Sunday, February 6, 2011

Telephone Conversation

This poem is about the discrimination of the African.



In the first stanza, the poet wrote about him finding a place to rent. He found a almost perfect flat and he was calling the landlady to check about the price and conditions. As it was during a time which racisms ranpant, the poet was an African and many white people were racist against them. Thus , before accepting the conditions, the poet had to con fess that he was an African to avoid things from getting messy.

However, the landlady, instead of being straight forward to reject the poet, discriminated him by asking how black he was. The poet was angry. He looked at the red booth, red pillar-box, red double-tiered. All these things are of the same colour in almost every country but not te colour of the skin.

The landlady continued to ask the poet about his skin colour in stanza three. The poet decided to tell her after much struggling. He tried to avoid answering her indirectly failed to convince the lady. Without any choice, the poet answered " West African Sepia" like in his passport. The assence of discrimination became worse as the lady either pretends or do not know.

The lady wanted to stop the conversation in the last stanza, however, the poet won the conversation by cleverly saying that although being a "facial brunette" , the lady should not depend on the skin colour of a man to assume that he is bad or good. There are also many other colours on the body of an African also contains other colours other than black.

1 comment:

  1. Hi Zi Han, your blog is interesting and everything is accessible. I have no difficulties finding posts etc. However, I think you can put the questions in your blog post so readers can know what you are trying to answer. It is not so much of a discussion as a question and answer. Some of your posts are a bit too short so I hope you can elaborate on them. On the other hand, the rest of your stuff is cool and the blog is attractive.

    ReplyDelete