Leave Taking Themes & Symbols Explained

What the book is about

Themes

Displacement and belonging

Enid came to England on the Windrush believing she was going home to the mother country, and found only grey — sky, buildings, people. Brod names her condition bluntly: she doesn't belong in England and can't go back to Jamaica. Her daughter Del inherits the same wound without knowing its source, feeling all her life that something was wrong. When the truth comes out, Del concludes she doesn't belong anywhere. The play's point is that displacement isn't cured by a passport or a house — it gets handed down until someone names it.

Characters:EnidDelBrod

Family secrets and the cost of silence

Enid hides Del's parentage for years, insisting the truth would destroy her. Brod argues the opposite: the truth is the only thing that can save her. The play stages the battle between these positions. Del's poem, her drowning dream, her sense of being a sentence rather than a life — all are symptoms of a secret she can feel but can't see. When Enid finally speaks, the revelation doesn't destroy Del; it explains her. The book's point: silence doesn't protect children from the past, it just leaves them alone with it.

Characters:EnidDelBrod

The dead and the unfinished rituals

Brod, an obeah man, pours rum for the ancestors at the party and later calls the spirits with water and a candle that flickers. Enid believes her sister died because their mother never performed the nine-night or the forty-day, so the spirit never rested and a duppy took her. The rituals are how the living settle their debts to the dead; skipping them leaves accounts open. The play's point is that grief needs ceremony — and a family that refuses its own rites passes the unrest down like an inheritance.

Characters:EnidBrod

Mothers, daughters, and impossible promises

Enid's control — ordering Viv to attend her own party, slapping Del — is love in its most rigid form, shaped by a promise made to a dying sister. Del experiences it as captivity: no party, no nothing, a sentence instead of a life. Viv gets a version of the same iron will and pushes back. The ending holds both truths at once: Enid kept her promise and kept her sister's child safe, but couldn't keep her. The book's point is that doing your best, even heroically, doesn't entitle you to the person you did it for.

Characters:EnidDelViv

Objects that carry meaning

Symbols

The libation of rum

Brod pours rum on the floor and invokes the ancestors who suffered so the living might be free. It is the old world's ceremony performed in a London living room — a reminder that the dead are owed acknowledgement. The party Enid throws for Viv is a secular version of the same rite, and both fail to include the person who most needs honouring: Del.

The flickering candle

In Brod's ritual, a glass of water and a candle are set out and the spirits are asked for a sign. The candle flickers. It stands at the hinge of the play: whatever Enid has refused to believe — duppies, the unrest of her sister's spirit — becomes undeniable enough to make her speak. The truth arrives through the old beliefs she tried to leave behind.

The photograph of the sister

The last image of the play: Enid alone, holding a photograph of the sister who died giving birth to Del. It stands for the promise Enid kept and the person she erased to keep it. Del has walked out; the photo is what remains of the woman Enid never mentioned — grief finally given a face, too late to share it.

The drowning dream

Del dreams of drowning while Enid stands on the shore, watching her go under. It is the play's whole mother-daughter relationship in one image: a child going down and a parent whose watching looks like indifference. It also echoes the duppy story — a death by water in the family that no ritual ever settled.

Spoilers

The ending explained

The ending refuses to let anyone off. Del leaves not in a tantrum but on a mission — to find out who she is, which she cannot do under the roof of the woman who raised her under a false name. Enid's last lines hold the play's cruel arithmetic: she kept her promise, she kept her sister's child safe, and still lost her. One reading is tragic — the truth Brod demanded 'saved' Del only by taking her away, so honesty and loss arrive in the same breath. Another reading is hopeful: Del walking out is the first act of a self-chosen life, the end of being a sentence. The photograph and the fade to black leave Enid with the dead instead of the living, which is where her silence always pointed. It lands because it doesn't reconcile — it simply shows the price.

Who is who

Leave Taking characters

Every character, where they appear and how they are connected.

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