Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky

A key moment in fantastic, known as fantasy, literature is when the reader buys into the world painted by the writer, and this moment is sped along in Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky first by establishing a realistic portrait of a Chicago boy struggling with life and then transitioning to a fantastical world that he paints in concrete detail, despite the fantasy setting and characters. Chapters 1-9 engage in worldbuilding that establishes the cultural context for the story, namely, the modern-day reality of Black boyhood as well as Black oral culture and history.

Being a boy is hard. From the beginning, Tristan is constantly failing to live up to the expectations of others no matter where he is. He feels like a fish out of water whether he is in a boxing ring, Alabama, a sea of fire, or a flying raft. The threats he faces in Chicago are overwhelming but perhaps familiar to adolescents making the first transition to young adulthood. His best friend has died, and neither he nor the adults in his life have been able to provide him guidance on how he is supposed to process his grief. Adults move him around—pushing him to box and sending him to Alabama—because they don’t know what to do with him. When Tristan enters the story, he is vulnerable and at a low point.

In his bedroom on the night Gum Baby invades, in MidPass, and on the Burning Sea, Tristan encounters threats that are fantastical, but that helpless feeling of not being in control of events is just the same. Here, too, Tristan feels like a problem for adults to solve, a point made clear when Brer Fox attempts unsuccessfully to figure out whether Tristan is from the Ridge or the Golden Crescent, regions of Alke. The insults Gum Baby hurls at Tristan are comic relief, but they also show that others see Tristan as a bumbler who causes disaster wherever he goes, mostly because other characters fail to fill him in on just what he should be doing.

Tristan’s perception of himself as a failure follows him to this new world when he can’t save Brer Fox using the only tools he has brought with him, his fists and the journal. Tristan initially fails to mark a key connection between his failures, namely that the tasks he is being called on to do are ones that children mostly are not designed to bear.

Tristan’s confusion in both worlds is just one of several bridges that connect the two worlds. Although Tristan himself expresses constant shock at his altered reality once he punches a hole in the sky, the stage is set for his belief in this alternate reality by including touches of fantasy and magic right from the beginning of the novel with the introduction of Eddie’s strange, glowing journal. Nana’s recounting of folktales and folk beliefs like the function of the bottle tree prime Tristan and the reader to see a strange world and characters as plausible.

By the time Gum Baby pops though the wall between the real world and fantasy, both Tristan and the reader are ready to believe the fantasy. The key to the system of magic in the novel comes in Chapter 7: “Iron Monsters 101,” a title that highlights the function of this chapter as a tutorial on life in Alke. The chapter establishes that familiar characters out of Black folklore live here.

Another important bridge between the worlds is the enduring impact of the history of slavery on Black culture in both worlds. In Chapter 7, the “big bad” in the novel appears as the Maafa. Maafa, meaning a disaster or devastating tragedy in the Kiswahili language of the African continent, is a term anthropologist Marimba Ani uses in her 1988 academic book Let the Circle Be Unbroken: The Implications of African Spirituality in the Diaspora to describe what happened to people of African descent once they entered the slave trade.

“MidPass,” the region of this world that Tristan first enters, is short for “Middle Passage,” the middle leg of the Atlantic slave trade, during which slavers transformed captives into enslaved people through the dehumanizing conditions aboard slave ships. Ironically, the strangeness of MidPass comes from the in-your-face nature of this history. Much of modern American life is designed to make people forget this history, but both friendly and unfriendly creatures in this world force Tristan to reckon with the threat that this forgetting poses to his survival.

The central problem of the novel is established as the question is posed as to whether Tristan will gain enough self-awareness about the personal problems he faces and understanding of the real impact of his culture to win the day.