89 pages • 2 hours read
The Bite of the Mango
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Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
When Mariatu wakes, she remembers “I have no hands” (42). She struggles upright and staggers in circles. On the brink of losing consciousness again, she thinks of her family and hears a voice in her head tell her, “You will live” (43).
With difficulty, Mariatu drapes a piece of discarded washing around her arms before staggering into the forest. She follows a path to an abandoned farmhouse and lies down on a bench repeating, “I’m alive. I will stay alive” (45). When she opens her eyes, she sees a large black cobra reaching for her but when she backs away from it, the snake withdraws.
Fleeing outside, Mariatu encounters another black cobra stretched across the path and recalls her grandmother teaching her that the spirits of dead relatives sometimes watch over people, often appearing “in the guise of an animal, a bird or a reptile” (45). The surprising presence of two black cobras is enough to convince her that something like this is taking place.
When the snake will not move, Mariatu is forced to take a different route through the forest. Here, she encounters two dogs. One of them, a “jet-black” creature, is “barking like I had never heard a dog bark before” (46). Frightened of the dog, Mariatu is again forced to take another path, where she finds a man and begs him for help.
The man says he cannot help Mariatu but offers her a mango, holding it to her mouth to eat. Mariatu refuses because “[i]t felt wrong to be fed like a baby” so the man places it on the fabric stretched between her arms allowing her to “take a few bites of the juicy fruit” (48). Mariatu begs the man to take her with him but he says her injuries are so severe that “You will die if you come with me” (50). Instead, he points her in the direction of a town named Port Loko and says goodbye.
Chapter 5 Summary
When Mariatu finally reaches a village on the outskirts of Port Loko, the villagers are reluctant to help her, fearing that she is a decoy sent by the rebels. However, once they realize how badly she is hurt, they walk her in the direction of the town.
The hospital at Port Loko is gray concrete building filled with people “waiting for help—old men, women holding screaming and bloodied babies, young children cradling their arms like me” (55-56). Mariatu drifts in and out of consciousness before starting to panic, fearing that the rebels will attack the hospital.
A nurse calms Mariatu, reassuring her that there are soldiers there to protect them. One of these soldiers helps Mariatu into a large military ambulance full of badly-injured people heading to the superior hospital in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. To her horror, Mariatu recognizes two of them as she looks into “the sad brown eyes of first Mohamed and then Ibrahim” (58).
Chapter 6 Summary
Chapter 6 opens with Mariatu recalling seeing a tiny weaver bird fall from the sky to land injured in front of her. She decided to let it die naturally rather than try and save it only to let it “die in pain a day of two later or, worse, live out its life with a broken wing” (59). However, after lying still for a long time, it suddenly “stood up as solid as ever and lifted off into the sky” (59).
When Mariatu sees her cousins, she feels like the weaver bird, stunned and frozen. She snaps out of it only when Ibrahim looks down at the bandages on his arms and Mariatu realizes that he too has lost his hands. Mariatu’s head slumps onto the shoulder of the woman next to her. She apologizes but the woman says simply “Don’t” (60) and gently returns Mariatu’s head to her shoulder.
When Mariatu awakes, the woman introduces herself as Fatmata. Throughout the journey, Fatmata supports Mariatu, reassuring her that they are safe and holding her when she is scared. Together, they reach the overcrowded hospital and Mariatu notes that the “stench of the building reached me before I even walked inside—blood, vomit and sweat” (62). When she sits down to wait, she is immediately sick.
After she has been treated, Fatmata takes Mariatu to see Mohamed and Ibrahim in the men’s ward. Still wearing “the big fat grin he always wore” (64), Mohamed tells Mariatu not to cry and even manages to make her laugh by joking that they can no longer wrestle because, without hands, “[n]o one will win” (64). Buoyed by the laughter, Mariatu feels “like that little weaver bird again, but this time I had the feeling I could learn to fly” (64).
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
Chapter Four opens with Mariatu’s monumental realization that she has lost her hands. Almost at the point of collapse, it is her love for her family that gives her the strength to carry on. When she thinks of them, she hears a voice in her head telling her that she will survive. With this, the reader is introduced more fully to Mariatu’s powerful will to live, balancing her wish to die that appears several times in the previous chapters. This occurs again when she reaches the abandoned farmhouse and tries to keep herself going by repeating, “I will stay alive” (45).
The scene in the farmhouse also introduces another symbolic element: the notion of black animals as the spirits of departed relatives watching over the living. Based, again, on her grandmother’s teachings, Mariatu believes that someone, possibly her half-brother, Santigie, may be appearing to her in animal form. Certainly, the black animals do force her to make decisions that ultimately prevent her death. The first cobra stops her from lingering too long in the farmhouse where she could easily bleed to death, while the second forces her to take a different path through the forest. This leads her to the black dog, which sends her down a path that eventually leads to a man who can direct her to the hospital, where her life is saved.
The same man also gives Mariatu a mango, her first food since the rebel’s attack, and this is also a highly symbolic moment that is alluded to in the book’s title. A common theme throughout much of the book is the painful loss of childhood innocence. However, the manner in which Mariatu manages to “take a few bites of the juicy fruit” (48) shows an opposing or mirroring aspect of this theme. When the man holds the fruit to her to mouth, she refuses it because she does not want to be fed like a baby, choosing instead to hold it between her recently-injured arms. In other words, even while freshly injured and close to death, Mariatu determinedly refuses to allow her disability to take away her independence and autonomy, to make her feel like an infant, dependent on others. This is an early example of Mariatu’s great strength and determination that will reappear throughout her tale.
Finally, the injured weaver bird is another important symbol, representing both Mariatu’s shock at seeing her injured cousins and her relationship with disability. At various points throughout the book, Mariatu struggles to come to terms with her disability and the horrors she has witnessed and, as seen in the earlier chapter, at times she concludes that death will be a preferable path. Her observation that it would be better for the bird to die than to live with a broken wing, represents this understanding, applied equally to the bird’s life and her own. The fact that the bird recovers likewise symbolically predicts the way she too will find the strength to “learn to fly” (64). It is Mohamed’s humor and positivity that allow her to begin moving past her trauma and start recognizing that recovery is possible.
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