Idiolect and Dialect |

Half a Life by V.S. Naipaul: Summary

Set in India, London, an unnamed African country that is likely Mozambique, and briefly in Berlin, Half a Life is the story of a man who spends two decades in search of a life he can call his own. Willie Somerset Chandran was born to an educated father who rejected materialism and ambition and, instead, married a poverty-stricken woman, who later gave birth to Willie.

The story begins with Willie questioning his father about his middle name, Somerset. When dissecting his full name, Willie discovers that his middle name came from a famous British writer, Somerset Maugham, who once visited his father. His first name is of a Christian nature, and his last name reveals his blended ancestral roots. This knowledge leaves Willie looking for a heritage of which he can be proud, a whole existence as opposed to a half.

Willie knows his mother's social and financial status is on the bottom rung of society's economic ladder, and he is ashamed of that fact. Subsequently, his survival instinct leads him to a fantasy world, one in which he pretends to be someone he is not, someone he does not need to be embarrassed by.

This deceit becomes an everyday occurrence for Willie, as he weaves quite a tangled web of lies about who he is and where he comes from. His hatred for his partial existence and for his parents drives Willie to leave the nest in search of himself.

He first travels to London, hoping to find himself there while studying literature and becoming a writer; instead, he finds himself trapped in uncertainty, uninterested in neither his studies nor making any effort to better himself.

Willie, who has had very little experience with sexual liberation, enters into intimate affairs with women who are already involved with his friends, hoping to educate himself in the art of lovemaking. However, each experience leaves him even more unfulfilled than the last. His visitations with prostitutes carry the same results. Having completed his education and exhausted the possibility of finding his future in London, Willie journeys to Africa.

Willie now has to learn a third language, which is a direct result of his wanderings. He feels so bewildered by communication that he develops difficulty expressing himself, so he settles for silence. Just as his three names are a combination of origins, the three separate languages create an even greater rift between Willie and his own existence.

Willie eventually settles down with Ana, a Portuguese-African woman, accompanying her to Mozambique. The couple makes their home there for eighteen years, living among an eclectic population of people with whom they manage to coexist.

Much as the civil war that has befallen Mozambique during his time there, the same conflict resides within Willie's relationship with Ana. Willie revisits his former habit of sleeping with prostitutes, but he remains unfulfilled and unsatisfied with his life and feels powerless to escape its confines.

After living in Africa for eighteen years, Willie finally faces reality, telling Ana that he is miserable with their life and needs to find his own. Ana agrees because she has been feeling as dissatisfied with her life as Willie has with his, and they go their separate ways, each in search of something that may not even exist.

JUDAS

JUDAS

              This poem was written by Mervyn Eustes Morris a Jamaican poet. Morris usually stresses upon the importance of nation and its language through his verse. He wants to redefine the aspect of Jamaican culture and their Creole language. In the first stanza it had told that the master gave Judas a mocking smile. But actually Christ simply smiled at Judas , but in these lines Morris has exaggerated the smile into a mocking smile. The word 'mocking' seemed to be the striking word and therefore poet wanted to highlight the 'mocking glance' of the master.

            The poet explains the Judas feeling of being partial by his master who had given the priority for John to sit in his right. This was again the poets’ partial feeling even in his own homeland by the colonizers. He has said that the truth which is in the side of colonized is always complicated in the foreign eyes. also the colonizer is the ''knowing judge of man''  in the sense whatever they say is believed by the world.

           On the whole the poem 'Judas' by Mervyn Morris is nothing but a representation of history by the point of view of the victim. He had deconstructed the real and the past i.e. deconstructing the already existing ideas. Also he wanted to say that the colonized people's ideas and life thoughts are not accepted whereas the colonizers ideology, life and thoughts were accepted. The poet uses the word 'master' and 'lord' for Christ in order to avoid the religious conflict. Though he describes the pathetic condition if 'colonized' people in the poem the comparison used in this poem is quite controversial however the poet tried to escape of controversies through his careful selection of words and diction.

I Have a Dream essay

I Have a Dream  
The speech took place at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington,D.C. and was given by Martin Luther King Jr.In his speech he used metaphors,similes,a little personification, and allusions to describe the treatment of colored people by whites and the actions that colored people had to take to right the wrong.He mentioned four documents,one being a song:The Declaration of Independence,the Emancipation Proclamation,the Bible, and the song America:My Country 'Tis of Thee.His unspoken message in mentioning and quoting from the documents is quite clear:It wasn't equal in America as three out of the four documents claimed.The themes of the speech are equality,the four documents;their message,his dream,freedom and segregation.

     King used repetition when mentioning specific states in the South:Georgia,Mississippi,Alabama,and South Carolina.Those were some of the most racist states back then.He also mentioned California,New York and New Hampshire to convey that his dream included all states,from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic coast.King's uses the Declaration and Proclamation because they are both documents promising freedom,justice and equal rights to all people--white or otherwise.He describes slavery and people being in mental chains and implies that the documents weren't being taken into effect.

     The purpose of this speech was:to inform people that living together peacefully as friends and family was possible;To expose the cruelties against colored people and people of different religions;To put the idea of freedom,equality and a future with no segregation in peoples' head.

Summary:-

On August 28, 1963, King gives his speech for freedom. He begins his speech with the emancipation of the slaves, issued by Abraham Lincoln, and later mentions that after being freed from slavery, blacks are still not free. King claims all men were issued a check and a promise of freedom, yet for black men and women that check has come back with “insufficient funds.” The members of the civil rights union issue a check to America, they return America’s unkept promise with one they are sure to keep: the continued pursuit of justice. King, along with his many supporters, demand their freedom now, they demand things to change with a sense of urgency and without procrastination from the oppressor. They do not want to see slow change over time; they would rather see significant change immediately. King roars, “now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.” However, King hopes to obtain equality through non-violent movement. He tells fellow black people to not have hatred or bitterness in their heart or turn to guns and fists. He knows that violence to obtain peace only leads to an endless cycle of fighting, unnecessary death, and cruelty. Also King believes blacks must not let this one incident lead them to hate all people of different races and nationalities. He knows that only leads to the same kind of discrimination he is fighting against with his “I have a dream” speech. Black people are not fighting for their own satisfactions, to fight until they feel content with what they have accomplished. Black people are fighting for continuous freedom and equality, not just to be stopped with King’s 1963 speech

A Far Cry from Africa Essay

 "A Far Cry from Africa"
 "A Far Cry from Africa" is poet Derek Walcott's cry of pain over the situation in Kenya in the 1950s. At that time, Kenya was still a British colony, and local Kenyans chafed under the long term injustices of British rule. A nationalist uprising of Kenyan nationalists called Mau Mau led to the death of about 13,000 people, most of them Kenyan, along with a huge number of animals.
In the poem, Walcott decries man's inhumanity toward man in trying to enact justice through slaughter, and compares it unfavorably to nature and the animal kingdom. He also expresses anger at the way the deaths are reduced to statistics or abstractions. This obscures the reality of the dead and their suffering, whether they are white or so-called "savages."
Walcott, in his second stanza, then expresses how torn he feels in his loyalties. He is from a British Caribbean colony, so he understands the plight of a colonial, but he also perceives himself as British. He is frustrated with both sides over the violence.
Because he is writing this in the Caribbean, his title is a pun. He is physically "a far cry" from Africa, but he is also hearing a cry of pain that has reverberated far and wide across the earth.
It is the heartfelt emotional intensity of the poet's voice, as well as the vivid natural imagery, that gives this poem its power.

If You Want to Know Me By Noémia de Sousa Poem & Essay

If You Want to Know Me

-Noémia de Sousa

If you want to know who I am,

Examine with careful eyes

That piece of black wood

Which an unknown Maconde brother

With inspired hands

Carved and worked

In distant lands to the North.

Ah, she is who I am:

Empty eye sockets despairing of possessing life

A mouth slashed with wounds of anguish

Raised as though to implore and threaten

Body tattooed with visible and invisible scars

By the hard whips of slavery

Tortured and magnificent,

Proud and mystical,

Africa from head to toe,

-ah, she is who I am!

If you want to understand me

Come and bend over my African soul,

In the groans of the Negroes on the docks

In the frenzied dances of the Chopes

In the rebelliousness of the Shaganas

In the strange melancholy evaporating

From a native song, into the night …

And ask me nothing more

If you really wish to know me…

For I am no more than a shell of flesh

In which the revolt of Africa congealed

Its cry swollen with hope

About the Poet:

Noémia de Sousa (aka Vera Micaia) was born in 1927 in Maputo, Mozambique.  She lived in Lisbon working as a translator from 1951 to 1964 and then she left for Paris where she worked for the local consulate of Morocco.  She went back to Lisbon in 1975 and became member of the ANOP.  In the early years of the liberation struggle she was very active.  She later left and lived in exile.  Noemia's background was Portuguese and Bantu and in much of her poetry she explores the idea of Africa and her heritage.  

Her poem below is phenomenal.  It’s angry and inspired and that final stanza—where she proffers her body as a medium for Africa’s struggle for freedom--wow, powerful.  And she ends her poem without a period, perhaps because her last word is ‘hope’ and what is more hopeful than an undefined end?  

Essay 

If you want to know me, by Noemia De Souza, has ruefully used literary devices. It is seen to have a mysterious and carefree title. Only after reading the poem will one realize and understand the depth of the feelings that have been expressed in the poem. That is where the power of the poem lays, in its words, images of wounds, untold stories and so on. She is seen to have written this poem in defense of the colonization of Africa and oppression. It portrays the physiological and psychological impact of colonization. It also showcases the struggle for cultural and political autonomy along with hybridity.

In the beginning of the poem, she establishes her lost identity due to colonization and uses the image of “empty sockets”. The eye is one part of the body that best expresses emotions and that very part itself is seen b devoid of its function/life. She is unable to see her past experiences and life and is now blind to it but despairs her present life. She goes on to tell us the harsh past experiences and marks that she has to live with for the rest of her life. The marks all over her body seem like tattoos that last forever leaving marks of slavery, which will always be part of her and he life no matter what. She uses language as a device to protest against slavery and gain liberation. Her usage of words like magnificent and torture together, beautiful and marred shows her resistance and only form of voicing her opinions.

 She proudly goes on to say “Africa from head and foot and this is what I am”. The colonization, slavery, all forms of violence, abuse, every single experience that she has ever gone through is what gives her identity. Even though it has distorted her life to a great extent, she still proudly believed in liberating her country and also for being an African. This powerful poem has well described and contributed to the identities of all Africans, created a bond against the hegemonic colonizer.

A Prayer for my Daughter' by W.B.Yeats

A Prayer for my Daughter' by W.B.Yeats

      This is a poem in which Yeats prays for the happiness and well-being of his daughter, who has just been born.  The poet is slightly upset as he thinks with apprehension about the collapse of modern civilization.  While the poet's mind is stormy with this fear the child is calmly sleeping in the cradle.  The thought about the dangers awaiting the child frightens him.  The poet listens to the ominous howling of the storm in his mind as he thinks of the dangers his daughter may be exposed to. The gloomy poet walks up and down and prays for his daughter.  As he listens to the stormy wind he thinks the prophetic vision described in his poem "The second Coming" is at hand.

          

  Then there follows a skillful description of the kind of beauty that is not desirable in a woman – beauty that makes a stranger crazy or that makes a woman exult at her reflection in the mirror.  The poet prays that his daughter may have beauty, but not excessive beauty.  He knows that too much beauty in a woman will land her in danger.  He knows that fabulous beauty goes with an empty mind.  The poet makes suggestive allusions to Helen who had "much trouble from a fool" and Venus who chose "a bandy-legged smith" as her husband.  From both these stories the poet draws a realistic and at the same time entertaining moral:

                        It's certain that fine women eat

                        A crazy salad with their meat

                        Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.

           

 So the poet wishes and prays that his daughter may be granted moderate beauty. Yeats's next prayer is that his daughter should grow up like a laurel tree with linnets singing on its branches.  The laurel tree represents luxuriant growth and peace and harmony.  While the birds stand for joy.  She should bring joy to those around her just as the birds provide joy to people.  The poet wants her daughter to become free from hatred.  The poet knows that intellectual hatred is great evil and can make the mind hollow.  The soul is the fountain of joy and peace and so if she can attune her will to the will of God, she need not have any fear about anything.  As the radical innocence of the soul is the highest form of spiritual development, Yeasts asks his daughter to recover it.  It is a gift from heaven and no earthly temptations can subdue her.

            Yeats's next wish is that his daughter should not become a political fanatic.  Fanaticism will create hatred and ill will and a woman with these vices will become incapable of using the gifts conferred on her.  No doubt, the poet is referring to Maud Gonne, the talented and beautiful lady whom Yeats loved.  She rejected him and married John Macbride, another political fanatic.  According to the poet, she wrecked her life and caused misery to her friends and relatives.  It was vanity and hatred that threw her life into confusion.  It is Yeats's wish that his daughter should not devote herself to any impersonal cause, sacrificing all other values in life.

      Yeats prays that her daughter be endowed with courtesy which he considers as the queen of all virtues.  Courteous behaviour can win over hearts.  Ceremoniousness is another quality that the poet wishes her daughter to possess.  According to him ceremony alone will engender innocence and beauty.  The poet makes references to Maud Gonne in several places in the poem.  This shows the poet's inordinate love foe her.  She rejected his love and chose to dedicate herself to the cause of Irish Independence.  Later though she married another political fanatic, John Macbride, she did not have a happy married life.  It is the poet's prayer that his daughter should not have similar experiences.

            The poem contains many heart-warming lines expressive of affection, humanity, generosity, optimism, good cheer, amiability etc.  Besides, we find several examples of the felicity of word and phrase: "the murderous innocence of the sea", "an old bellows full of angry wind", "rooted in one dear perpetual place" etc. are examples.  We also get a bit of moralizing which has its own appeal:  "an intellectual hatred is the worst."

                        "Ceremony's s the name for the rich horn

                        And custom for the spreading laurel tree."

            "A prayer for my Daughter" is a poem full of practical wisdom, moral philosophy and beauty.