Controversial History of the House of the Seven Gables

Africa, by David Diop David Mandessi Diop (19271960) was a revolutionary African poet born in France that with p bents of westbound African railway line. His verse forms highlighted problems of Africa brought ab proscribed by colonialism and gave a message to Africans to bring about change and freedom. He was cognize for his involvement in the negritude movement in France, a movement started by B escape writers and artists protesting against French colonialism and its set up of African culture and values. His views and feelings were create in Presence Africaine and in his go for of songs Coups de pillon which was print in 1956.Diop died at the age of 33 in a plane crash. Africa my Africa Africa of proud warriors in inherited savannahs Africa of whom my grand fret sings On the banks of the distant river The song starts by Diop reminiscing about Africa, a land he has non seen but provided heard about from his grandmothers songs. His choice of spoken communication interc hangeable distant symbolise how far he is from his country, a feeling base on his real life as he lived in France throughout his childhood and unaccompanied visited Africa in the 1950s.Despite this, he upsetts a vivid scene of Africa and the proud warriors who walk on its ancestral savannahs You can sense how much he misses his homeland by his stress on the word Africa, and he continues to c each(prenominal) it My Africa to emphasise it is his land and his feelings of patriotism towards it. I have never cognize you But your rake flows in my veins Your beautiful unrelenting blood that irrigates the fields The blood of your sweat The sweat of your knead The work of your slavery He continues to say that he has never k instantaneouslyn Africa, but despite the distance he cannot deny how much it is a part of him.The beautiful somber blood which flows in his veins describes his African descent and shows how much Africa is a part of him and his hump for it and its pile. The next verses be angry and accusatory as he stresses that it is the blood and sweat of his people which is irrigating the fields for the benefit of other people. By this he is pointing a experience at the colonialists who exploited corrosive people and mapd them as slaves to profit from their ponderous labour. Africa, tell me Africa Is this your digest that is unbent This bear out that never breaks infra the weight of humiliationThis back trembling with red scars And saying no to the whip under the midday sun. In these verses he urges the Black people to affirm up to the pain and the humiliation that they are suffering in their own land. He reminds them of the strength Teleph angiotensin-converting enzyme Conversation by Wole Soyinka Nigerian poet Wole Soyinka uses irony to depict the absurdity of racism in his poem, Telephone Conversation. IRONY the use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning the irony of her reply, How nice when I verbalize I had to work all told weekend. technique of indicating, as through char motioner or plot development, an purpose or attitude opposite to that which is actually or ostensibly verbalized. (esp. in modern writing) a stylus of organizing a work so as to give full expression to contradictory or antonymous impulses, attitudes, etc. , esp. as a means of indicating detachment from a subject, theme, or emotion. Irony, badinage, satire indicate hoax of something or someone. The essential feature of irony is the indirect presentation of a contradiction amidst an movement or expression and the context in which it occurs.In the figure of speech, emphasis is placed on the op blot between the literal and intended meaning of a statement one thing is said and its opposite implied, as in the comment, Beautiful weather, isnt it? made when it is raining or nasty. Irony differs from sarcasm in hugeer wraith and wit. In sarcasm ridicule or mockery is used harshly, a lot crudely and contempt uously, for destructive purposes. It may be used in an indirect gentle slices gentlemanner, and have the skeleton of irony, as in What a pretty musician you turned out to be or it may be used in the form of a direct statement, You couldnt play one piece correctly if you had two assistants. The distinctive quality of sarcasm is present in the spoken word and manifested chiefly by vocal inflection, whereas satire and irony, arising originally as literary and rhetorical forms, are exhibited in the organization or structuring of either language or literary material. Satire usually implies the use of irony or sarcasm for censorious or circumstantial purposes and is often directed at public figures or institutions, conventional behavior, political websites, etc. Some examplesWhen something bad has happened This is comely great, or That was except perfect. In response to a bad joke Thats just so funny, or obviously feigned (and often weak) laughter Ha. Ha. Ha. NOT. When a borin g statement has been made Wow, great When someone has tho or so botched something Great job or Congratulations When somebody accuses another of something bad/ ill-treat Do I get bonus points if I act alike(p) I care? use when writing I love school The vocaliser of the poem, a dark West African man searching for a new apartment, tells the story of a telephone call he made to a potential land doll.Instead of discussing price, side, amenities, and other information significant to the apartment, they discussed the loud speaker unit systems pelt color. The landlady is described as a polite, well-bred woman, heretofore though she is shown to be sh conquerly racist. The speaker is described as being genuinely apologetic for his skin color, level(p) though he has no reason to be sorry for something which he was born with and has no control over. In this short poem, we can see that the speaker is an intelligent person by his use of high diction and agile wit, not the savage that t he landlady assumes he is because of his skin color.All of these discrepancies between what appears to be and what rightfully is create a sense of verbal irony that helps the poem display the ridiculousness of racism. The price seemed reasonable, berth / Indifferent The startle sentence of the poem includes a pun that introduces the theme of the following poem and to a fault informs us that things are not going to be as straightforward as they appear. The price seemed reasonable, location / Indifferent If we read over these lines quickly, we would assume that the speaker meant Being incomplete good nor bad by the use of the word indifferent .But, indifferent is alike defined as Characterized by a lack of partiality unbiased. This other definition gives the sentence an entirely different meaning. Instead of the apartments location being neither good or bad, we read that the apartments location is unbiased and impartial. However, we quickly learn in the following lines of the po em that the location of the apartment is the exact opposite of unbiased and impartial. The speaker is rudely denied the ability to rent the airscrew because of bias towards his skin color.This opening pun quickly grabs our attention and suggests that we as readers be on the mindset for more(prenominal) subtle uses of language that will alter the meaning of the poem. Caught I was, insultingly After this introduction, the speaker begins his self- averion about his skin color (line 4). It is ironic that this is called a self-confession since the speaker has nothing that he should have to confess since he has done nothing wrong. He warns the landlady that he is African, instead of just informing her. Caught I was, foully he says after listening to the silence the landlady had responded with. I hate a wasted journeyI am AfricanAgain, the word caught connotes that some wrong had been done, that the speaker was a criminal caught committing his crime. By making the speaker actually seem sorry for his skin color, Soyinka shows how ridiculous it really is for someone to apologize for his race. To modern horse opera thinkers, it seems almost comical that anyone should be so submissive when he has committed no wrongdoing. ARE YOU unrelenting? OR VERY LIGHT? Her goodness is seemingly confirmed subsequent on when the speaker says that she was considerate in rephrasing her question (line 17). Her response to the callers question included only light / Impersonality (lines 20-21).Although she was described as being a wealthy woman, she was seemingly considerate and only slightly impersonal. The speaker seems almost welcome for her demeanor. Of course, these kind descriptions of the woman are teeming with verbal irony. We know that she is being very shallowly judgmental even while she is seeming to be so pleasant. The landlady, on the other hand, is described with nothing but positive terms. The speaker mentions her good-breeding, lipstick coated voice, long gold-rolled/ Cigarette holder, all possessions that should produce her a well(p) lady (lines 7-9).These words describing her wealth are neutral in regard to her personal character, but allow that she could be a good person. How dark? , After recording the all-important question, How dark? , the poem pauses for a moment and describes the surroundings to give a sense of reality that shows that the ridiculous question had really been asked (line 10). The speaker describes the buttons in the phone booth, the foul smell that seems to always coexist with public spaces, and a bus tearaway(a) by outside. His description gives us an image of where the speaker is located a public phone booth, credibly somewhere in the coupled Kingdom.The Red booth, Red pillar-box, and Red double-tiered / Omnibus are all things that one might find in Leeds, the British city in which Soyinka had been studying prior to writing this poem). In addition to the literal images that this description creates, a sense of the ang er running through the speakers mind is pictured by the repeated use of the word red. This technique is the closest that that the speaker ever comes to openly screening anger in the poem. Although it is hidden with seemingly polite language, a glimpse of the speakers anger appears in this quick pause in the conversation.In the end, the landlady repeats her question and the speaker is forced to reveal how dark he is. West African sepia, he says, citing his passport . She claims not to know what that means. She wants a quantifiable expression of his darkness. His response, feigning simplicity is that his impudence is brunette, his hands and feet peroxide blonde and his bottom raven black. He knows that she just wants a musical rhythm of his overall skin-color so that she can categorize him, but he refuses to give it to her. Instead he expatiate the different colors of different parts of his body. wouldnt you rather / See for yourself? As it was meant to, this greatly annoys the l andlady and she hangs up on him. In goal, he asks the then empty telephone line, wouldnt you rather / See for yourself? The speaker, still playing his ignorance of what the lady was truly asking, sounds as though he is asking whether the landlady would like to meet him in person to enounce his skin color for herself. The irony in this question, though, lies in the fact that we know the speaker is actually referring to his black bottom when he asks the woman if she wants to see it for herself.Still feigning ingenuity, the speaker offers to show his backside to the racist landlady. passim the poem, yet another form of irony is created by the speakers use of high diction, which shows his education. Although the landlady refuses to rent an apartment to him because of his African heritage and the supposed savagery that accompanies it, the speaker is clearly a well educated individual. Words like pipped, rancid, and spectroscopic are not words that a savage brute would have in his me ntal lexicon (lines 9, 12, 23).The speakers intelligence is further shown through his use of sarcasm and wit in response to the landladys questions. Although he pretends politeness the entire time, he includes subtle meanings in his speech. The fact that a black man could outwit and make a white woman seem foolish shows the irony in judging people establish on their skin color. Wole Soyinkas Telephone Conversation is packed with subtleties. The puns, irony, and sarcasm employed help him to show the ridiculousness of racism. The conversation we observe is comical, as is the entire notion that a man can be judged based on the color of his skin.Night Rain John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo was born at Kiagbodo in the Ijaw country in 1935. For a while he worked as a newspaper editor, before going to Princeton University in the United States where he was a Parvin Fellow. On his return to Nigeria he became a Research Fellow at the University of lbadan. He spent ten years as editor of the highly influential literary magazine Black Orpheus. He then move to the University of Lagos, as Professor and Head of Department. He in additionk voluntary retirement in 1980 to allow time for his research and creative endeavours.He set up the first Repertory Theatre in the country, PEC Repertory Theatre. A poet, playwright and essayist, Clark-Bekederemo has been a fertile author. His writings include a book of critical essays, America their America, a collection of literary essays, The Example of Shakespeare, and a highly acclaimed translation of the Ozidi Saga. He has published numerous volumes of poetry including A Reed in the Tide, which is said to have been the first by a single African poet to be published internationally (rather than in an anthology. His poetry is inspired a great deal by his cultural roots among the Ijaw people of Nigeria. Other volumes of poetry include Casualties, which came out in 1970 just after the Nigerian Civil War, A Decade of Tongues, State of the Unio n, and a sixth book of poems, Mandela and other poems. JP Clark remains a controversial figure in some respects, but there is no doubting his prowess as a poet. Nigerian poet and playwright he originally published under the call off of J. P. Clark. Poetry is the genre in which he is probably most successful as an artist.His poetic works are Poems (1961), a group of forty lyrics that treat heterogeneous themes A Reed in the Tide (1965), occasional poems that focus on the poets indigenous African background and his travel experience in America and other places Casualties Poems 1966-68 (1970), which illustrates the horrendous events of the Nigeria-Biafra war A Decade of Tongues (1981), a collection of seventy-four poems, all except Epilogue to Casualties (dedicated to Michael Echeruo) His poetic career spans three literary pedigrees the apprenticeship stage of trial and experimentation, exemplified by such juvenilia as Darkness and Light and Iddo Bridge the imitative stage, in which he appropriates such Western poetic conventions as the distich measure and the sonnet sequence, exemplified in such lyrics as To a Fallen Soldier and Of Faith, and the individualized stage, in which he attains the maturity and originality of form of such poems as Night Rain, Out of the Tower, and Song. While his poetic themes centre on violence and protest (Casualties), institutional corruption (State of the Union), the beauty of nature and the landscape (A Reed in the Tide), European colonialism (Ivbie in Poems), and humanitys inhumanity (Mandela and Other Poems), he draws his imagery from the indigenous African background and the Western literary tradition, interweaving them to dazzling effect. Although he is fascinated by the poetic styles of Western authors, particularly G. M. Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and W. H. Auden, he has cultivated an eloquent, penetrating, and descriptive voice of his own.Bekederemos dramas include Song of a Goat (1961), a tragedy cast in the Gr eek classical mode in which the impotence of Zifa, the protagonist, causes his wife Ebiere and his brother Tonye to indulge in an illicit love relationship that results in suicide. As one of Africas pre-eminent and distinguished authors, he has, since his retirement, continued to play an active routine in literary affairs, a role in which he is increasingly gaining deserved international recognition. In 1991, for example, he received the Nigerian National Merit Award for literary excellence and saw publication, by Howard University, of his two definitive volumes, The Ozidi Saga and Collected Plays and Poems 1958-1988. Chinua Achebes Refugee Mother and ChildThe Mother has always held a supreme position in all religions. In Islam, she holds the first,second and third places. In Hinduism, the Mother and Motherland are deemed greater than heaven. In Christianity, the privilege of giving birth divinely was also handed over to a woman. The image of bloody shame with her child is supposed to be the highest paradigm of motherhood one can envisage . Here ,Chinua Achebe states that even that image could not surpass the picture of a mother expressing tenderness for a son she would concisely have to forget. It is the most poignant impression ones imagination and memory can ever perceive. The prescribed poem is titled Refugee Mother and Child.The adjective refugee assumes different meanings in this context. One, the mother in question may be a refugee. Besides, one who flees from danger, and is in a secure and protective circle is also called a refugee. In this regard, the baby is a refugee, and his refuge is his mothers womb till he comes out to this cruel world. another(prenominal) interpretation would be the mother finding refuge from the reality of the death of her son in a make-believe world. The air held a nausea of unwashed children with traces of diarrhea,and the stench of the emanations post-delivery. The rawness of the struggle to attain motherhood is portray ed as the poet states The air was heavy with odors f diarrhea of unwashed children with washed-out ribs and dried-up bottoms struggling in labored steps behind blown empty bellies. Mothers there had long ceased to care, as the poignancy of the situation of the refugees had reached their saturation point. But this one still held her own. She donned a ghost grinning. The situation is scary because the new-born is dead and the smile seems ghastly. The term ghost smile may also signify that the lady held a ghost of a smile that erst was real. nowadays that the genuine reason for the smile is lost, it may be termed as a ghost of a smile. Her eyeball also looked super-focussed as it held the ghost of a mothers pride.She combs ,with maternal affection, the hair on his skull. Note that it is skull and not head as the baby is impoverished, and dead. Her eyes appeared to sing a lullaby, as she parts the sons hair. In an otherwise situation, this act would be of little consequence another everyday affair before breakfast or school. Here,however, it happens to stand for the last display of maternal affection and is therefore equivalent to putting flowers on a lilliputian grave. If You Want to Know Me By Noemia de Sousa My apologies for the long drought without a FUUO poet of the week. Noemia de Sousa (aka Vera Micaia) was born in 1927 in Maputo, Mozambique.She lived in Lisbon working as a translator from 1951 to 1964 and then she left for Paris where she worked for the local consulate of Morocco. She went back to Lisbon in 1975 and became member of the ANOP. In the early years of the liberation struggle she was very active. She later left and lived in exile. Noemia racial background was Portuguese and Bantu and in much of her poetry she explores the paper of Africa and her heritage. Her poem below is phenomenal. Its angry and inspired and that final stanzawhere she proffers her body as a speciality for Africas struggle for freedomwow, powerful. And she ends her p oem without a period, perhaps because her last word is apply and what is more hopeful than an undefined end? 19262002), Mozambican poet and writer. Carolina Noemia Abranches de Sousa was born in the Mozambican capital, Lourenco Marques (now Maputo), the child of two mixed-race parents, roughly fifty years before her countrys liberation from Portugal. She was proud that her background included German, Portuguese, and Goan (Indian) ancestors as well as Ronga and Makua from Mozambique. Her early education was in Maputo, though after her father died she was not able to attend an academic high school. She trained at a commercial school, learning to type and do stenography, but she also pursued more traditional academic subjects and studied English and French.De Sousas first job was working at a local business as a secretary, employment she took in order to support her mother. She published her first poem, O irmao negro (The Black Brother), in the local literary magazine Mocidade (Youth) when she was nineteen. She was then known as Carolina Abranches , so she disguised her identity by publishing under the initials N. S. E. , referring to her unused names of Noemia de Sousa. She soon began working for the Associacao Africana (African Association), a political group that included the renowned Mozambican poet Jose Craveirinha , and she was responsible for reviving the associations hawkish newspaper, O Brado Africano (The African augur).She wrote several well-received and much anthologized poems through the late 1940s, though after 1951 she no eternal wrote poetry, with the exception of a commemorative poem following the death of independent Mozambiques first president, Samora Machel , in an woodworking plane crash in 1986. Her early poems are often cited as representative of the Negritude school of writing, extolling black African culture and history, though she was writing in isolation from the better-known French school of Negritude. Her poems celebrated Mozambi can culture and history. One of the most often cited is a poem about migrant workers in southward Africas gold and diamond mines, Magaica (Migrant Laborer) which concludes Youth and health, the lost illusions which will shine like stars on some Ladys neck in some Citys night. Her celebration of my mother Africa (in the poem Sangue negro Black line of products is continued in Se me quiseres conhecer , If You Want to Know Me, which has a catalog of Mozambican lives If you want to conceive me come, bend over this soul of Africa in the black dockworkers groans the Chopes frenzied dances the Changanas rebellion And she was appreciated for her cries for liberation, as with these closing lines from Poema de Joao (The Poem of Joao) who can take the multitude and lock it in a cage? In 1951 she moved to Portugal to escape the vigilance of the Portuguese secret police, who were interested in her work at O Brado Africano. In Portugal she met and married her husband, Gaspar Soares, in 1962. The couple moved to France, where de Sousa worked as a journalist under the pen name Vera Micaia.She returned to Portugal and was living there when she died in 2002. I Thank You paragon Bernard Binlin Dadie Bernard Binlin Dadie (or sometimes Bernard Dadie) (born 1916 near Abidjan) is a prolific Ivorian novelist, playwright, poet, and ex-administrator. Among many other senior positions, starting in 1957, he held the post of Minister of Culture in the government of Cote dIvoire from 1977 to 1986. He worked for the French government in Dakar, Senegal, but on returning to his homeland in 1947, became part of its movement for independence. Before Cote dIvoires independence in 1960, he was detained for sixteen months for taking part in demonstrations which opposed the French colonial government.In his writing, influenced by his experiences of colonialism as a child, Dadie attempts to connect the messages of traditional African folktales with the contemporary world. With Germain Cof fi Gadeau and F. J. Amon dAby, he founded the Cercle Culturel et Folklorique de la Cote dIvoire (CCFCI) in 1953. 1 His humanism and desire for the equality and independence of Africans and their culture is also prevalent. storied for his work I Thank You, God I thank you God for creating me black, For having made me the total of all sorrows, and set upon my head The existence. I wear the lively of the Centaur And I book the world since the first morning. washcloth is a colour improvised for an occasion Black, the colour of all days And I carry the World since the first evening.I am happy with the shape of my head fashioned to carry the World, satisfied With the shape of my nose, which should go on all the air of the World, happy With the form of my legs prepared to run through all the stages of the World. I thank you God for creating me black For making of me Porter of all sorrows.. Still I am Glad to carry the World, Glad of my short arms Of my long arms Of the thickness of my lips.. I thank you God for creating me black White is a colour for special occasions Black the colour for every day And i have carried the World since the dawn of time And my laugh over the World, through the night, creates the Day. I thank you, God for creating me blackGabriel Okaras one time Upon a Time erstwhile Upon a Time has been published in the Edexcel GCSE anthology. In Once Upon a Time, Gabriel Okara speaks of a time when Africans were rooted in the simplicity of tradition and minimalism of sophistication and how different they have turned out to be with the advent of colonialism. The very title Once Upon a Time points to a fairy tale existence long ago that is almost deemed unbelievable Once Upon a Time they used to laugh with their hearts and eyes in complete sincerity. A smile, if natural, first reaches the eyes. Therefore Okara portrays fake, unfelt smiles. A smile is the first greeting a person is received with.If the greeting itself is misleading the rest is to b e regarded with great suspicion. Once Upon a Time they were children in the lap of nature . However, now they have turned into processed products of the pseudo modern existence. They now laugh mechanically with their teeth and ice-block common cold eyes. The term ice-block cold eyes is very suggestive of death and stagnation. It also denotes lack of communication. Pictorial vehemence suggests the lurking hypocrisy. The people only search behind the speakers shadow. Okara means to say that every action is analyzed and every motive criticized. Also, they are satisfied with the shadow of the person in question, and do not seek the identity of the persona.This points to the current media insurance that project the shells of various personalities without delving to their depth. They fail to comprehend the enigma behind each strange individual. The poet moves from expression to action. Now they shake hands without hearts as their left hand probes the speakers pockets. People do not go ou t of their way to help others now-a-days. Instead, influenced by the Western formula of success, they take advantage of others to reach their end. The poet submits that immersed in the crowd, he has also become a cog in the wheel of society. Like Kamala Das echoes in her poem Fancy-Dress Show, the poet claims that he has learnt to adorn different faces to suit the situation- homeface, officeface, streetface, hostface, ocktailface, with all their conforming smiles like a immovable portrait smile. The third stanza portrays the hiatus between words give offed and bitter reality. The divorce between the invention and remark is explicit. The poet has also learnt o say Good bye when he means Good excreting The shut door stands for modern insularity it foregrounds the alienation of the individual from tradition, tribe and clan. . The speaker tells his son that he wants to relearn everything and be like him. He seems to echo that Child is the father of man. Okara ,in other words, would like to go down to his roots. The man distrusts even his mirror image, his reflection for my laugh in the mirror hows only my teeth like a snakes bare fangs The poisonous erudition is implicit in his own state of being. The poet opines that unpolluted simplicity and innocence can only be found in childhood, and relived in the same. The Call of the River Nun is a similar celebration of lost innocence David Rubadiris A blackness Labourer in Liverpool An analysis of David Rubadiris A Negro Labourer in Liverpool The poem strives to highlight the plight of a Negro labourer in Liverpool. The enigmatic article a points to the lack of a specific identity. They are just one among a group, one of the community, who do not necessarily possess any individual identity.They are labeled according to their work(labourer)or corresponding to their geographical location. The poet himself hints at the indifference of society as a unit to the plight of the labourer as he states that he passes him. He slouches on dark backstreet pavements. His marginalization is unambiguous in his position slouching. Further, it is also emphasized in his being side-stepped on the pavements. Again the pavement is subject by the phrase dark backstreet. The head is bowed when it would have preferred to be straight. He is conquer with fatigue and totally exhausted. He is a dark shadow amongst other shadows. He has no unique identity, his life is not colourful.The poet asserts that he has lifted his face to his, as in acknowledgement. Their eyes met but on his dark Negro face. The poet probably refers to the reflection of the speakers eyes in the eyes of the labourer. The eyes are foregrounded on his dark face. There is no sunny smile as he wears a forlorn expression. The sun is an important and recurrent motif in African poetry. A wise man once said that a man is poor if he does not have a cent he is poor if he does not possess a dream. The labourer here neither has hope nor longing. Only the mec hanical cowed dart of eyes that is more mechanized than the impassive activity of the people. People in their impassive fast-forward life fail to notice the labourer.He painfully searches for a face to comprehend his predicament, acknowledge his suffering. It expresses his utter solitude and utter desperation. Capitalism & Women Academy. Mises. org Feminists Should Thank Capitalists. Mises Academy Course. Enroll Today Ads by Google Notice that the poet shifts from the indefinite article a to the definite article the in addressing the Negro labourer in the second stanza. It is to assert and affirm his existence in society that the poet does the same. David Rubadiri goes on to describe him in terms of his motherland and in terms of his emotions a heart heavy. He bears a centurys oppression that had seek after an identity.He strives to attain the fire of manhood. But ironically, even in the Land of the free (England), he is otiose to attain the same. Nevertheless, the free here are a lso dead, in a state of decay and stagnation, for they too grope for a light, a ray of hope. The speaker puts forward the question Will the sun That greeted him from his mothers womb Ever shine again? Not here- Here his hope is the shovel. And his fulfillment fall He awaits a new dawn, as fresh as that promised as he arose from his mothers womb. He longs for the rays of hope of a sun that will never set for him. Presently his hope is his shovel-his hard work, and he discovers content in its fulfillment.