The woman with the strongest sense of self, however, is Tracey. Hawa, her West African friend is someone else entirely she is from a little village, and is happy to be there – and through her the narrator realises that leaving one’s birthplace is not necessarily a sign of being successful. Aimee, the Australian popstar, is so used to being famous that she no longer has to worry about who she is, as long as she’s popular. For instance, her mother, who is from Jamaican descent and is determined to be a strong, independent, feminist, politically influential woman, wishes her daughter will live a similarly activist life. It’s interesting that those close to the narrator, who remains nameless throughout the novel, do seem to believe that their identity is fixed. The novel is not told chronologically but instead switches between different events of her life (such as the time she first went to tap dance class, and how she first saw superstar Aimee dance on tv and later met her in real life), which mirrors how identity is fluid, rather than fixed. The narrator is continuously trying to find out who she is and where she belongs, and eventually she realises that her identity changes over time and across different continents. The main theme of Swing Time is identity.
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