39 pages • 1 hour read
Antwone Quenton FisherFinding Fish
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Music
Slave songs, blues, and rock music are part of the fabric of American culture. Racist oppression provided potent artistic stimulus and inspiration. The same is true of Antwone’s art. The musicality of the poem at the end of the Prologue hints at this tradition, especially in the rhyme between “strife” and “life.” While the allure of this kind of cultural production is its relatability, Antoine is born out of strife. Not only his parents’ difficult lives, but the heritage of suffering that contextualizes theirs. When Antwone is still in utero, his mother imagines him dancing to “her favorite Fats Domino song” (19). Music soothes, and its structure connects Antwone with a heritage he longs for, as in the celebratory African drums in his childhood dream.
Later, music becomes a reprieve from an intolerable reality: “I close my eyes–like the song by Peaches & Herb, and take a deep breath [...] in my mind’s story, we love each other. To me, she’s ‘My Girl’ in the Temptations song” (69). Though he rejects the church, Antwone’s relationship with music has a discernably spiritual dimension: “Music was my refuge, a place for me to lay my burdens down, and the singers were the preachers and teachers I cared to hear” (122).
The autobiography closes with a reference to John Lennon’s “Imagine,” a poignant ending given that Lennon was also shot like Antwone’s father. Yet his songs remain and do not cease to provide comfort and hope to a huge number of people. The entwinement of music and heritage continues when Antwone’s daughter is born. Just as he was named for a Fats Domino song, she is named after the Duke Ellington composition, “Mood Indigo.”
Fishing
Antwone’s surname is one of the keys to this memoir. In constructing his identity from puzzle pieces, the orphaned child experiences a deepened sense of connection. This theme is probed in painful moments such as when he imagines a connection between Dr. Fisher and himself based on their shared surname. The name becomes a hook on which Antwone hangs his developing sense of identity: “Not long after I began the fourth grade at Parkwood Elementary, I became known as Fish. […] after a while I started to think it sounded sturdy, like a person with some personality” (131).
Given that Antwone is the adopted son of a reverend and, therefore, deeply familiar with the New Testament, fishing for him is loaded with Biblical connotations: “it was also an allusion to the biblical saying that you can give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, but teach him to fish and he’ll eat forever” (358). In this regard, Antwone’s autobiography has a parabolic dimension. While the book is an offering to many people, like Jesus’ miraculous feeding of the five thousand, it is also distinctly personal. This is most apparent in the intimate moment in which Antwone sings “Summertime” to his newborn daughter: ‘It’s summertime and the living is easy. Fish are jumpin’…’ We were Fish, after all. ‘And the cotton is high.’” (365). The strong sense of personal identification with this famous song denotes the simultaneity of the personal and the universal in artistic work such as Antwone’s own.
