Johnson’s query about Yahaira’s “grief,” as Yahaira is dismissing Dr. Johnson’s attempts to open a line of dialogue. Dr. Johnson’s attempts to heal Yahaira have failed resolutely, and the music of the line bears this out.
When Tío Jorge shares news of the airline money with Tía Solana, Camino learns for the first time that she has a half-sister. She also learns that through her claim to the airline reparations, she now has an avenue toward making life easier for herself and Tía Solana. This is among Camino’s highest ambitions. When Camino sends Yahaira a message on social media, she crosses a dramatic threshold. At this point in the novel, Camino and Yahaira’s goals are at odds and building dramatic tension. Because Camino wants desperately to escape the Dominican Republic at the same time as Yahaira is planning to go against her mother’s wishes to travel there, it is inevitable that the two characters’ ambitions will collide.
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