The family landed in Atlanta at night. They wandered off the airplane into a vertiginous swirl of strange images, sounds, and languages. They walked through the long corridors of the airport, past moving sidewalks, blinking murals, stands of strange-looking food, and a rush of people who all seemed to know exactly where in all that chaos they wanted to go.
This quote encapsulates the conflicted feelings of refugees who have just arrived in a new country. The author describes the overwhelming mix of sights and sounds, highlighting how confusing it can be to see and hear many foreign stimuli. To put the reader in the perspective of the characters, the author uses the words "strange-looking" and "vertiginous" to emphasize the alien and disorienting nature of the experience. The author adds complexity to the quote by writing that the people the characters saw around them "seemed to know exactly where... they wanted to go" (71). The word "seemed" alludes to the fact that perhaps many of the people in the crowded airport were not exactly sure of where to go or what the future held for them, but this still did not provide help or comfort to the characters.
This was the sight that had drawn her to start the Fugees in the first place, two years back, on a lark and with little appreciation for what she was getting herself into: a group of refugee boys who had survived the unimaginable, strangers now in an unfamiliar land, playing the game with passion, focus, and grace that seemed, for a brief moment anyway, to nullify the effects of whatever misfortune they had experienced in the past.
In this quote, Luma reflects on why she began the Fugees. This is important for her because there are many points in the book where she gets overwhelmed or loses faith in the team. However, as the author says, there are also times that the focus and passion of the players allows them to transcend the various struggles they have faced and simply play a great game of soccer. These moments remind Luma, the players, and the reader why the team matters.
Unlike basketball, baseball, or football, games that reset after each play, soccer unfolds fluidly and continuously. To understand how a goal was scored, you have to work back through the action - the sequences of passes and decisions, the movement of the players away from the action who reappear unexpectedly in empty space to create or waste opportunities - all the way back to the first touch. If that goal was scored by a young refugee from Liberia, off an assist from a boy from southern Sudan, who was set up by a player from Burundi or a Kurd from Iraq - on a field in Georgia, U.S.A., no less - understanding its origins would mean following the thread of causation back in time to events that long preceded the first whistle.
This quote describes how someone playing or watching a game of soccer must follow the way that players and moves work together to lead to an outcome. The quote emphasizes one reason why Luma had so much success in bonding the Fugees players to one another: unlike sports that are more focused on the individual, in soccer, the players from different countries needed to communicate, work together, and understand other players' strengths and weaknesses. On a metaphorical level, this quote also speaks to the need to look back in time to see the causes for things that happen; this is paralleled by the author going back to describe the circumstances that forced many of the players and their families out of their home countries and to America.
Putting Luma on a pedestal is counterproductive... Luma is really a normal person doing what she can for the people around her. If people can look at her and see that, that she's human, not a saint or a superhero, and that she doesn't—can't—do everything or effect miracles, then maybe they can say to themselves, "I need to look around myself and see my neighborhood, and what is going on here and five streets over, and what I can do in terms of investing myself and my time, to be present for the people around me, and to do something positive for change in my community."
This quote, which Tracy tells St. John near the end of the book after the Fugees have already gained recognition from the article published by the journalist, reveals the main purpose of the book. While the book does call attention to Luma's compassion and perseverance, the author is careful to note throughout that she did not have special training, nor did she always feel she was making the right decisions to help her players. The book is intended to inspire readers to open their eyes to the number of refugees in their country and their local community, and to encourage readers to seek ways they themselves can positively impact that community in large or small ways.
Beatrice ran through the darkened streets of Monrovia, past checkpoints manned by menacing teenage boys and young men burdened by the weight of guns too big for their small frames.
Young boys are a motif in Outcasts United; young boys make up the three Fugees teams, but they also make up the gangs that threaten Fugees players and were a large part of the political groups that forced many of the families of the Fugees from their homes overseas. In this quote, as Beatrice fought to get herself and her family to safety, St. John uses the weight and size of the guns brandished by men at checkpoints to emphasize their youth. Perhaps as Beatrice noticed this, it made her think about how vulnerable her own sons were, causing her even more fear.
While the freight trains continued to rumble through town a dozen times a day, little in Clarkston looked familiar to the people who’d spent their lives there. Women walked down the street in hijabs and even in full burkas, or jalabib. The shopping center transformed: while Thriftown, the grocery store, remained, restaurants such as Hungry Harry’s pizza joint were replaced by Vietnamese and Eritrean restaurants, a halal butcher, and a “global pharmacy” that catered to the refugee community by selling, among other things, international phone cards.
This quote uses the changing physical appearance of Clarkston to demonstrate its changing demographics in the 1990s and 2000s. The consistency of the freight train going through the town and Thriftown remaining open shows that not everything about the town has changed, especially in the way it fits into the United States at large. In contrast, the opening of the halal butcher and the closing of the pizza restaurant represent the way the new inhabitants of Clarkston began to reshape its culture.
The boys were playing the game with the sweaty mixture of passion, joy, and friendship she recognized from the games played in the empty lot on the other side of the fence from her grandmother’s house in Amman. But unlike in Amman, the boys playing in Clarkston seemed to come from many different backgrounds— they were white, black, and brown.
When Luma made the decision to stay in the United States after university, her father made sure she was cut off from her entire family in terms of finances as well as all communication. This created a great sadness and nostalgia in Luma, driving her to make decisions in the next few years based on what returns a sense of home or comfort to her. Luma moves to Georgia because its climate is similar to that of her home city of Amman, and in this quote the author shows that a major reason Luma began the Fugees was because its first players reminded her of boys she always wanted to play soccer with at home as a child. The narrator also underscores the passion and focus of the players to show how these players were different from the girls on the team Luma was coaching at the time through the Decatur YMCA.
"She’s a girl," he said. "She doesn’t know what she’s talking about." Luma ordered him to stand in goal. She took off her shoes as the boy waited beneath the crossbar, rocking back and forth and growing more anxious by the moment. She asked for a ball, which she placed on the grass. Then, barefoot, as the team looked on, she blasted a shot directly at the boy, who dove out of the way as the ball rocketed into the net. Luma turned toward her team. "Anybody else?" she asked.
As a child, Luma was prevented from playing soccer because of her gender; her grandmother would often scold her for spending time outside with strange men. Though Luma decided to stay in the United States because of the relative freedom it afforded her as a woman, her gender still caused her to be judged at times, especially with regard to playing and coaching soccer. Luma's approach to this kind of judgement is clear from this scene during tryouts for the first season of the Fugees. She shows the players her skill has nothing to do with her gender, and makes it clear that insubordination or sass will not be tolerated on her team.
Luma picked up on another problem facing her young players. Many had come from places that had been destroyed by war, so they had never had access to any kind of formal education. Often refugee children were unable to read or do even the simplest math. Without a basic education in their own language, they were playing catch-up in schools where classes were taught in a new language, one many of the boys could barely understand. While the public school system around Clarkston offered English-as-a-second-language programs, the schools were overwhelmed with newcomers. To move students through the system, many refugees were placed in standard classes that, while appropriate for their ages, did not take into account their lack of schooling or English. If these students didn’t get help and find a way to succeed in school, they would fail out or simply get too old for high school, at which point they would be on their own.
When Clarkston was chosen as an ideal city to place refugees, the decision was made based on its proximity to Atlanta, where adult refugees could travel for work. Refugee children, however, needed to be placed into schools in Clarkston itself, and these schools needed to adapt quickly and drastically to provide the services these students needed. Since many of the refugee children came in with low levels of English, abruptly halted education in all subjects, and psychological trauma, this was no easy feat, and the schools had varying levels of success. Luma was aware of this problem, and tried to get players the help they needed while demanding that they also take personal responsibility for their education; she promised to remove any players who were failing in school or didn't attend her tutoring sessions. In the epilogue, the author describes the academic success of many, though not all, of the Fugees players, which can be at least partially attributed to Luma's efforts.
Bien explained that he and his family had just arrived the night before and that he didn’t know anyone or anything about America. He wanted to know what American kids were like. Were they nice? Were they different? Grace laughed. Were they different! The boys at school, he told Bien, wore their pants low around their hips— almost to their knees, not like in Africa, where boys and men wore their pants around their waists, with belts and tucked-in shirts. American boys wore their hair long, in braids, like women. They weren’t so nice either. Some had guns. They fought with one another. They made fun of people from Africa. Boys and girls got together and did things you weren’t supposed to do.
All of the Fugees came to America with certain preconceptions about the country. Soon, through conversations and first-hand experiences, the players and their families came to understand the positives and negatives of their new homes. In this quote, Grace gives an overview of American life including clothing, violence, xenophobia, and societal expectations. All of these are themes in the book that emerge in sections before and after this quote, from the players' different dress at school, home, and practice to Luma's rules regarding gang involvement and sexuality.
