He has been so weakened and traumatized by his experiences that he can barely control his reactions, or his own body the violent vomiting mentioned here, for instance, is induced by nothing more than the sight of a few Japanese-American civilians at a train station. Here we see the fragility of Tayo's mental state after his return from war. Maybe it had always been this way and he was only seeing it for the first time. Years and months had become weak, and people could push against them and wander back and forth in time. He couldn't vomit any more, and the little face was still there, so he cried at how the world had come undone, how thousands of miles, high ocean waves and green jungles could not hold people in their place. He could still see the face of the little boy, looking back at him, smiling, and he tried to vomit that image from his head, because it was Rocky's smiling face from a long time before, when they were little kids together. The smell of his own vomit and the rotting garbage filled his head, and he retched until his stomach heaved in frantic dry spasms. And what little still remained to white people was shriveled like a seed hoarded too long, shrunken past its time, and split open now, to expose a fragile, pale leaf stem, perfectly formed and dead.The swelling was pushing against his throat, and he leaned against the brick wall and vomited into the big garbage can. Hollow and lifeless as a witchery clay figure. But the effects were hidden, evident only in the sterility of their art, which continued to feed off the vitality of other cultures, and in the dissolution of their consciousness into dead objects: the plastic and neon, the concrete and steel. The destroyers had tricked the white people as completely as they had fooled the Indians, and now only a few people understood how the filthy deception worked only a few people knew that the lie was destroying the white people faster than it was destroying Indian people.

It was the white people who had nothing it was the white people who were suffering as thieves do, never able to forget that their pride was wrapped in something stolen, something that had never been, and could never be, theirs. “The people had been taught to despise themselves because they were left with barren land and dry rivers.

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