I am the god, Apollo

I am the god, Apollo is the recurring phrase Apollo Kagwa uses to steady and remake himself. First spoken by his father as a tender blessing to a newborn, it later becomes Apollo’s private answer to rejection and fear. The words carry the novel’s central tension in miniature: they promise a complete, invulnerable self, yet return most insistently when Apollo feels exposed, powerless, or close to panic.

Origin in a Father’s Blessing

When Apollo is born, Brian West carries him in the crook of one arm and calls him a god, joining that grand title to the intimate image of his “little sun.” The blessing accompanies the newborn’s bedtime and belongs to a brief period in which the family seems to have entered a happy ending. But by Apollo’s fourth birthday, Brian West has vanished without leaving a trace. The phrase thus begins as a father’s gift and outlasts the father’s presence: Apollo retains words of affection whose original speaker is no longer there to repeat them.

That history gives the mantra its double edge. It offers Apollo a voice of care to carry forward, but it also recalls the abrupt absence that made such reassurance necessary. The adult phrase is not simply the continuation of a secure childhood bond; it is something Apollo must say for himself after the person who first named him has disappeared. The story’s movement from a father addressing his child to the child addressing himself makes the words both inheritance and repair.

A Mantra Against Humiliation

As a teenager, Apollo tries to sell old magazines and books to New York booksellers. Some welcome his energy and teach him the trade; others suspect that he has stolen his stock, shut him out behind buzzer-controlled doors, or leave him waiting while they pretend not to see him. Those encounters unfold in a city where anti-Black suspicion makes even a boy with glasses and a backpack seem threatening. Apollo begins to wonder whether he really is a monster, and whether that supposed monstrosity explains why his father left.

The mantra emerges in these moments of self-doubt. Repeated silently or under his breath while he is being judged, it answers the degrading image imposed on him with an image of his own making. The invocation does not open the doors or change the booksellers’ conduct; its protective force is inward. By repeating the name and title, Apollo tries to prevent humiliation from becoming his whole account of himself. The contrast between his self-declaration and the people who still refuse him entry preserves the limits as well as the necessity of that defense.

Repetition in Love and Fatherhood

The phrase returns in Apollo’s adult relationships, where its force shifts from private endurance toward promises made to another person. Before Emma Valentine leaves for Brazil, Apollo repeats it to himself as he takes her hand and asks whether he can convince her to stay. The mantra accompanies a vulnerable attempt at intimacy; it does not make the separation disappear. Later, when Emma explains that she believes her three wishes will come true only after the red string on her wrist falls away naturally, Apollo cuts it with a plastic knife and promises that all three wishes will come true with him. He again turns the self-affirmation into confidence in what he can offer her, even as his decisive action overrides the ritual’s stated condition.

After their baby’s birth, the words become practical as well as emotional. Apollo retrieves the bag he carried on the night Brian was born and finds a copy of Fields of Fire inside. He works at his laptop to contact a collector, then whispers the mantra as he begins. The quiet, late-night scene places the phrase beside the labor of earning money and caring for a family: Apollo’s declaration accompanies work rather than replacing it. Its echo of Brian West’s old blessing also makes Apollo’s own fatherhood a place where the inherited words can be carried forward, though now as a resource he supplies himself.

Panic, Revenge, and the Limits of the Claim

When Apollo hears a child crying in the back room and sees the intruder holding a kettle of scalding water, the mantra rises into an expression of terror. Chained in the kitchen, he imagines his body expanding into a sun, too enormous for the apartment, and repeats the words with increasing intensity. The once-private reassurance becomes a response to an immediate threat to his child. Yet he remains restrained, and his cry cannot by itself protect the baby. The gulf between the godlike image and the chained father makes the scene a stark test of what the mantra can—and cannot—do.

On North Brother Island, Apollo again uses the phrase to master fear before confronting the women who live there. His breathing is constricted; he speaks softly, then louder, and finally shouts that he wants revenge. The women approach with clubs fashioned from chair legs and beat him. Here the recurrence culminates not in victory but in physical defeat. The words have helped Apollo move from hiding in the shadows into the open, but they have not made him invulnerable.

Across these scenes, the mantra changes in volume and purpose: a remembered blessing, a shield against racist suspicion, a private accompaniment to love and work, and a cry against danger. Its power lies less in proving that Apollo is literally godlike than in giving him a language with which to resist abandonment and act despite fear. Each return also exposes the distance between the person Apollo claims to be and the vulnerable person the world can still hurt.