Exploring Racial Prejudice and Emotional Turmoil: An Analysis of ‘Telephone Conversation’ and ‘The Glass Essay’
// Written in the first person narrative point of view, the poem “Telephone Conversation” by Wole Soyinka is a poetic satire against the widely-spread racism in the modern Western society.
The poem is about a telephone conversation in England between the poetic persona seeking to rent a house and an English landlady who completely changes her attitude towards him after he reveals his identity as a black African.
The motif of a microcosmic telephone conversation, therefore, is employed by the poet to apply to a much broader, macrocosmic level where racial bigotry is ridiculed in a contest of human intelligence, showcasing the poet’s witticism as well as his ingenious sense of humour.
// The poem starts with a somewhat peaceful atmosphere befitting the poetic persona’s satisfaction for having found the correct house – “The price seemed reasonable, location indifferent.” He was also happy about the privacy that he believed that he would enjoy, for “The landlady swore she lived / Off premises.” At this stage, we get to know that the two were engaged in a telephone conversation, which, however, was to come quickly to an unpleasant end as the man decided to reveal his nationality – “Madam,” I warned. / “I hate a wasted journey – I am African.” A sudden, unexpected hush of silence is strengthened by a caesura in line 6 of the poem to emphasize the impact of the African’s race being revealed to the landlady.
Furthermore, the poet’s use of the word “confession” to describe an announcement of the persona’s ethnic identity is very sarcastic in that being an African seems to be a sin which the persona committed, and which he needed to atone for.
// An uneasy atmosphere ensues thereby.
Following the caesura, there is “Silenced transmission of / Pressurized good-breeding”, with the word “silenced” again to reiterate the landlady’s sudden change, as well as the man’s intuitive sensitivity towards the unfriendliness on the other end of the phone.
There is a foreboding overtone, relevant to the change of the woman’s attitude she would have towards the African man.
And we get the first indication of the poet’s sense of humour in the expression “[p]ressurized good-breeding”, too, which is an ironical manifestation of the polite manners landlady was supposed to have for the job of renting premises.
// To conclude, through his poem “Telephone Conversation”, Soyinka is able to satirize the racist society in the west.
By showing that a dark African persona is eventually capable of confronting the racial discrimination aimed towards him, and retaliates against it by outwitting the landlady, the poet sends out a clear message – dark skinned people are no less intelligent than people that are lighter in skin colour.
In “The Glass Essay”[1], which is part of her 1995 work “Glass, Irony and God”[2], Anne Carson confronts the reader with the situation and the thoughts of a possibly imaginary speaker and with the aftermath of being abandoned by a lover.
/// The text at hand forms a combination of autobiographical allusions to Carson’s personal background, quotes from works of Emily Brontë and detailed descriptions of the mental processes of and reality around the speaker.
Though being written in prose, the text is widely arranged in short stanzas of three lines each. This concept occasionally breaks up, however, when external quotes are inserted or in the first stanza of the text’s last chapter “thou” (p. 31-38).
/// The essay is subdivided by 9 short headlines, each consisting of only a single word, in detail. One is “hero”:
The term “hero” links the idea “of Emily Brontë’s little merlin hawk Hero / that she fed bits of bacon at the kitchen table” (p. 23) and the speaker’s father, a veteran and “former World War II navigator” (p.24) who now “suffers from a kind of dementia / … / /// Analysing the imagery and the virtually visual methods Carson applies in her narrative, the striking fact about the images she uses is their relevance to the speaker’s current state of mind. They vary from quiet, almost idyllic images to violent and grotesque images.
/// The overall tone and the dominating mood of the images remains rather negative, corresponding to the speaker’s momentary attitude. She is still “thinking // of the man who / left in September” (p. 1) and spends her nights alone, feeling as if “night drips its silver tap / down the back” (p. 1) /// In those rare moments when she remembers life as it was when she was still together with Law, she suddenly seems to experience comfort and once again witness “shadows // of limes and roses blowing in the car window / and music spraying from the radio and him / singing and touching my left hand to his lips” (p. 8)
/// The tremendous visual power of Carson’s images keeps the reader fixed in her domain of making poetry sensible.
Through the depiction of colors, shapes, surfaces and textures, Carson has the ability to appease or to unleash fury with the reader as a witness and herself as the main aim.
Her images are most effective as narrative devices, “she knows how to hang puppies” (p. 4), that Anne.