The Theory of Flight is a reflective short story that examines themes of childhood imagination, trauma, and escape in a repressed political and emotional society. The short story is set in Zimbabwe, where it is told in terms of a young girl who finds solace in a personal world that shields her from the turmoil and fear that surrounds her every waking moment. The author, Ndlovu, explores how children process violence and tragedy in their innocent yet profoundly deep ways through memory and imagination.
The narrator remembers herself as a child fascinated with the notion of flying—not as an actual physical process but as a symbolism of freedom. The children talk amongst themselves about how flying works as some sort of theoretical construct that will enable them to escape from where they are. This notion of flying grows concurrently with the narrator's understanding and awareness of the tougher realities of life as an adult: politics, lack of emotional expression, and the underlying threat of danger.
At the heart of all this is the relationship between the narrator and her mother, a figure mediated by fear and repression. This mother Figure of the narrator's does not encourage questioning, curiosity, or emotion, advising her child to keep quiet and submissive. This repression reflects the overall social environment in which speaking out could invite dire punishment. However, the child understands that this silence is somehow protective, yet it also leads to alienation.
As the narrator grows older, she begins to realize that flight is not a physical escape. Rather, it exists in the mind—in imagination, memory, and storytelling. The "theory of flight" thus becomes a means of explicating trauma rather than refusing it. In this way, the child has learned that often, surviving the unendurable requires adaptation rather than escape, and that sometimes the most resilient can be quiet, internal, and unseen.
The style of Ndlovu's prose is lyrical, restrained, and introspective. It tells its story not in terms of a linear plot so much as fragments of memory. This, of course, reflects how trauma remembers-not clear action and sequence, but sensation and image, emotional impression. The use of a child narrator allows extreme happenings to approach, yet not reach, explicit description, resulting in the impact being subtle and haunting.
Ultimately, The Theory of Flight is a meditation on how children come to learn to live in fear without knowing the meaning of fear. Ndlovu seems to hint that imagination is not a denial but a survival mechanism, one that allows the child to live with the world that cannot yet be changed. The story leaves readers with the understanding that though flight may never free the body, it could preserve the self.
