EM8 - Survey of Afro-Asian Literature PDF

EM8 - Survey of Afro-Asian Literature Mr. Elvin Ruiz Unit 2: African Literature Overview of the African Literary Tradition Key concepts: oral tradition, postcolonialism, identity, diaspora, etc. African Literature African literature, the body of tradit...

EM8 - Survey of Afro-Asian Literature Mr. Elvin Ruiz Unit 2: African Literature Overview of the African Literary Tradition Key concepts: oral tradition, postcolonialism, identity, diaspora, etc. African Literature African literature, the body of traditional oral and written literatures in Afro-Asiatic and African languages together with works written by Africans in European languages. Traditional written literature, which is limited to a smaller geographic area than is oral literature, is most characteristic of those sub-Saharan cultures that have participated in the cultures of the Mediterranean. In particular, there are written literatures in both Hausa and Arabic, created by the scholars of what is now northern Nigeria, and the Somali people have produced a traditional written literature. There are also works written in Geʿez (Ethiopic) and Amharic, two of the languages of Ethiopia, which is the one part of Africa where Christianity has been practiced long enough to be considered traditional. Works written in European languages date primarily from the 20th century onward. The literature of South Africa in English and Afrikaans is also covered in a separate article, South African literature. The relationship between oral and written traditions and in particular between oral and modern written literatures is one of great complexity and not a matter of simple evolution. Modern African literatures were born in the educational systems imposed by colonialism, with models drawn from Europe rather than existing African traditions. But the African oral traditions exerted their own influence on these literatures. The Nature of Storytelling The storyteller speaks, time collapses, and the members of the audience are in the presence of history. It is a time of masks. Reality, the present, is here, but with explosive emotional images giving it a context. This is the storyteller’s art: to mask the past, making it mysterious, seemingly inaccessible. But it is inaccessible only to one’s present intellect; it is always available to one’s heart and soul, one’s emotions. The storyteller combines the audience’s present waking state and its past condition of semiconsciousness, and so the audience walks again in history, joining its forebears. And history, always more than an academic subject, becomes for the audience a collapsing of time. History becomes the audience’s memory and a means of reliving of an indeterminate and deeply obscure past. Storytelling is a sensory union of image and idea, a process of re-creating the past in terms of the present; the storyteller uses realistic images to describe the present and fantasy images to evoke and embody the substance of a culture’s experience of the past. These ancient fantasy images are the culture’s heritage and the storyteller’s bounty: they contain the emotional history of the culture, its most deeply felt yearnings and fears, and they therefore have the capacity to elicit strong emotional responses from members of audiences. During a performance, these envelop contemporary images—the most unstable parts of the oral tradition, because they are by their nature always in a state of flux—and thereby visit the past on the present. It is the task of the storyteller to forge the fantasy images of the past into masks of the realistic images of the present, enabling the performer to pitch the present to the past, to visualize the present within a context of—and therefore in terms of—the past. Flowing through this potent emotional grid is a variety of ideas that have the look of antiquity and ancestral sanction. Story occurs under the mesmerizing influence of performance—the body of the performer, the music of her voice, the complex relationship between her and her audience. It is a world unto itself, whole, with its own set of laws. Images that are unlike are juxtaposed, and then the storyteller reveals—to the delight and instruction of the members of the audience— the linkages between them that render them homologous. In this way the past and the present are blended; ideas are thereby generated, forming a conception of the present. Performance gives the images their context and ensures the audience a ritual experience that bridges past and present and shapes contemporary life. Storytelling is alive, ever in transition, never hardened in time. Stories are not meant to be temporally frozen; they are always responding to contemporary realities, but in a timeless fashion. Storytelling is therefore not a memorized art. The necessity for this continual transformation of the story has to do with the regular fusing of fantasy and images of the real, contemporary world. Performers take images from the present and wed them to the past, and in that way the past regularly shapes an audience’s experience of the present. Storytellers reveal connections between humans—within the world, within a society, within a family—emphasizing an interdependence and the disaster that occurs when obligations to one’s fellows are forsaken. The artist makes the linkages, the storyteller forges the bonds, tying past and present, joining humans to their gods, to their leaders, to their families, to those they love, to their deepest fears and hopes, and to the essential core of their societies and beliefs. The language of storytelling includes, on the one hand, image, the patterning of image, and the manipulation of the body and voice of the storyteller and, on the other, the memory and present state of the audience. A storytelling performance involves memory: the recollection of each member of the audience of his experiences with respect to the story being performed, the memory of his real-life experiences, and the similar memories of the storyteller. It is the rhythm of storytelling that welds these disparate experiences, yearnings, and thoughts into the images of the story. And the images are known, familiar to the audience. That familiarity is a crucial part of storytelling. The storyteller does not craft a story out of whole cloth: she re-creates the ancient story within the context of the real, contemporary, known world. It is the metaphorical relationship between these memories of the past and the known images of the world of the present that constitutes the essence of storytelling. The story is never history; it is built of the shards of history. Images are removed from historical contexts, then reconstituted within the demanding and authoritative frame of the story. And it is always a sensory experience, an experience of the emotions. Storytellers know that the way to the mind is by way of the heart. The interpretative effects of the storytelling experience give the members of the audience a refreshed sense of reality, a context for their experiences that has no existence in reality. It is only when images of contemporary life are woven into the ancient familiar images that metaphor is born and experience becomes meaningful. Stories deal with change: mythic transformations of the cosmos, heroic transformations of the culture, transformations of the lives of everyman. The storytelling experience is always ritual, always a rite of passage; one relives the past and, by so doing, comes to insight about present life. Myth is both a story and a fundamental structural device used by storytellers. As a story, it reveals change at the beginning of time, with gods as the central characters. As a storytelling tool for the creation of metaphor, it is both material and method. The heroic epic unfolds within the context of myth, as does the tale. At the heart of each of these genres is metaphor, and at the core of metaphor is riddle with its associate, proverb. Each of these oral forms is characterized by a metaphorical process, the result of patterned imagery. These universal art forms are rooted in the specificities of the African experience.  I. Apartheid, Colonialism, and Oppression 1. The Moment Before the Gun Went Off by Nadine Gordimer About the Author: Nadine Gordimer was born in Springs, South Africa. Her parents were Jewish immigrants; her father was from Latvia and her mother was from England. Gordimer began writing at the age of nine, and was just 15 years old when her first work was published. The novel entitled The Conservationist (1974) gave her her international breakthrough. Gordimer was involved in the anti-apartheid movement early on and several of her books were banned by the apartheid regime. Gordimer has lived and worked in Johannesburg, South Africa, since 1948. Nadine Gordimer's works include novels, short stories, and essays. During the 1960s and 1970s Gordimer wrote a number of novels set against the backdrop of the emerging resistance movement against apartheid, while the liberated South Africa provides the backdrop for her later works, written in the 1990s. The stories of individuals are always at the center of her narratives, in relation to external limitations and frameworks. As a whole, Gordimer's literary works create rich imagery of South Africa's historical development. She also won the The Nobel Prize in Literature 1991. Marais Van der Vyver shot one of his farm laborers, dead. An accident. There are accidents with guns every day of the week: children playing a fatal game with a father's revolver in the cities where guns are domestic objects, and hunting mishaps like this one, in the country. But these won't be reported all over the world. Van der Vyver knows his will be. He knows that the story of the Afrikaner farmer - a regional Party leader and Commandant of the local security commando - he, shooting a black man who worked for him will fit exactly their version of South Africa. It's made for them. They'll be able to use it in their boycott and divestment campaigns. It'll be another piece of evidence in their truth about the country. The papers at home will quote the story as it has appeared in the overseas press, and in the back-and-forth he and the black man will become those crudely-drawn figures on anti-apartheid banners, units in statistics of white brutality against the blacks quoted at United Nations - he, whom they will gleefully call 'a leading member' of the ruling Party. People in the farming community understand how he must feel. Bad enough to have killed a man, without helping the Party's, the government's, the country's enemies, as well. They see the truth of that. They know, reading the Sunday papers, that when Van der Vyver is quoted saying he is 'terribly shocked', he will 'look after the wife and children', none of those Americans and English, and none of those people at home who want to destroy the white man's power will believe him. And how they will sneer when he even says of the farm boy (according to one paper, if you can trust any of those reporters), 'He was my friend. I always took him hunting with me: Those city and overseas people don't know it's true: farmers usually have one particular black boy they like to take along with them in the lands: you could call it a kind of friend, yes, friends are not only your own white people, like yourself, you take into your house, pray with in church and work with on the Party committee. But how can those others know that? They don't want to know it. They think all blacks are like the big-mouth agitators in town. And Van der Vyver's face, in the photographs, strangely opened by distress - everyone in the district remembers Marais Van der Vyver as a little boy who would go away and hide himself if he caught you smiling at him. And everyone knows him now as a man who hides any change of expression round his mouth behind a thick, soft moustache, and in his eyes, by always looking at some object in hand, while concentrating on what he is saying, or while listening to you. It just goes to show what shock can do. When you look at the newspaper photographs you feel like apologising; as if you had started in on some room where you should not be. There will be an inquiry. There had better be - to stop the assumption of yet another case of brutality against farm workers, although there's nothing in doubt - an accident, and all the facts fully admitted by Van der Vyver. He made a statement when he arrived at the police station with the dead man in his bakkie. Captain Beetge knows him well, of course; he gave him brandy. He was shaking, this big, calm, clever son of Willem Van der Vyver, who inherited the old man's best farm. The black was stone dead. Nothing to be done for him. Beetge will not tell anyone that after the brandy, Van der Vyver wept. He sobbed, snot running onto his hands, like a dirty kid. The Captain was ashamed for him, and walked out to give him a chance to recover himself. Marais Van der Vyver had left his house at three in the afternoon to cull a buck from the family of Kudu he protects in the bush areas of his farm. He is interested in wild life and sees it as the farmer's sacred duty to raise game as well as cattle. As usual, he called at his shed workshop to pick up Lucas, a twenty-year-old farmhand who had shown mechanical aptitude and whom Van der Vyver himself had taught to maintain tractors and other farm machinery. He hooted. And Lucas followed the familiar routine, jumping onto the back of the truck. He liked to travel standing up there, spotting game before his employer did. He would lean forward, braced against the cab below him. Van der Vyver had a rifle and.300 ammunition beside him in the cab. The rifle was one of his father's, because his own was at the gunsmith's in town. Since his father died (Beetge's sergeant wrote 'passed on') no-one had used the rifle and so when he took it from a cupboard he was sure it was not loaded. His father had never allowed a loaded gun in the house. He himself had been taught since childhood never to ride with a loaded weapon in a vehicle. But this gun was loaded. On a dirt track, Lucas thumped his fist on the cab roof three times to signal: look left. Having seen the white ripple-marked flank of a Kudu, and its fine horns raking through disguising bush, Van der Vyver drove rather fast over a pot- hole. The jolt fired the rifle. Upright, it was pointing straight through the cab roof at the head of Lucas... That is the statement of what happened. Although a man of such standing in the district, Van der Vyver had to go through the ritual of swearing that it was the truth. It has gone on record, and will be there in the archive of the local police station as long as Van der Vyver lives, and beyond that, through the lives of his children, Magnus, Helena and Karel - unless things in the country get worse, the example of black mobs in the towns spreads to the rural areas and the place is burned down as many urban police stations have been. Because nothing the government can do will appease the agitators and the whites who encourage them. Nothing satisfies them, in the cities: blacks can sit and drink in white hotels now, the Immorality Act has gone, blacks can sleep with whites... It's not even a crime any more. Van der Vyver has a high barbed security fence round his farmhouse and garden which his wife, Alida, thinks spoils completely the effect of her artificial stream with its tree-ferns beneath the Jacarandas. There is an aerial soaring like a flag- pole in the back yard. All his vehicles, including the truck in which the black man died, have aerials that swing like whips when the driver hits a pot-hole. They are part of the security system the farmers in the district maintain, each farm in touch with every other by radio, twenty-four hours out of twenty-four. It has already happened that infiltrators from over the border have mined remote farm roads, killing white farmers and their families out on their own property for a Sunday picnic. The pot-hole could have set off a landmine, and Van der Vyver might have died with his farm boy. When neighbours use the communications system to call up and say they are sorry about 'that business' with one of Van der Vyver's boys, there goes unsaid: it could have been worse. It is obvious from the quality and fittings of the coffin that the farmer has provided money for the funeral. And an elaborate funeral means a great deal to blacks; look how they will deprive themselves of the little they have, in their life-time, keeping up payments to a burial society so they won't go in boxwood to an unmarked grave. The young wife is pregnant (of course) and another little one, wearing red shoes several sizes too large, leans under her jutting belly. He is too young to understand what has happened, what he is witnessing that day. But neither whines nor plays about. He is solemn without knowing why. Blacks expose small children to everything. They don't protect them from the sight of fear and pain the way whites do theirs. It is the young wife who rolls her head and cries like a child, sobbing on the breast of this relative and that. All present work for Van der Vyver or are the families of those who work. And in the weeding and harvest seasons, the women and children work for him, too, carried - wrapped in their blankets, on a truck, singing - at sunrise to the fields. The dead man's mother is a woman who can't be more than in her late thirties (they start bearing children at puberty) but she is heavily mature in a black dress between her own parents, who were already working for old Van der Vyver when Marais, like their daughter, was a child. The parents hold her as if she were a prisoner or a crazy woman to be restrained. But she says nothing, does nothing. She does not look up, she does not look at Van der Vyver, whose gun went off in the truck. She stares at the grave. Nothing will make her look up, there need be no fear that she will look up, at him. His wife, Alida, is beside him. To show the proper respect, as for any white funeral, she is wearing the navy-blue-and-cream hat she wears to church this summer. She is always supportive, although he doesn't seem to notice it. This coldness and reserve - his mother says he didn't mix well as a child - she accepts for herself but regrets that it has prevented him from being nominated, as he should be, to stand as the Party's parliamentary candidate for the district. He does not let her clothing, or that of anyone else gathered closely, make contact with him. He, too, stares at the grave. The dead man's mother and he stare at the grave in communication like that between the black man outside and the white man inside the cab before the gun went off. The moment before the gun went off was a moment of high excitement shared through the roof of the cab, as the bullet was to pass, between the young black man outside and the white farmer inside the vehicle. There were such moments, without explanation, between them, although often around the farm the farmer would pass the young man without returning a greeting, as if he did not recognize him. When the bullet went off, what Van der Vyver saw was the Kudu stumble in fright at the report and gallop away. Then he heard the thud behind him, and past the window saw the young man fall out of the vehicle. He was sure he had leapt up and toppled - in fright, like the buck. The farmer was almost laughing with relief, ready to tease, as he opened his door, it did not seem possible that a bullet passing through the roof could have done harm. The young man did not laugh with him at his own fright. The farmer carried him in his arms, to the truck. He was sure, sure he could not be dead. But the young black man's blood was all over the farmer's clothes, soaking against his flesh as he drove. The young man did not laugh with him at his own fright. The farmer carried him in his arms, to the truck. He was sure, sure he could not be dead. But the young black man's blood was all over the farmer's clothes, soaking against his flesh as he drove. Persona:  Characters: ○ Marais Van der Vyver ○ Lucas ○ Lucas’s Mother ○ Wife of Lucas ○ Alida ○ Captain Beetge Theme: Apartheid, Colonialism, and Oppression Setting: Place: Rural farm in South Africa Time: Late 1980s; before the fall of apartheid Analysis: Insights: 1. In Another World by Rasaq Malik About the Author: - Hunter poet (mao rajud niy naas akong notes hahaha) In another world I want to be a father without passing through the eternal insanity of mourning my children, without experiencing the ritual of watching my children return home as bodies folded like a prayer mat, without spending my nights telling them the stories of a hometown where natives become aliens searching for a shelter. I want my children to spread a mat outside my house and play without the walls of houses ripped by rifles. I want to watch my children grow to recite the name of their homeland like Lord’s Prayer, to frolic in the streets without being hunted like animals in the bush, without being mobbed to death. In another world I want my children to tame grasshoppers in the field, to play with their dolls in the living room, to inhale the fragrance of flowers waving as wind blows, to see the birds measure the sky with their wings. Persona: A father Characters: Theme: Apartheid, Colonialism, and Oppression Analysis: “eternal insanity of mourning” - maboang forever because of mourning for his children  The poem is about a father who longs for a world where his children don’t die Insights: "In order for me to write poems that are not political, I must listen to the birds and in order for me to hear the birds, the war planes must be stopped."-Marwah Makhoul (related to the last line of the poem) “If the child dies, all their future selves die with them” “A child without parents is called an orphan, but there is no word in the English language for a parent who lost a child” II. Racism, Prejudice, and Social Justice 1. Telephone Conversations by Wole Soyinka About the Author: a Nigerian playwright, poet, and essayist, often tackles themes of oppression, tyranny, and human rights in his works. In 'Telephone Conversation he explores the social issue of racial discrimination, highlighting how it infiltrates even the most mundane aspects of life. His use of humor and irony not only entertains but also serves as a mechanism for critique, showing how absurd and inhuman racial discrimination can be. This piece is, without a doubt, his best-known. The price seemed reasonable, location Indifferent. The landlady swore she lived Off premises. Nothing remained But self-confession. "Madam," I warned, "I hate a wasted journey--I am African." Silence. Silenced transmission of Pressurized good-breeding. Voice, when it came, Lipstick coated, long gold-rolled Cigarette-holder pipped. Caught was foully. "HOW DARK?"...I had not misheard..."ARE YOU LIGHT OR VERY DARK?" Button B, Button A. *Stench Of rancid breath of public hide-and-speak. Red booth. Red pillar box. Red double-tiered Omnibus squelching tar. It was real! Shamed By ill-mannered silence, surrender Pushed dumbfounded to beg simplification. Considerate she was, varying the emphasis– "ARE YOU DARK? OR VERY LIGHT?" Revelation came. "You mean-like plain or milk chocolate?" Her accent was clinical, crushing in its light Impersonality. Rapidly, wave-length adjusted, I chose. "West African sepia"--and as afterthought, "Down in my passport." Silence for spectroscopic Flight of fancy, till truthfulness clanged her accent Hard on the mouthpiece. "WHATS THAT? conceding "DONT KNOW WHAT THAT IS." "Like brunette." "THAT'S DARK, ISNT IT" "Not altogether. Facially. I am brunette, but, madam, you should see The rest of me. Palm of my hand, soles of my feet Are a peroxide blond. Friction, caused– Foolishly, madam–by sitting down, has turned My bottom raven black--One moment, madam!"--sensing Her receiver rearing on the thunderclap About my ears-"Madam," I pleaded, "wouldn't you rather See for yourself?" Persona: An African who is finding a place to stay in United Kingdom Characters: African, Landlady Theme: Racism, Prejudice, Social Justice Analysis: “The landlady swore she lived off premises” - the landlady does not live in the building where the African want to rent” "I hate a wasted journey--I am African." - The speaker confesses to being “African” to avoid taking a trip to see the rental only to be turned down simply for being black. The speaker isn’t personally ashamed of being “African”; rather, the speaker seems fully aware of society's racial prejudices and worries about what the landlady will think. “Red booth. Red pillar box. Red double-tiered Omnibus squelching tar” - signifies that the setting is in the United Kingdom and that the landlady is maybe a white European. "HOW DARK?"...I had not misheard..."ARE YOU LIGHT OR VERY DARK?" - this shows how the landlady reduces the speaker to a single attribute: skin color. Racism, the poem thus makes clear, is inherently reductive and dehumanizing. I chose. "West African sepia"--and as afterthought, "Down in my passport." Silence for spectroscopic Flight of fancy, till truthfulness clanged her accent Hard on the mouthpiece. "WHATS THAT? Conceding "DONT KNOW WHAT THAT IS." "Like brunette." "THAT'S DARK, ISNT IT" - The landlady is playing into the ignorant idea that black people with lighter skin (and, as such, whose skin is closer in appearance to that of white people) are superior to those with darker skin. The key thing that matters to her, then, is how black the speaker looks.  The landlady was hesitant to allow the African to rent because people usually think that if a person is “African”, he/she is a bad person and might disturb other tenants. Insights: Colorism-prejudice/discrimination especially within a racial or ethnic group. As simple as mundane, there is still racism A person does not need to see a person (para iya i discriminate). It’s the same with poverty III. Gender, Feminism, and Empowerment 1. We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie About the Author: So I would like to start by telling you about one of my greatest friends, Okoloma Maduewesi. Okoloma lived on my street and looked after me like a big brother. If I liked a boy, I would ask Okoloma's opinion. Okoloma died in the notorious Sosoliso plane crash in Nigeria in December of 2005. Almost exactly seven years ago. Okoloma was a person I could argue with, laugh with and truly talk to. He was also the first person to call me a feminist. I was about fourteen, we were at his house, arguing. Both of us bristling with half bit knowledge from books that we had read. I don't remember what this particular argument was about, but I remember that as I argued and argued, Okoloma looked at me and said, "You know, you're a feminist." It was not a compliment. I could tell from his tone, the same tone that you would use to say something like, "You're a supporter of terrorism." I did not know exactly what this word "feminist" meant, and I did not want Okoloma to know that I did not know. So I brushed it aside, and I continued to argue. And the first thing I planned to do when I got home was to look up the word "feminist" in the dictionary. Now fast forward to some years later, I wrote a novel about a man who among other things beats his wife and whose story doesn't end very well. While I was promoting the novel in Nigeria, a journalist, a nice, well-meaning man, told me he wanted to advise me. And for the Nigerians here, I'm sure we're all familiar with how quick our people are to give unsolicited advice. He told me that people were saying that my novel was feminist and his advice to me -- and he was shaking his head sadly as he spoke -- was that I should never call myself a feminist because feminists are women who are unhappy because they cannot find husbands. So I decided to call myself "a happy feminist." Then an academic, a Nigerian woman told me that feminism was not our culture and that feminism wasn't African, and that I was calling myself a feminist because I had been corrupted by "Western books." Which amused me, because a lot of my early readings were decidedly unfeminist. I think I must have read every single Mills & Boon romance published before I was sixteen. And each time I tried to read those books called "the feminist classics," I'd get bored, and I really struggled to finish them. But anyway, since feminism was un-African, I decided that I would now call myself "a happy African feminist." At some point I was a happy African feminist who does not hate men and who likes lip gloss and who wears high heels for herself but not for men. Of course a lot of this was tongue-in-cheek, but that word feminist is so heavy with baggage, negative baggage. You hate men, you hate bras, you hate African culture, that sort of thing. Now here's a story from my childhood. When I was in primary school, my teacher said at the beginning of term that she would give the class a test and whoever got the highest score would be the class monitor. Now, class monitor was a big deal. If you were a class monitor, you got to write down the names of noisemakers -- which was having enough power of its own. But my teacher would also give you a cane to hold in your hand while you walk around and patrol the class for noisemakers. Now, of course you were not actually allowed to use the cane. But it was an exciting prospect for the nine-year-old me. I very much wanted to be the class monitor. And I got the highest score on the test. Then, to my surprise, my teacher said that the monitor had to be a boy. She had forgotten to make that clear earlier because she assumed it was... obvious. A boy had the second highest score on the test, and he would be monitor. Now, what was even more interesting about this is that the boy was a sweet, gentle soul who had no interest in patrolling the class with the cane, while I was full of ambition to do so. But I was female and he was male, and so he became the class monitor. And I've never forgotten that incident. I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is just as obvious to everyone else. Now, take my dear friend Louis for example. Louis is a brilliant, progressive man, and we would have conversations and he would tell me, "I don't know what you mean by things being different or harder for women. Maybe in the past, but not now." And I didn't understand how Louis could not see what seems so self-evident. Then one evening, in Lagos, Louis and I went out with friends. And for people here who are not familiar with Lagos, there's that wonderful Lagos' fixture, the sprinkling of energetic men who hang around outside establishments and very dramatically "help" you park your car. I was impressed with the particular theatrics of the man who found us a parking spot that evening. And so as we were leaving, I decided to leave him a tip. I opened my bag, put my hand inside my bag, brought out my money that I had earned from doing my work, and I gave it to the man. And he, this man who was very grateful and very happy, took the money from me, looked across at Louis and said, "Thank you, sir!" Louis looked at me, surprised, and asked, "Why is he thanking me? I didn't give him the money." Then I saw realization dawn on Louis' face. The man believed that whatever money I had had ultimately come from Louis. Because Louis is a man. Men and women are different. We have different hormones, we have different sexual organs, we have different biological abilities. Women can have babies, men can't. At least not yet. Men have testosterone and are in general physically stronger than women. There's slightly more women than men in the world, about 52 percent of the world's population is female. But most of the positions of power and prestige are occupied by men. The late Kenyan Nobel Peace laureate, Wangari Maathai, put it simply and well when she said: "The higher you go, the fewer women there are." In the recent US elections we kept hearing of the Lilly Ledbetter law, and if we go beyond the nicely alliterative name of that law, it was really about a man and a woman doing the same job, being equally qualified, and the man being paid more because he's a man. So in the literal way, men rule the world, and this made sense a thousand years ago because human beings lived then in a world in which physical strength was the most important attribute for survival. The physically stronger person was more likely to lead, and men, in general, are physically stronger. Of course there are many exceptions.But today we live in a vastly different world. The person more likely to lead is not the physically stronger person; it is the more creative person, the more intelligent person, the more innovative person, and there are no hormones for those attributes. A man is as likely as a woman to be intelligent, to be creative, to be innovative. We have evolved; but it seems to me that our ideas of gender had not evolved. Some weeks ago, I walked into a lobby of one of the best Nigerian hotels. I thought about naming the hotel, but I thought I probably shouldn't. And a guard at the entrance stopped me and asked me annoying questions, because their automatic assumption is that a Nigerian female walking into a hotel alone is a sex worker. And by the way, why do these hotels focus on the ostensible supply rather than the demand for sex workers? In Lagos I cannot go alone into many "reputable" bars and clubs. They just don't let you in if you're a woman alone, you have to be accompanied by a man. Each time I walk into a Nigerian restaurant with a man, the waiter greets the man and ignores me. The waiters are products -- at this some women felt like, "Yes! I thought that!" The waiters are products of a society that has taught them that men are more important than women. And I know that waiters don't intend any harm. But it's one thing to know intellectually and quite another to feel it emotionally. Each time they ignore me, I feel invisible. I feel upset. I want to tell them that I am just as human as the man, that I'm just as worthy of acknowledgment. These are little things, but sometimes it's the little things that sting the most. And not long ago, I wrote an article about what it means to be young and female in Lagos, and the printers told me, "It was so angry." Of course it was angry! I am angry. Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change; but, in addition to being angry, I'm also hopeful. Because I believe deeply in the ability of human beings to make and remake themselves for the better. Gender matters everywhere in the world, but I want to focus on Nigeria and on Africa in general, because it is where I know, and because it is where my heart is. And I would like today to ask that we begin to dream about and plan for a different world, a fairer world, a world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves. And this is how to start: we must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise our sons differently. We do a great disservice to boys on how we raise them; we stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way, masculinity becomes this hard, small cage and we put boys inside the cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear. We teach boys to be afraid of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true selves, because they have to be, in Nigerian speak, "hard man!" In secondary school, a boy and a girl, both of them teenagers, both of them with the same amount of pocket money, would go out and then the boy would be expected always to pay, to prove his masculinity. And yet we wonder why boys are more likely to steal money from their parents. What if both boys and girls were raised not to link masculinity with money? What if the attitude was not "the boy has to pay" but rather "whoever has more should pay?" Now, of course because of that historical advantage, it is mostly men who will have more today, but if we start raising children differently, then in fifty years, in a hundred years, boys will no longer have the pressure of having to prove this masculinity. But by far the worst thing we do to males, by making them feel that they have to be hard, is that we leave them with very fragile egos. The more "hard man" the man feels compelled to be, the weaker his ego is. And then we do a much greater disservice to girls because we raise them to cater to the fragile egos of men. We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller, we say to girls, "You can have ambition, but not too much." "You should aim to be successful, but not too successful, otherwise you would threaten the man." If you are the breadwinner in your relationship with a man, you have to pretend that you're not, especially in public, otherwise you will emasculate him. But what if we question the premise itself? Why should a woman's success be a threat to a man? What if we decide to simply dispose of that word, and I don't think there's an English word I dislike more than "emasculation." A Nigerian acquaintance once asked me if I was worried that men would be intimidated by me. I was not worried at all. In fact, it had not occurred to me to be worried because a man who would be intimidated by me is exactly the kind of man I would have no interest in. But still I was really struck by this. Because I'm female, I'm expected to aspire to marriage; I'm expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. A marriage can be a good thing; it can be a source of joy and love and mutual support. But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don't teach boys the same? I know a woman who decided to sell her house because she didn't want to intimidate a man who might marry her. I know an unmarried woman in Nigeria who, when she goes to conferences, wears a wedding ring because according to her, she wants the other participants in the conference to "give her respect." I know young women who are under so much pressure from family, from friends, even from work to get married, and they're pushed to make terrible choices. A woman at a certain age who is unmarried, our society teaches her to see it as a deep, personal failure. And a man at a certain age who is unmarried, we just think he hasn't come around to making his pick. It's easy for us to say, "Oh, but women can just say no to all of this." But the reality is more difficult and more complex. We're all social beings. We internalize ideas from our socialization. Even the language we use in talking about marriage and relationships illustrates this. The language of marriage is often the language of ownership rather than the language of partnership. We use the word "respect" to mean something a woman shows a man but often not something a man shows a woman. Both men and women in Nigeria will say -- this is an expression I'm very amused by -- "I did it for peace in my marriage." Now, when men say it, it is usually about something that they should not be doing anyway. Sometimes they say it to their friends, it's something to say to their friends in a kind of fondly exasperated way, you know, something that ultimately proves how masculine they are, how needed, how loved. "Oh, my wife said I can't go to the club every night, so for peace in my marriage, I do it only on weekends." Now, when a woman says, "I did it for peace in my marriage," she's usually talking about giving up a job, a dream, a career. We teach females that in relationships, compromise is what women do. We raise girls to see each other as competitors -- not for jobs or for accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are. If we have sons, we don't mind knowing about our sons' girlfriends. But our daughters' boyfriends? God forbid. But of course when the time is right, we expect those girls to bring back the perfect man to be their husbands. We police girls, we praise girls for virginity, but we don't praise boys for virginity, and it's always made me wonder how exactly this is supposed to work out because... I mean, the loss of virginity is usually a process that involves... Recently a young woman was gang raped in a university in Nigeria, I think some of us know about that. And the response of many young Nigerians, both male and female, was something along the lines of this: "Yes, rape is wrong. But what is a girl doing in a room with four boys?" Now, if we can forget the horrible inhumanity of that response, these Nigerians have been raised to think of women as inherently guilty, and they have been raised to expect so little of men that the idea of men as savage beings without any control is somehow acceptable. We teach girls shame. "Close your legs." "Cover yourself." We make them feel as though by being born female they're already guilty of something. And so, girls grow up to be women who cannot see they have desire. They grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think, and they grow up -- and this is the worst thing we did to girls -- they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form. I know a woman who hates domestic work, she just hates it, but she pretends that she likes it, because she's been taught that to be "good wife material" she has to be -- to use that Nigerian word -- very "homely." And then she got married, and after a while her husband's family began to complain that she had changed. Actually, she had not changed, she just got tired of pretending. The problem with gender, is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Now imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn't have the weight of gender expectations. Boys and girls are undeniably different biologically, but socialization exaggerates the differences and then it becomes a self-fulfilling process. Now, take cooking for example. Today women in general are more likely to do the housework than men, the cooking and cleaning. But why is that? Is it because women are born with a cooking gene? Or because over years they have been socialized to see cooking as their role? Actually, I was going to say that maybe women are born with a cooking gene, until I remember that the majority of the famous cooks in the world, whom we give the fancy title of "chefs," are men. I used to look up to my grandmother who was a brilliant, brilliant woman, and wonder how she would have been if she had the same opportunities as men when she was growing up. Now today, there are many more opportunities for women than there were during my grandmother's time because of changes in policy, changes in law, all of which are very important. But what matters even more is our attitude, our mindset, what we believe and what we value about gender. What if in raising children we focus on ability instead of gender? What if in raising children we focus on interest instead of gender? I know a family who have a son and a daughter, both of whom are brilliant at school, who are wonderful, lovely children. When the boy is hungry, the parents say to the girl, "Go and cook Indomie noodles for your brother." Now, the daughter doesn't particularly like to cook Indomie noodles, but she's a girl, and so she has to. Now, what if the parents, from the beginning, taught both the boy and the girl to cook Indomie? Cooking, by the way, is a very useful skill for boys to have. I've never thought it made sense to leave such a crucial thing, the ability to nourish oneself -- in the hands of others. I know a woman who has the same degree and the same job as her husband. When they get back from work, she does most of the housework, which I think is true for many marriages. But what struck me about them was that whenever her husband changed the baby's diaper, she said "thank you" to him. Now, what if she saw this as perfectly normal and natural that he should, in fact, care for his child? I'm trying to unlearn many of the lessons of gender that I internalized when I was growing up. But I sometimes still feel very vulnerable in the face of gender expectations. The first time I taught a writing class in graduate school, I was worried. I wasn't worried about the material I would teach because I was well-prepared, and I was going to teach what I enjoy teaching. Instead, I was worried about what to wear. I wanted to be taken seriously. I knew that because I was female I will automatically have to prove my worth. And I was worried that if I looked too feminine, I would not be taken seriously. I really wanted to wear my shiny lip gloss and my girly skirt, but I decided not to. Instead, I wore a very serious, very manly and very ugly suit. Because the sad truth is that when it comes to appearance we start off with men as the standard, as the norm. If a man is getting ready for a business meeting, he doesn't worry about looking too masculine and therefore not being taken for granted. If a woman has to get ready for business meeting, she has to worry about looking too feminine and what it says and whether or not she will be taken seriously. I wish I had not worn that ugly suit that day. I've actually banished it from my closet, by the way. Had I then the confidence that I have now to be myself, my students would have benefited even more from my teaching, because I would have been more comfortable and more fully and more truly myself. I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femaleness and for my femininity. And I want to be respected in all of my femaleness because I deserve to be. Gender is not an easy conversation to have. For both men and women, to bring up gender is sometimes to encounter almost immediate resistance. I can imagine some people here are actually thinking, "Women too do sef." Some of the men here might be thinking, "OK, all of this is interesting, but I don't think like that." And that is part of the problem. That many men do not actively think about gender or notice gender is part of the problem of gender. That many men, say, like my friend Louis, that everything is fine now. And that many men do nothing to change it. If you are a man and you walk into a restaurant with a woman and the waiter greets only you, does it occur to you to ask the waiter, "Why haven't you greeted her?" Because gender can be -- Actually, we may repose part of a longer version of this talk. So, because gender can be a very uncomfortable conversation to have, there are very easy ways to close it, to close the conversation. So some people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes, how, you know, female apes bow down to male apes and that sort of thing. But the point is we're not apes. Apes also live on trees and have earthworms for breakfast, and we don't. Some people will say, "Well, poor men also have a hard time." And this is true. But that is not what this -- But this is not what this conversation is about. Gender and class are different forms of oppression. I actually learned quite a bit about systems of oppression and how they can be blind to one another by talking to black men. I was once talking to a black man about gender and he said to me, "Why do you have to say 'my experience as a woman'? Why can't it be 'your experience as a human being'?" Now, this was the same man who would often talk about his experience as a black man. Gender matters. Men and women experience the world differently. Gender colors the way we experience the world. But we can change that. Some people will say, "Oh, but women have the real power, bottom power." And for non-Nigerians, bottom power is an expression which I suppose means something like a woman who uses her sexuality to get favors from men. But bottom power is not power at all. Bottom power means that a woman simply has a good root to tap into, from time to time -- somebody else's power. And then, of course, we have to wonder what happens when that somebody else is in a bad mood, or sick or impotent. Some people will say that a woman being subordinate to a man is our culture. But culture is constantly changing. I have beautiful twin nieces who are fifteen and live in Lagos. If they had been born a hundred years ago they would have been taken away and killed. Because it was our culture, it was our culture to kill twins. So what is the point of culture? I mean there's the decorative, the dancing... but also, culture really is about preservation and continuity of a people. In my family, I am the child who is most interested in the story of who we are, in our traditions, in the knowledge about ancestral lands. My brothers are not as interested as I am. But I cannot participate, I cannot go to umunna meetings, I cannot have a say. Because I'm female. Culture does not make people, people make culture. So if it is in fact true – So if it is in fact true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we must make it our culture. I think very often of my dear friend, Okoloma Maduewesi. May he and all the others who passed away in that Sosoliso crash continue to rest in peace. He will always be remembered by those of us who loved him. And he was right that day many years ago when he called me a feminist. I am a feminist. And when I looked up the word in the dictionary that day, this is what it said: "Feminist: a person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes." My great grandmother, from the stories I've heard, was a feminist. She ran away from the house of the man she did not want to marry and ended up marrying the man of her choice. She refused, she protested, she spoke up whenever she felt she was being deprived of access, of land, that sort of thing. My great grandmother did not know that word "feminist," but it doesn't mean that she wasn't one. More of us should reclaim that word. My own definition of feminist is: "A feminist is a man or a woman who says – A feminist is a man or a woman who says, "Yes, there's a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it. We must do better." The best feminist I know is my brother Kene. He's also a kind, good-looking, lovely man, and he's very masculine. Persona: Characters: Theme: Gender, Feminism, and Empowerment Analysis: Insights: 2. It's a Night Job by Joanita Male About the Author: You have to understand, I did not to choose this life - it chose me. My childhood had somehow prepared me for this job – if you can call it a job that is. My mother had the same job and her mother as well. I guess I couldn’t escape it. It’s a cold evening, and it's around 7 pm. I’m sure it will not rain today. The rain cuts business down almost to zero. You see, the street side is not a place to be during a downpour. The sky is a dark blue with a few stars spread out, that’s how I know it will not rain. I’ve been told stars are a sure sign that the skies will hold back. Thank God! I’m wearing the white dress, the stretchy one that shows the curve of my hips clearly. White is a good colour when you’re trying to be noticed among several other girls, especially when your complexion is as dark as mine. My make-up has been applied. My mum taught me how to wear make-up. Maroon lipstick (red was for the light skinned ones) and a bit of eye shadow. I’m wearing six inch heels, not so much for fashion but more to be noticed easier. At 5’ 1”, I am one of the shorter girls here. I’m not wearing any underwear; I have learnt that sometimes the only way to get customers is to give a preview of what’s to come. I’m standing on Burton Street, the small stretch before the roundabout to Yusuf Lule road. Most of the girls are already there. This street has no lights at all. I like that about it, any sign of lights means we have a potential client. The buildings on this street are homes that were turned into offices. They have domineering gates with large signposts at the entrance. There isn’t a sound from them at this time. Lights. I quickly bend over, enough to give the driver a glimpse of what he will be getting if they choose me. I manage to bend yet still twist my body so they can see a bit of my face. I’m smiling. I’m good at that now. It comes with practice; I don’t have to be happy to smile. I can conjure up a smile at your slightest bidding...it’s one of the requirements of the job. A white corona slows down next to me, I can tell by the car that this client might not pay as handsomely as I would like, but I learnt a long time ago not to pass up any offers, you might go hungry if you do. A dark face is staring at me all I see are wide eyes and sparkling teeth. “Get in,” he shouts with impatience. He has to drive off before anyone sees him. I jump in, still smiling, I’m not sure where we are going, but I have to be clear on my prices. “Long or short?” I ask loudly, with my eyebrows raised, it’s something I always do. “Long, how much?” he shouts out. This might be a difficult one, I think to myself. “Fifty thousand,” I say. “Okay,” he blurts out as we drive off to what I assume is Ntinda. Getting home won’t be too expensive, I stay in Naalya and that’s pretty close to where we’re going. We pull up at Max’s motel. Everyone that stays in Ntinda uses this spot. We come out of the car and he rushes out. I follow after him like an unwanted puppy. They always act this way at first, like they’re doing you a favour. I hate this part! We get to the room and he wastes no time taking off his clothes. He lays there on the double bed covered with a thick brown blanket. Everything about this motel is dull. Ugly brown curtains to match the blankets, cream walls and basic furniture, everything looks as if they were dragged out of the nearby primary school. Everything about this motel is dull apart from the people. The different clients that is. They range from the boda-boda rider who decides to pleasure himself with the day’s earnings to the city tycoon who tries to remain inconspicuous on his visits. I look down at him and he is well built, much better than most of my usual clients. He looks at me waiting. I hate this part too. The beginning. I pull up my dress. Even though he’s paying for ‘long’ I am determined to give him ‘short’. I’m not in the mood to do too much today. I’ll please him enough to the point where he can’t tell the difference. We are at it now; this is the part that I don’t hate so much, the satisfaction I give them. All of them. We rock away as the motel bed creaks. I can partly hear the beds in the neighbouring rooms making the same sound; it’s like a song matching rhythms, matching beats. His face is twisted almost as if he is in pain. I know that means I am doing a good job. He’s a first timer. I’m sure of it. He asked the price. No one ever asks the price. It’s over now. I’m thinking about it and I am pretty sure this is the part I actually hate the most. The self-loathing. The moment I start to blame all of this on my mother, the point where I am flooded with memories of listening to my mother cry every night when they left. The different men she brought home, that is. I always wondered what made her so unhappy. She had enough money to look after us on her own and she was a good mother. It’s only now that I am older that I understand. “Pay up,” I shout. I am not smiling any more. When it’s time to get paid it helps not to smile. “But, you’re expensive,” Of course now that it’s over, he realizes. I don’t say anything, arguing never works, I just look at him, stare actually. He pulls out a crumpled fifty thousand shilling note. The old notes, the ones that are larger and much paler. I grab it and stick it in my bra before he changes his mind. He goes to the tiny bathroom to wash off. He really is a first timer. I waste no time rummaging through his trousers. Nothing. I check his shirt, there’s a wallet, a few crumpled ten thousands, I grab them and then I’m gone. Max’s motel is conveniently or should I say inconveniently situated away from the main road. This means I have to call my boda-boda guy. Great! I’m home now. I throw on pair of leggings before I got home; I wonder what girls did before leggings were in vogue. Mother opens the door. She is smiling at me; she knows I have some money for her. She stopped bringing the men home a long time ago; there isn’t a large market for hookers over fifty. How did I get myself into this? I can’t even explain to myself. Maybe it was because of the several daddies I had or watching my mother apply make-up every day and somehow look after us. Or maybe it’s the fact that I was raised on the words “Look after your body, you never know when you’ll need it to make a living.” Maybe that’s it. It’s the receptionist job I have, that’s where I get the money. This is what I tell her, this is what she pretends to believe. Maybe she does believe it, I don’t really know. Mother sticks out her small hand, waiting. Even at fifty she’s still in great shape even though she isn’t as beautiful as she used to be. The job took its toll on her. There’s a shadow of regret behind every smile she wears, maybe this is the effect of the night job. That’s why I’m going to stop, seriously. Soon, someday. I greet her and hand over the fifty thousand note, she’s still smiling as she goes on about how much I make her proud. Okay, I’m certain now, this really is actually the part I hate the most, my mother’s adoration. I walk to my room, I have a long day tomorrow, my university class has a sociology test to sit. Persona: Characters:  Theme: Gender, Feminism, and Empowerment Analysis: Insights: IV. Displacement and Migration 1. A Mother in a Refugee Camp by Chinua Achebe About the Author: No Madonna and Child could touch Her tenderness for a son She soon would have to forget.... The air was heavy with odours of diarrhoea, Of unwashed children with washed-out ribs And dried-up bottoms waddling in laboured steps Behind blown-empty bellies. Other mothers there Had long ceased to care, but not this one: She held a ghost-smile between her teeth, And in her eyes the memory Of a mother’s pride.... She had bathed him And rubbed him down with bare palms. She took from their bundle of possessions A broken comb and combed The rust-coloured hair left on his skull And then—humming in her eyes—began carefully to part it. In their former life this was perhaps A little daily act of no consequence Before his breakfast and school; now she did it Like putting flowers on a tiny grave. Persona: another observer/detached observer Characters: Theme: Displacement and Migration Literary Devices: “Madonna and Child” - Allusion to art (Madonna e Bambino) “The air was heavy with odours of diarrhoea” - Olfactory Imagery “Of unwashed children with washed-out ribs” - Visual Imagery “And dried-up bottoms waddling in laboured steps” - Visual Imagery “Behind blown-empty bellies.” - VIsual Imagery “She held a ghost-smile between her teeth” - Visual Imagery “And rubbed him down with bare palms” - Kinesthetic Imagery “Like putting flowers on a tiny grave” - Simile Analysis:  “She had bathed him And rubbed him down with bare palms.” - These lines shows her tenderness of a mother. “The rust-coloured hair left on his skull” - this line implies that the child has been dead for a while “And in her eyes the memory Of a mother’s pride.... She had bathed him And rubbed him down with bare palms. She took from their bundle of possessions A broken comb and combed The rust-coloured hair left on his skull” - these lines shows her dedication for the child who has been dead for a while Insights: 1. Conversations About Home (At the Deportation Centre) by Warsan Shire About the Author: Well, I think home spat me out, the blackouts and curfews like tongue against loose tooth. God, do you know how difficult it is, to talk about the day your own city dragged you by the hair, past the old prison, past the school gates, past the burning torsos erected on poles like flags? When I meet others like me I recognise the longing, the missing, the memory of ash on their faces. No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. I've been carrying the old anthem in my mouth for so long that there’s no space for another song, another tongue or another language. I know a shame that shrouds, totally engulfs. Allah Ceebta, I tore up and ate my own passport in an airport hotel. I’m bloated with language I can't afford to forget. They ask me how did you get here? Can’t you see it on my body? The Libyan desert red with immigrant bodies shot in the face for trying to enter, the Gulf of Aden bloated with immigrant bodies. I wouldn’t have put my children on the boat unless I thought the sea was safer than the land. I hope the journey meant more than miles because all of my children are in the water. I want to make love but my hair smells of war and running and running. I want to lay down, but these countries are like uncles who touch you when you’re young and asleep. Look at all these borders, foaming at the mouth with brown bodies broken and desperate. I’m the colour of hot sun on my face, my mother’s remains were never buried. I spent days and nights in the stomach of the truck, I did not come out the same. Sometimes it feels like someone else is wearing my body. I know a few things to be true. I do not know where I am going, where I have come from is disappearing, I am unwelcome and my beauty is not beauty here. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing. I am the sin of memory and the absence of memory. I watch the news and my mouth becomes a sink full of blood. The lines, the forms, the people at the desks, the calling cards, the immigration officers, the looks on the street, the cold settling deep into my bones, the English classes at night, the distance I am from home. But Alhamdulilah all of this is better than the scent of a woman completely on fire, or a truckload of men who look like my father, pulling out my teeth and nails, or fourteen men between my legs, or a gun, or a promise, or a lie, or his name, or his manhood in my mouth. I hear them say, go home, I hear them say, fucking immigrants, fucking refugees. Are they really this arrogant? Do they not know that stability is like a lover with a sweet mouth upon your body one second and the next you are a tremor lying on the floor covered in rubble and old currency waiting for its return. All I can say is, I was once like you, the apathy, the pity, the ungrateful placement and now my home is the mouth of a shark, now my home is the barrel of a gun. I'll see you on the other side. Persona: Somalian Refugee Characters: none Theme: Displacement and Migration Literary Devices: “God, do you know how difficult it is…” - apostrophe Analysis: “I think home spat me out” - being driven-out from your own homeland “I’ve been carrying the old anthem in my mouth for so long that there’s no space for another song, another tongue or another language” - this means that despite living in a different place, she still hasn’t learned the culture there because she remains attached to her old culture (acculturation). “I’m bloated with language I can't afford to forget.” - Language as identity; The language which the persona learned “Water”- symbolizes transition/danger/uncertainty (going to a safer place but not safe yet because in the water/ocean, there is no clear direction) “ I hope the journey meant more than miles because all of my children are in the water.” - the children are not yet safe “I want to make love but my hair smells of war and running and running.” - shows evidence of war “I do not know where I am going, where I have come from is disappearing, I am unwelcome and my beauty is not beauty here.” - you never come home to the same place twice “I am the sin of memory” - very painful; it feels wrong to remember “and the absence of memory” - there are no memories of them on the new home “he English classes at night” - shows that she’s been learning the English language “scent of a woman completely on fire” - gender-based violence there is a custom or practice wherein the wife will burn themselves alive on the funeral pyres of their husband or soon after his death “a truckload of men who look like my father” - everyone looks like the perpetrator  “pulling out my teeth and nails, or fourteen men between my legs, or a gun, or a promise, or a lie, or his name, or his manhood in my mouth.” - gang rape, domestic violence, trauma “I'll see you on the other side.” - this could mean death or "the other side" could also mean the lugar where she is deported Overall: The poem is about the struggle and hardships of the refugees from their homeland(because of war) and trying to migrate or seek refuge to another country but they are being deported instead. Insights: 2. To Make Use of Water by Safia Elhillo About the Author: DILUTE i forget the arabic word for economy i forget the english word for ‫ عسل‬forget the arabic word for incense & english word for ‫ مسكين‬arabic word for sandwich english for ‫ وله & صيدلية & مطعم‬/stupid girl, atlantic got your tongue/ QUENCH i think i can take care of myself because i only broke one plate the day wael died left it in the sink for hours watched water fill the seams of the mosaic & only let myself think once of the crossed ocean how we thought it was enough to keep us safe BLUR back home we are plagued by a politeness so dense even the doctors cannot call things what they are my grandfather’s left eye swirled thick with smoke what my new mouth can call glaucoma while the arabic still translates to the white water WASH i think i can take care of myself a stranger’s sour mouth scraped the name off my body but i keep quiet i am last in the shower line i let it remain a household joke how i finish all the hot water SWIM i want to go home DISSOLVE i want to go home DROWN half don’t even make it out or across you get to be ungrateful you get to be homesick from safe inside the folds of your blue american passport do you even understand what was lost to bring you here. Persona: Young Sudanese Woman who is now living in America Characters: Theme: Displacement and Migration Literary Devices: In the poem, water was used as a metaphor Analysis: “DILUTE”- (adding another substance to make the other weaker) - Her L1 which is Arabic was slowly fading after she learned the English language–the language of the land where she migrated. “QUENCH” - quench of protection ○ “i only broke one plate” - breaking plates is symbol of not capable of doing something yet but this line shows that she is in full control because she only broke 1 plate “BLUR” - In the Sudanese/Arabic culture, they don’t name things as they are; they are not straightforward (Culture of Politeness) “WASH” - Wash the traces of sexual assault ○ “a stranger’s sour mouth scraped the name off my body but i keep quiet” - implies that she was raped “SWIM”- the persona wants to go home; sense of displacement “DISSOLVE” - her motivation was already fading away “DROWN” - literal meaning; On the way to safe harbor, other people die along the way ○ “ungrateful you get to be homesick from safe inside the folds of your blue american passport” - you should not be ungrateful as an immigrant but the persona said no. She should be homesic Insights: Displacement - forced removal V. Aging, Death, and Reflection 1. At 84 by Sophie Bamwoyeraki About the Author: Your teeth have fled their nest. Dust rules over the Holy Book. Untouched buttons of your radio look on. Curtain folds are like a nurse’s starched uniform. Your soup bowl has become a roach’s pool. Your appetite is painted in dull colours. Your walking stick is the centre in the spider’s handcraft. Vivacity basks in a second childhood. The sturdy voice that bounced on walls is now drained. The kite-sharp eyesight simmers on dying fire. Your countenance is the light of a fast sinking sun. Muscles of steel now soft like newly ground corn. Humour has abandoned your garden. Where are the mighty hands that lifted me when I fell? Silent weeds strangle years. Tendrils of life are tangled up and bewildered. Your worm-eaten garb sways in the wind. My eyes well up and rage weighs my throat down. You are the mahogany never meant to shed his leaves. Persona: “Most likely” the child of the addressee. Addressee - someone whom the persona wants to address Theme: Aging, Death, and Reflection Literary Devices: “Dust rules over the Holy Book” - Visual Imagery “Untouched buttons of your radio look on” - Visual Imagery “Curtain folds are like a nurse’s starched uniform” - Simile “Your soup bowl has become a roach’s pool” - Visual Imagery “Your walking stick is the centre in the spider’s handcraft” - Visual Imagery “Vivacity basks in a second childhood” - Personification “The sturdy voice that bounced on walls is now drained” - Auditory imagery or Personification “The kite-sharp eyesight simmers on dying fire” Metaphor of failing eyesight “Your countenance is the light of a fast sinking sun” - Metaphor “Muscles of steel now soft like newly ground corn” - Simile “Humour has abandoned your garden” - Personification “Where are the mighty hands that lifted me when I fell?” - Synecdoche or Apostrophe “Silent weeds strangle years” - Metaphor  “Your worm-eaten garb sways in the wind” - Visual Imagery Analysis: “Your teeth have fled their nest.” - the word nest is used because the shape of our dentures are round; child rearing “Humour has abandoned your garden” - the implies that the grandfather was not jolly anymore “Silent weeds strangle years” - The persona did not notice that his/her grandfather was getting old “Your worm-eaten garb sways in the wind” - the clothes were not maintained “My eyes well up and rage weighs my throat down” - because of anger, the persona cannot speak “You are the mahogany never meant to shed his leaves” - the word “his” signifies that the addressee, is the persona’s father Insights: VI. Language, Education, and Identity 1. The Uses of English by Akinwumi Isola About the Author: It was a small village of about twenty-five houses with thatched (hut-like) roofs. Only the mission house, the school, and the church had corrugated iron roofs. It was a peaceful location in the middle of the agricultural belt that surrounded what was called Ibadanland. There was a young man called Depo who had a wife called Asunle. No day passed without a noisy quarrel in their household. It was always more or less a shouting match because Depo always threatened his wife ferociously but he never really beat her. Asunle would maintain a safe distance and shout alarmingly, as if her life were in danger. Depo always looked annoyed and embarrassed. He seemed to be crying for help and salvation. His wife apparently enjoyed every bit of it; she would shout and curse to attract attention. Their neighbours would cry almost in unison: “There they go again!” Asunle accused Depo of being obstinate (very difficult to deal with) and inconsiderate. Depo would insist on eating particular types of food at odd hours and always drank too much palm wine afterward. These habits were becoming intolerable to his wife. Some people thought that it was Asunle who was too defiant. She was always ready to pick a quarrel. She could, at will, turn the smallest domestic encounter into an irritating exchange. She would struggle like a wild cat as she was being restrained, and hurl invectives(insults) at her husband in an endless exasperating stream that would make the peacemakers shout, “But that is enough!” Elders in the village started looking for a solution. They spent long hours debating all relevant points, but no one suggested a divorce. Elders never did. At last Depo’s close friends suggested what they thought was a foolproof plan: he should marry a second wife! With a co-wife in the household, they thought, Asunle would be forced to become more sensible. So, Depo and his friends began the anxious search; Asunle never seemed to worry. At last Atoke, the would-be second wife, was identified in a big village several kilometres away. Elders promptly proposed and received a favourable reply, including the consent of the girl herself. The ceremonies were performed, and even Asunle played her part as senior wife to her credit. The village heaved a sigh of relief, hoping for peace at last in Mr Depo’s household. But if the villagers were right in expecting peace after the marriage, they were naive in thinking that other problems would not arise. It turned out that the battle lines only shifted from between husband and wife to between wife and co-wife. In their positive estimation of the new wife’s character, villagers were grossly misled by her good looks. She was young, tall, and shapely, with a rich crop of hair, which she used to plait in beautiful, elaborate styles. There was a moderate gap between her upper front teeth and she smiled a lot. But beneath that alluring visage (visij) lay a sarcastic turbulence, amply fuelled by a sharp tongue and an artful, dramatic disposition. In spite of Asunle’s notorious, wily truculence, she could not duplicate half the repertoire of Atoke’s creative acerbity. No one could tell whether Depo’s choice of Atoke as second wife was by cruel accident or a calculated search for someone who would be more than a match for Asunle. Trouble started when Atoke refused to duly acknowledge Asunle’s superior position in the household. By tradition, it was Atoke’s duty to cook for the whole household and it was Asunle’s right to tell her what to cook, when to cook it, and how much. But Atoke refused to be ordered about by anyone. She would only cook for herself and her husband. Asunle was therefore forced to continue cooking for herself and her two children, Olu, a little boy in his third year of school, and Lara, a mere toddler. Before Asunle had realised it, Atoke’s monopoly of their joint husband was complete. Atoke cooked the tastiest of foods, which endeared her all the more to Depo, who had by now learned to tap palm wine, most of which he consumed himself. The after-supper scenes between Depo and Atoke were enviable pictures of marital happiness. But Asunle was being excluded from it all! The children adjusted quickly to the new domestic situation. Lara, the little girl, took to Atoke instantly, like a fish to water. She would follow Atoke everywhere in spite of her mother’s attempts to restrain her. It was to Atoke’s credit that she too liked Lara. She would carry her on her back; she would play little games with her. Lara preferred to join her father, Depo, and the new wife at mealtimes. She would sit in her father’s lap, and be indulged. Olu, the schoolboy, stuck by his mother Asunle. Soon Asunle could no longer endure the marginalisation. She accused Depo of encouraging defiance on the part of Atoke, who was openly trampling tradition. But the gauntlet was taken up not by Depo, who was by then almost permanently inebriated, but by Atoke, who was not prepared to lose her favourable position. Rowdy quarrels quickly re-erupted in Depo’s household and eventually regained their original position as the village’s primary source of entertainment to the chagrin of elders and the delight of young ones. Villagers were expecting Asunle to re-enact her past performances and promptly put the new wife in her place, but the very first public encounter left no doubt that Asunle was in trouble. Actually it was Asunle who fired the first salvos: three or four missiles of invective. Her style was to quickly boil over and assail her adversary with verbal abuse, gesticulating wildly. She would then refuse to go off the boil for a long time. She would make unpleasant remarks about her enemy’s looks and behaviour. When the opponent was her husband, she shone like a lone star. When Asunle started this first fight, Atoke remained very calm. She came out of the house and stood outside. Asunle followed her. A small crowd was already gathering, attracted by Asunle’s usual noise. Then Atoke asked Asunle to stop bleating like a sheep and wait for some response. At first she calmly agreed with Asunle on all the unpleasant remarks she had made about her bodily features and behaviour. But she proceeded to demonstrate how all her own shortcomings would pale in comparison with the degree of ugliness of Asunle’s features and the awkwardness of her behaviour. She even gave a few examples. Atoke was more sophisticated than Asunle. To Atoke, lips were not just thin, they had to be compared with a common phenomenon that would sharply paint the picture of incongruity. For example, Asunle’s lips were as thin as a palm wine seller’s drinking calabash! Her eyes were as sunken as a brook almost obscured under an evergreen bush. In other words, whereas Asunle would stop at just ridiculing an ugly part of the body, Atoke would go further and liken the part to some funny phenomenon. In addition, while Asunle’s performances were angry and trumpet-tongued, Atoke’s were calculated, spiteful, and expressed with great fluency. The truth soon became too apparent to be ignored. Asunle was no match for the great Atoke. Overnight a new champion had wiped out all the records of a long reigning heroine. It was too bitter a pill for Asunle to swallow. Part of Atoke’s advantage was that she came from a very big village where she had been exposed to greater variety in the art of vituperation than Asunle who had lived all her life in small villages. As the new wife’s reputation spread, gossip was making the old wife’s life unbearable. For the first time Asunle was not too keen to pick a quarrel. But these were trying times for the household as quarrels increased. One morning, Asunle discovered that there was no water in the family pot. Normally she would have called on Atoke to go to the river and fetch some water, but she wanted to avoid any confrontation so early in the morning. So she picked a pot and ran to the river. When she returned, she did not pour the water into the big family water pot. She gave some to Olu to wash himself and get ready for school; she was also going to give Lara her morning bath and use the remaining to prepare breakfast for herself and the children. But while she was busy washing Lara in the backyard, Atoke took the remaining water, poured it into a cooking pot, and placed it on the fire to cook her own breakfast. When Asunle came back and discovered what had happened, she was furious. She wanted to know what gave Atoke the idea that she, Asunle, the senior wife, had become her errand girl to fetch water for her to cook food. Atoke just smiled, stoked the fire, and sat calmly without making any comment. The situation boiled over! Asunle picked up a small pestle and pushed the clay pot over. It overturned and broke, emptying its contents into the fire in a whirl of smoke and ashes. Atoke shot up and grabbed Asunle’s clothes. They started a noisy struggle. Little Lara started to cry. Depo ran in from the backyard where he had gone to wash his face. He struggled to separate the fighters. Asunle pushed him off energetically and he fell. But he struggled up instantly. He forced himself between them. Atoke went out of the house followed by Asunle, and a grand performance of verbal abuse started in front of the house. The usual crowd gathered and seemed to be saying this time, “Not again!” Both wives were equally angry and worked up. They reeled off abuse in a frenzied battle of wit and hate. Atoke had better control of her performance. Asunle was too angry to be effective. Atoke’s performance was therefore entertaining. Atoke looked at Asunle, shook her head, and said, “Do you ever observe how you carry your body when you move about? You push that heavy mouth of yours forward like a timid stray dog venturing onto a dance floor.” The audience would have applauded, but the elders suppressed all response, except a few muffled chuckles. Asunle had virtually lost her voice. She was going to dry! The villagers’ sympathies instantly returned to her. An elderly lady came forward and shouted angrily at the two women. “What on earth do you think you are doing? Can’t you see? People are laughing at you! Is this the kind of report you want sent back to your parents? Shut your mouths and go inside, now!” The two ladies stopped shouting and went into their house. But the damage had been done to Asunle’s reputation. She had been humiliated. She went into her bedroom and cried. Depo had to take Olu to school to explain why he was coming so late that morning. Asunle knew she had to do something to redeem herself. After some hard thinking, she smiled and carried on with the day’s chores. Depo took his machete and went to the farm. The two ladies were not speaking to each other. That morning little Lara stayed with her mother. It was two o’clock when Olu came home from school. Asunle had prepared a good lunch for him. He was eating hungrily because he hadn’t had breakfast. Asunle sat watching him dotingly. Then a conversation began: “Olu, my dear son.” “Yes, mother.” “How was school today?” “We learned Bible stories and did arithmetic.” “Have you been learning any English?” “Oh yes! We have learned a lot of English! Let me show you my book.” “No, no! Don’t worry. But you’ll do something for me.” “An errand? You want to write a letter? Let me wash my hands.” “No, it’s not a letter, but go and wash your hands.” Olu washed his hands and sat beside his mother. “Now mother, what do you want me to do for you?” “You said you have been learning some English?” “Yes, we have learned a lot of English. Look at this book. Everything inside it is English!” “Really!” “Oh, yes!” “But can you insult someone in English?” Olu hesitated a bit and said, “Well, yes! Oh yes! It is possible. There is so much English in my head!” “Well then, you remember how that stupid Atoke abused me in the morning? Now I want to show her that I tower above her in social standing. I have a son who can insult her in English! So, I want you to go to her now and insult her roundly in English.” Olu stood up calmly, tucked in his shirt, and adjusted his belt. He dashed to his bag and quickly checked something in his book. He nodded satisfactorily and marched smartly to face Atoke who was just entering the house. Olu stood right in Atoke’s way, and Atoke was forced to stop and wonder. Then Olu simply asked, “Why were you abusing my mother in the morning?” The confrontation was unexpected, and it momentarily disorientated Atoke. But she quickly regained her balance. She shouted at him. “Shut your dirty mouth! Has your mother run out of ideas?” Olu then moved a few steps back and with arms akimbo he started to speak English knowing full well that Atoke would not understand. He said, “What is this?” Atoke was taken aback. “What is he talking?” Olu responded, “It is a basket.” Atoke concluded that Olu must be insulting her in English. She warned mother and child: “If you want to abuse me in English, you’ll get into trouble. And I hope you are listening, careless mother?” Olu moved farther back before throwing another English missile: “What are you doing?” Atoke was annoyed now. “I am warning you, you little rat.” Olu just fired on: “I am going to the door.” Atoke said, “This is a good-for-nothing boy!” Olu continued. “Sit on the chair. What are you doing? I am sitting on the chair.” Atoke said, with a lot of hatred in her voice, “That stupid English you are speaking will be the death of you.” Olu would not be deterred: “Where is your book? It is on the desk.” Atoke then said, “I know that my God will surely throw back all those curses on your ill-fated head!” At that point Asunle felt the need to protect her son. She had been sitting down, enjoying her son’s special performance with tremendous pride. She now stood up to defend Olu: “Don’t curse my son, shameless woman. His intelligence is a gift from God. I know you can’t understand.” “There is nothing to understand,” Atoke retorted. “You think he can succeed where you have failed? Where a calabash fails to bail out enough water, there is no job for the basket. It is one more step down the road to perdition for mother and child.” A big noisy quarrel ensued between the two wives, and a crowd quickly gathered. Now Olu had absolutely gone wild with English! He was reeling off original verbal insults in special English: “Go to the door. What are you doing? I am going to the door. Put the basket on the table. Where is the basket? It is on the table.” The crowd grew bigger. Olu walked up and down the crowd, the left hand in his pocket, and the right held aloft as he nodded his head to emphasize the importance of each verbal missile in English! Villagers tried to settle the quarrel. Atoke complained that Asunle had started asking her son to insult her in English! An elderly man wondered whether little Olu had acquired enough English to insult anyone. Before the man finished talking, Olu started rolling out his English again. “What is this? It is a window.” When Atoke heard the word window she flew into a rage. Unfortunate coincidence! Yoruba had borrowed the word window from English and its meaning had been extended to describe gaps in teeth. Atoke shouted, “Did you all hear that? Is it right for this luckless little rat to ridicule the gap in my teeth?” After more bitter exchanges villagers succeeded in pacifying the fighters. An old man shouted at Olu to quiet down, and he shut his frivolous mouth. The oldest woman in the crowd wanted to know how Atoke, who never went to school, knew what Olu was saying in English. Atoke narrated how the fight started and reminded them that they were all witnesses to Olu’s ridicule of the “window” in her teeth. All this noise had attracted the attention of a teacher from the mission house. As the teacher approached, Olu cleverly went into hiding. Villagers sought the teacher’s opinion on Olu’s knowledge of English. When another pupil in a higher class who witnessed part of Olu’s performance explained what Olu had been saying to the teacher, they both burst into laughter. When the teacher explained it all to the villagers, everyone laughed. The old man sighed and remarked: “This lack of English is a big embarrassment.” The teacher wanted to see Olu, but the little scholar had disappeared. Noticing the improved atmosphere, little Lara quietly walked to Atoke and held on to her shawl. Atoke looked at her, smiled, and picked her up. The little girl smiled too. There was a gap in her tiny set of teeth. Atoke laughed and said, “Well, look what we have here! I am not the only one with a window!” Setting: A small village of about twenty-five houses with thatched (hut-like) roofs in Ibadanland Characters: Depo - drunkard, picky eater Asunle - nagger, always ready to pick a quarrel, feisty, competitive Atoke - young, tall, shapely, with rich crop of hair, witty with words Lara - toddler, has a gap in between her teeth Olu - schoolboy who is in his 3rd grade, Mama's boy Theme: Language, Education, and Identity Main Conflict: Character vs. Character  Other conflict: Character vs Society Analysis: The story highlights the Yoruba humor Communication is very important especially in relationships Insights: Little knowledge is very dangerous Uses of English: To communicate To insult/dominate another person To educate “Falling in love is the easy part, staying in love is the hardest part.” awee : (