Telephone Conversation

Wole Soyinka

In Telephone Conversation, Wole Soyinka uses the format of a telephone conversation to express his thoughts and feeling about racial discrimination. The telephone is supposed to overcome distances, but ironically the telephone conversation here brings out the distance between people.

The speaker, an African is having a conversation with a British lady. He wants to take a house on rent and he has found one. He thinks the price is reasonable and the location is indifferent. The two words reasonable and indifferent are significant. Even such an abstract thing as price could be reasonable while some people are not. The location is indifferent. The location is not bothered who lives there but the people are. They could be indifferent to the point of being insensitive.

The land lady says ‘she lived off premises’. Even then she is bothered about who is going to reside in her house. The deal is almost settled when the man says he is an African. He wants to know whether she has a problem with that. She suddenly goes silent thus expressing her lack of good breeding. Her silence covers up her racial feeling. But it doesn’t cover it up for long.  She tries to tone it down and hide it. Her looks and habits become a mockery of her own culture. Her mind is still quite narrow.

                                                            Voice, when it came,

Lipstick coated, long gold-rolled

Cigarette -pipped.

When she resumes her conversation, she does not ask him anything about his education or his job. She asks him how dark he is. She is hoping that he may not be too dark for her to tolerate. She sees people as black men and white men, but she is trying to compromise if he is not ‘too dark’. With all her good breeding she fails to see that it is not just her aversion to black people that she should cure but her basic racial view point and discrimination that she should completely do away with.

Even if she says she is tolerant to dark and not to very dark, she is still a racist. Here, the poet makes a very subtle point that he is not attacking the discrimination against his race but the discrimination shown to any race for that matter, brown, yellow or light black.

‘ARE YOU DARK? OR VERY LIGHT?’ Revelation came.

‘You mean – like plain or milk chocolate?’

When the speaker says black, she sees ‘red’. Red is the colour of danger and wherever she is forced to share a spot with the public, she might be feeling horrified. By ‘Red double-tiered omnibus squelching tar’, the poet means how the black community is run over by the white because they sense danger lurking in them.

Obviously, the speaker scores over the lady in breeding, culture, decency and even in language. She does not even understand what ‘sepia’ means. The speaker now feels more confident and teases her in different ways.

Facially, I am brunette, but madam, you should see

The rest of me. Palm of my hand, soles of my feet…’

He tries to tell her how his body got that colour. He refers to his rear end and she takes offence and is about to hang her phone. After she has cut him off, he still manages to tell her to see it for herself. Thus, in every way he is able to outsmart her and make his message loud and clear. He would have lost his chance to be her tenant but he has succeeded in ‘giving it to her’.

The poet also has succeeded in destroying the myth of culture and breeding associated with the western world. He shows how discrimination rears its ugly head in subtle ways. 

An Old Woman

An Old Woman by Arun Kolatkar depicts a very commonplace scene from and the street. But in the poet’s hands it becomes a question which haunts us forever. It is written in simple English and has a very simple structure.

He describes an old woman who grabs hold of the passers-by and goes along with them begging for such a small amount as fifty paise. In return she offers to guide them to a shrine. But they have seen it already. They miss the point that ‘the help given to the poor is what takes you to God and his shrine’.  

But she has no choice but to push them to give her something.

She hobbles along any way

and tightens her grip on you

            People get irritated and they sternly say ‘no’ to her. She won’t let them go.

                                You know how old women are

                                 They stick you like a burr.

A burr is a prickly seed case of plants. It sticks to clothes. This is an exact description of this old woman. Being a woman, she is able to generate life like a seed. But being old, she is only a seed case. A burr sticks to clothes, and the old woman is so weak that she too is supported by the cloths she wears.

The old woman now tells them how difficult her life is among those wretched hills. The hills her represent the wealthy and the mighty. They don’t yield anything. Then people take a look at her and they find how devoid of hope her life is. Her eyes are sunken deep and through her eyes they ‘look at the sky.’ In her eyes they see no hope, an empty sky, with neither clouds not silver linings. Her misery encompasses them too.

            Suddenly people find how farcical the society and its institutions are. The hills hoard and do not yield, the temples offer and do not deliver, and the sky has turned empty of gods. There is nothing to help her get over her misery. There is nothing that offers hope for the poor. While everything loses their significance, the woman in her misery stands there as the only reality there is. She is able to put up with everything, unlike whatever is around her.

            The passers-by may give her some coins. Whatever she is given is what she considers them worthy of. This is a moment of choice for them. They can give her a handsome amount and be great in her eyes and in theirs. They can give her a petty amount and be petty in their eyes and in hers. Either way she is strong enough to take it (the shatterproof crone). It is the image of those who are around her that shatters ‘with a plate glass clatter’.

            Arun Klatkar successfully drives a point home. The poem opens our eyes not only to the old woman’s pitiable condition but also to how we deserve to be pitied for the poverty in our souls. Moreover, the old woman is able to see it clearly.  

                        And you are reduced

to so much small change

in her hand.

The Shield of Achilles

 The Shield of Achilles

W. H. Auden’s poem The Shield of Achilles is remarkable for its content, structure and beauty. Though the poem is based on Homer’s Iliad, the poet uses allusions only as a springboard for his own thoughts. It is not an interpretation of the myth or a new perspective. Whatever the poet has drawn from the epic is made to undergo a complete change to suit his purpose.

The poet names his characters only in the end, thereby suggesting that they are not as important as the situation. Thetis represents the mother of a modern day soldier. Her son Achilles represents the new generation which has degenerated an insensitive humanity which loves wars. The armor maker Hephaestos is still an artist who tells the truth as he always did.

In the beginning of the poem we see Thetis looking over Hephaestos’ shoulder with the hope of seeing the beautiful metal carving on the shield he is making. It is a shield for his son Achilles. But she fails to see what she is looking for. She expects to see the glories of a city but she sees only the spoils of a war. The armor maker, an artist, has put there only,

 An artificial wilderness

          And a sky like lead

It is just the opposite of what Homer talks about when he describes the shield of Achilles. No vines, no olive trees and no

Marble well-governed cities

And ships upon untamed seas,          

Around her, there reverberates the voice of authority, ‘in tones dry and level as the place’, using such a pure science as statistics to mislead the masses. She sees the soldiers, depressed and thoughtful, motivated by some false beliefs, marching towards the killing fields.

            She searches for images of ceremonies, rituals and customs. But the ones she sees are of a different nature. There are no priests around temples but sentries outside an army camp.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot

                      Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)

Instead of animal sacrifice, it is human sacrifice. Instead of pious rituals, it is a scene of insensitivity. Three people, gone pale with fear, are led out to be shot dead. The world around is ruled by a few. The majority live a shameful life,

And died as men before their bodies died.

            The mirth and merriment that Hephaestos had depicted on the shield of Achilles cannot be spotted on the shield of this modern day Achilles’ shield. All Thetis gets to see is,

                   A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,

loitering about in a weed-choked field, pelting stones at birds. His first lessons were about girls getting raped and boys knifing their friends. He has not heard about values or compassion.

               ‘Of any world where promises were kept,

                Or one could weep because another wept.

As the armorer finishes his work and walks away,

Thetis of the shining breasts

                     Cried out in dismay

She is horrified at what is in store for her son. He himself is an iron-hearted killer, whom wars may please and not sadden. His own death is imminent too. 

Thus we can easily see how the poets busts the myths associated with war. He is not only criticizing the modern day war, he is also making us doubt whether the wars in epics could have been different. Using the strands gleaned from the epic Iliad, Auden has managed to weave a magical mirror in which we shamefully witness our own world finding in war a solution not only for political problems but for economic problems too.