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.