Punching the Air Reading Guide & Discussion Questions

Book Club Discussion Questions

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For supplemental discussion material see our Beyond the Book article, The "Central Park Five" (The Exonerated Five) and our BookBrowse Review of Punching the Air.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

1. Amal observes that authorities at school, in the justice system, and the public at large, do not see him, but rather construct a self they assign to him, "shaping me into / the monster / they want me to be" (p. 16). Where does that monster image come from, and why is it so easy to assign it to Amal?
2. Amal expresses a feeling of inevitability about his fate in the system (p. 8), and the shaping of his life by outside forces, like the prosecutor writing the "script" and directing the "scene" (p. 22), and in the poem "Blind Justice" (p. 44). To what extent do you think he and the other inmates, and the privileged boys, created their own life outcomes, and to what extent are their outcomes results of societal forces?
3. When he is sentenced, Amal compares his life before this moment to Africa and says, "maybe jail / is America" (p. 61). In "DNA," he connects the shackles he wears leaving the court to the shackles his ancestors wore (pp. 80–81). Discuss the connections between his experience as a black youth in contemporary America and the experiences of early Africans arriving in the Americas. What has changed, and where do we see echoes of the past?

Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Balzer + Bray. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.